The question that every sailor who takes the sailing seriously eventually asks is the same question regardless of the specific form their sailing takes: what is this for? Not the physical mechanics of it, which the training answers. Not the competitive dimension of it, which the racing circuit answers. The deeper question: what is the specific quality that the sailing produces in me that the rest of my life does not produce in the same form, and how do I arrange my sailing to produce that quality in the most complete form available to me?
Sven and I came from the same starting place in the racing world and arrived at different answers to this question, and the specific difference in our answers is the most illuminating description of both of us that I know of. Not because the answers are opposites: the solo Pogo and the offshore community passage are both expressions of a serious relationship with the sea that the weekend racing does not fully produce. But because the specific qualities each answer prioritises reveal the specific qualities that each person most needs the sailing to provide, and those qualities are the qualities that define the person as much as the sailing defines the practice.
The Solo Answer
The solo sailing answer to the question is the answer of the person who most needs the sailing to provide the specific quality of complete self-reliance: the state in which every decision belongs to the sailor alone, every mistake is the sailor’s mistake, every success is the sailor’s success, and the mediation of the crew, the skipper, the tactician, the social dynamic of the boat, is entirely absent.
The solo passage is the purest possible test of the sailor against the sea without the social buffer of the crew that crew sailing provides, and the specific quality it produces is the quality of someone who has been alone with their own judgment in conditions where the judgment was the only thing between them and the consequence of being wrong.
This is what the Pogo provides that the crew racing, which I loved, could not. Not a better sailing experience in the general sense: a more specific one. The solo passage on the Pogo is the sailing life reduced to its essential relationship: one sailor, one boat, one ocean. Everything else, the crew, the team, the community, the company, is genuinely valuable in the contexts it belongs to. In the solo passage it is absent, and the absence reveals what the sailing is when it is nothing but itself.
The Community Answer
Sven’s answer to the question is the community answer: the sailing life most completely expressed in the specific quality of community that the offshore passage produces and that the solo sailing, by its nature, cannot. The Naora voyage is the fullest expression of this answer: a five-year circumnavigation organised around the specific community that forms in the conditions the voyage creates, the Long Table that formalises what the offshore passage produces naturally, the Circle that continues between passages in the form of the connection that the sailing built and that the sailing is not required to maintain.
Neither answer is more correct than the other. Both are the honest answer of someone who asked the question seriously and followed the answer where it led. The solo sailor who has been alone with their judgment on the Pogo for five days in the Bay of Biscay and the community sailor who has been at the Long Table with twelve people in the Pacific for five weeks have been in different expressions of the same fundamental truth about what the sea produces in the people who go to it with full attention and sufficient duration. I went one way. Sven went the other. We have been comparing notes on what each way finds for twenty-two years. The notes are interesting from both directions.
