{"id":1147,"date":"2016-02-26T08:30:53","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T19:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2016-02-26T08:32:04","modified_gmt":"2016-02-25T19:32:04","slug":"dont-over-think-it-just-do-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/?p=1147","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t over-think it. Just do it."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"yacht2\"<\/a>Like many sailors, I learned to sail in a small one-sailed dinghy.\u00a0 I say that \u2018I learned to sail\u2019 rather than \u2018I was taught to sail\u2019 because the chap who I thought was going to teach me to sail simply sat me in the boat and said: \u2018That\u2019s the tiller.\u00a0 That\u2019s the mainsheet.\u00a0 Don\u2019t worry; you\u2019ll soon work it out.\u2019\u00a0 And then he pushed me out into the estuary.<\/p>\n

It turned out that he was right.\u00a0 I did soon work it out.\u00a0 Happily, I survived that first voyage without even getting too wet.\u00a0 And, over the next few years, I graduated to bigger and bigger boats and made longer and longer voyages.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because I was comparatively light and reasonably nimble, I spent my first couple of years on bigger boats as the forward hand \u2013 changing headsails, rigging spinnakers, and then packing them into their turtles for their next (hopefully error-free) hoist.<\/p>\n

Then somehow (I don\u2019t remember quite how) I developed a bit of a reputation as a headsail trimmer.\u00a0 It was probably at this point that I decided that I should get a better understanding of the physics of sailing; which meant that I needed to understand something about hydrodynamics and aerodynamics and meteorology.<\/p>\n

A lot of what I learned confirmed what every \u2018old salt\u2019 already knew.\u00a0 But some of it totally contradicted what every old salt already knew.\u00a0 My new-found knowledge certainly led to some interesting conversations with some of the \u2018Captain Bligh\u2019 skippers with whom I sailed.<\/p>\n

All of this happened in the days before on-board computers and other high-tech aids.\u00a0 The only on-board computer I had was the one between my ears.\u00a0 But, most of the time, it worked pretty well.\u00a0 I remember one particularly black night on which we reached a rock in the middle of nowhere \u2013 which was also the second mark on a 250 nautical mile ocean race course \u2013 within a minute of my prediction.\u00a0 Even our Captain Bligh skipper was impressed!<\/p>\n

And then one summer, I, along with three then-friends, set off on a reasonably ambitious cruise.\u00a0 Somewhere not too far from our point of departure, it became apparent that two of my companions had the idea that I was the skipper for hire.\u00a0 I was there to take them on a pleasure cruise for two.\u00a0 My other companion, they seemed to have decided, was there to ply them with cold drinks and tasty snacks.<\/p>\n

To be honest, I wasn\u2019t too put out.\u00a0 For the next three or four days, I sailed the boat pretty much single-handedly.\u00a0 And then, on the fourth or fifth day, we arrived \u2013 at about five in the afternoon \u2013 outside the narrow entrance to the harbour at which we were intending to anchor for the night.\u00a0 The entrance was a bit like the neck of a bottle: long, narrow, and with high rocky cliffs on either side.<\/p>\n

My passenger-companions showed no sign of participating in the actual sailing, so I headed the boat into the wind and dropped the genoa.\u00a0 (For those of you who don\u2019t know, the genoa is the big sail at the front.)\u00a0 And then, while my passenger-companions called for more cold lager, I turned the boat towards the entrance and tacked it, single-handedly, like a 45-foot dinghy, through the drainpipe entrance, making use of every last scrap of breeze bouncing off the cliffs.<\/p>\n

Once we were safely inside the heads, with the anchor down, one of my passenger-companions turned to me and said: \u2018Damn.\u00a0 That was impressive.\u00a0 How did you know what to do?\u00a0 And when to do it?\u00a0 You really must explain it to me.\u2019<\/p>\n

But I couldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying that you don\u2019t have to know what you are doing; but I think that it can be a serious handicap to think<\/em> too much about what you are doing.\u00a0 In my experience, once you know what to do, and you know that you know what to do, it\u2019s usually best not to think about it too much.\u00a0 Just do it.<\/p>\n

And this applies to writing as much as it applies to sailing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many sailors, I learned to sail in a small one-sailed dinghy.\u00a0 I say that \u2018I learned to sail\u2019 rather than \u2018I was taught to sail\u2019 because the chap who I thought was going to teach me to sail simply … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1149,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiwistreet.co.nz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}