Okay so some of y’all don’t know about the nasty cup, so let me explain. Since I was a skinny 16 year old white boy I have spent my summers working for a children’s camp designed to give impoverished children a free week of summer camp experience. To keep it brief, I’ve been through some shit and that’s putting it lightly. Never would I ever have imagined a 11 year being capable of being racist, braindead or so amazing they could possibly be my future life coach. Over my 5 year tenure with the camp, I have exposed myself to a variety of jobs: dishwasher, child counseling, maintenance, swim instructor, boathouse bitch, technology wizard and my favorite and most prized position: lead sail instructor. Sailing Hobie Cats is the most unique experience we offer the children, but in order for anything to happen with the boats, somebody has to know what is going on in regards to the boats and teach others how to sail and maintain them.
In my experience at camp, there are a variety of ways to teach someone how to use and maintain a boat with varying rates of success. You could push someone on a boat with an experienced sailor and hope that they pick up on all the techniques, maneuvers and part names but there are just too many variables in this method. First as a person who has experienced this atrocity of instruction myself the two (three if you’re on drugs) people you put on a boat have a 99.7% chance of not processing information the same. On the instructor side, it is a safe bet to assume most people at camp are literally stupid and can only operate up to 2F bits of brain memory at a time (for you normal people out there thats 47 bits, not even enough to run a speedometer on a car). To solve this issue, some counselors try and compress the basics of the boat, but instead of using a good compression method like RTC or DCT some instructors are in fact total idiots themselves and teach nothing because (and this may come as a shock) they in fact are clueless themselves!
Some of you out there may be wondering how in fact both the instructor and the student could both be clueless and it’s really simple: popularity. When someone told you in high school being popular didn’t matter, they were on crack or popular in high school and on crack because being popular and charismatic at an early age literally will pave your life for you. You remember how in fallout you would always change your the charisma stat to 1 so you could invest your skill points in something more useful like intelligence? Yeah turns out life is not some video game where you go around shooting mutants and exploiting the shit out of others in order to find a computer chip, but it’s still a wasteland somehow. I have seen time and time again people become promoted to a position because of their popularity and have no competence to fulfill their job. It’s almost like no one knew that they had no clue what was going on the whole time. As the great Tony once said: “Your best workers are not always the people you would smoke pot with.”
Up to this point everything I have said is a fact, therefore being true, but I’m about to hit you with another fact: not everyone is stupid. There are some instructors out there who know the correct way to teach someone how to sail, you don’t teach them. Turns out there’s this thing called reading that exists and it’s literally the most powerful action someone could do. And for those of you who can’t read but are somehow understanding these words there’s this shit out there called videos on this website youtube. Unbelievable but you can actually teach yourself how to do something as long as you put any amount of time and effort into it. When the legendary Ramone told me how to sail, he threw a book at my face called “The Hobie 16 manual.” His words of advice were simple: “You just read it and then figure it out from there.” Ramone was probably one of two guys I worked with at camp who had completed a bachelor’s degree in literally anything, so now that I’m thinking about it there’s no surprise he was the one to teach me this. Ripley’s believe it or not I started doing research on the subject matter and managed to figure a thing or two out on my own.
I remember the first “real skill” I mastered: back winding. For all you land mammals out there back winding is the equivalent of reverse on a car. Instead of being like my sister and backing into the garage door with the Camry (rest in pieces), you let the wind pressure and local current push your boat backwards. With crafty rudder positioning I found myself in the boat spinning like the room after a bottle of jack, y’know how it is. With this skill I was able to best the 14 class of boats, which were notorious for having terrible turning abilities. I won a 14 regatta at camp and my next steps were just upon me: The nasty cup.
Nasty cup is the Hobie 16 regatta, the largest and fastest boat class we had at camp. Winning the nasty cup was pretty much it at camp. If you won the nasty cup you won camp for the week by default, and likely had the biggest dick around. Due to a lack of popularity, no one really had a good idea on how good I was, and to be fair I didn’t either, but like we always say: real Gs move in silence like lasagna. My first Nasty Cup regatta was a pretty rough one, with waves having a fluctuation of probably a foot and we easily had 14 knot winds. About 7 boats entered the regatta and only 5 and a half made it out alive. I remember every tack I made that race and finished a measly 4th, but considering my competition was 30–50% older than me I thought I did pretty well for myself. For the rest of the season I averaged a 3rd place finish, always finding myself a leg behind the most experienced staff who had double, triple or septuple the experience I had. This didn’t deter me though, I knew that I could outsmart my competition using basic calculations and understanding of the physics behind the race, and that retirement was surely on it’s way for some of the top finishers. The peak of my career was literally one tack away.
I spent a whole offseason doing research on how I could improve my game. I had a folder on my browser titled “porn” that was filled with hobie forums and race recap videos from professional sailors. Due to legal reasons I am required to state that this folder was relabeled “UVA losing” and contains a highlight reel of the VT vs UVA football game in 2018 to avoid any questionable remarks from my peers or the time a professor noticed it in a screenshot from a homework assignment. This is all true, nothing I say is false. In my last camp season, there was an overhaul in staff, with about half of the waterfront staff retiring from camp and another 3rd switching to doing drugs full time and becoming basically useless. Due to this we had literally one regatta and it was a race between 4 people. If Vegas gave a shit about the nasty cup, or gambling was legal at a non-profit summer camp for impoverished children I would say my odds to win were around last if you polled word of mouth. After all most people don’t care about this obsession of a hobby I have, and those that think they’re as good likely have their head so far up their ass they could fit into a can of worms.
I still suffer from PTSD of this race, as literally the whole thing was screwed against me. At the last minute, my boss who was definitely past the peak of his career had to drop out due to some insubordinate camper making ridiculous demands. He was subbed with Claire who is literally from New Zealand, a place where I’m pretty sure everyone and their kangaroo can fly a monster hull for 47 minutes straight and would have probably gotten 1000–1 odds of beating everyone else in the race by half of the lake. And then the real fun was about to begin: getting a boat. Longtime readers will know that my life is literally the fucking lottery and I blame it all on both genetics and summer camp administration.
To even the playing field, we draft sailboats on a literally lottery where sailors put a poker chip in a hat and draw to get a boat. Some are boring and white, while others are cool as shit and yellow like mine. While I think this is probably the best way to do it, there’s more probability going on here than some people realize. While you enter the lottery to get a boat, and obviously newer boats are better than older boats, you enter another fucking lottery: the crew. If you remember from the first paragraph, we’re still at the children’s camp and we have to engage the children somehow. To achieve this we let them sit on the boat and let them think they’re a big shot sailor. While most kids are with the program and have a basic concept of system dynamics, aerodynamics, gravity, weight and how water will splash on the boat and make you wet, some campers just believe they are immune to basic laws of human life and think that they can do what they want and are the captain. Last I checked, I never had a camper that completed Fundamental Physics with Calculus I & II, so I can guarantee whatever I am trying to get them to do is in the team’s interest to win the race. True story, I had a camper try and jump off the boat during a race because their counselor let them in sail class. If you’re reading this Peter, I will find you, and I will make you pay for that.
To save everyone the details, I pretty much lose lottery² and get a boat I know has cracks in, and a crew of people that were trying to tell me how to sail the whole time and were trying to stick their feet off the boat, despite the fact that we were moving a solid 15mph on the water (comparable to going 40mph in the bed of a truck on the road and with no seatbelt insurance). Even with these odds stacked against me, I am about 30–60 yards away from Claire the entire race consistently. We race one direction for 30 minutes, and whoever gets the farthest down the lake wins, mostly because teaching some counselors how a open water regatta works would be a nightmare, and because it’s just easy to assume that whoever was going the fastest made the most distance (vel = dist/time for all you people able of doing algebra out there). At the end of the race, Tony comes around in the stingray because he’s a god and can get a camp boat to roll over and not stall on the water, and laughs at my second place position.
I have never been more infuriated my whole life, that I lost to a last minute switcharoo in sailors. Being upset was pretty short lived tho, as when I turned around and saw the competition, I realized I smoked everyone. No one was close to me and Claire, and since Claire didn’t even work at camp, I was the defacto best sailor at camp. Did anyone give a shit? Absolutely not. At the end of the day, my boss gave me a promotion to head sail instructor, and Zeke let me do whatever I wanted during work hour. Fun fact: the guy who got last tried to talk shit about me and how I beat him in the regatta. Turns out if you have a huge inheritance, you aren’t subject to common sense! Amazing right? I’m an adult however, and did something I didn’t know if it would work: I went to see how much leverage I could put on my boss.
This guy was pretty much going out of his way to harass me, and I pretty much ignored it because I know a shark when I see one, and the only thing they’re looking for is a bone to be feed and I wasn’t lending today. When I literally couldn’t eat meals in piece without being harassed by his campers, I decided I had enough and did something most people would never do: leverage Dave. This was probably the shittiest thing I might have ever done, but I’m an engineer: when I see a problem I find a way to fix it. My demand was simple: I quit the summer camp job, or this other guy leaves. I guess it worked, because this asshole left camp the next week, and Dave told me that I was “critical” and “necessary for the rest of the summer.” I’m not trying to flex here, as I l know that there are definitely people more critical at camp, and way more important than my dumbass has ever been, (Zeke, Tony, Tim, OG89 Danny Swanson, etc.) but honestly it was just a feel good moment to see that my boss actually thought I was being productive. Turns out nobody closing out the summer had ever read the Hobie manual, or knew how to operate the motorboats, so I was all he had left.
So yeah, there’s today’s excerpt of being a sail instructor. I definitely have more stories from camp, so if you guys want to hear those just let me know. And if you want to hear more about being an under caffeinated college student looking at numbers all day I definitely have a couple stories in my back pocket.
See y’all next time
~Andrew aka guy who has a flown a hull but isn’t popular enough to have a picture taken of them.