Gunkholing is the practice of meandering along shorelines in a slow boat, spending the nights in peaceful and protected coves. Places where the bottom is gunky and your anchor holds, even though you’re already protected in your little hidey-hole of a cove or inlet. The places you see when gunkholing aren’t ones you want to pass as quickly as you do on the highway. Rather they’re shorelines full of details perfectly suited to the average sailboat’s speed of ten or twenty kilometres per hour. It’s an activity that pairs well with cycling, coincidentally the only mode of land transport easily stowed on a boat. Except when it comes to sailing one can lounge, eat, and not be subjected to the salt and debris that accumulates on the side of sunbaked highways. It’s a glorious way to spend time viewing birds, architecture, and the kinds of landscapes artists can only hope to capture. Those who put up giant fences on the road side of million dollar mansions wouldn’t even dream of doing the same to the view they paid so dearly for.
Another beauty of sailing is that it is far more accessible than its reputation would have you believe. While boats are indeed a good way to hemorrhage money and time whether one wishes to or not there are always accessible options and boat people are often romantics open to trades or simply supporting someone else in a beautiful hobby. Old kayaks and canoes abound and don’t even require a car to bring to the water yet for the same outlay sailing dinghies can be had and they do the work for you. One of the ways the sailing community tries to retain its elite reputation is through the prioritization of racing and it’s true that new sails make the boat go faster. But one should always remember that if you just want to enjoy the water speed is likely not the priority, and those constantly buying new equipment have to sell the old stuff to someone at a discount. It might as well be you.
In fact it’s worth remembering that for most of sailing’s multiple millennia long history it’s been a commercial or industrial endeavour. When the age of sail ended that left spars and canvas to hobbyists: hedonists concerned with speed and indulgence. The beautiful swooping lines of classic sailboats that you likely picture as the fastest race boats, and the ones my own Atlanta suffers from, are shaped by designers trying to get around racing handicap rules rather than actual speed or maneuverability. If one wants to see the technological peak of traditional sailing in terms of speed and ease of handling you’re best to look at traditional working boats.
Pilot Cutters are particularly well-loved for this reason. A pilot, in nautical terms, is a local sailing expert that visiting vessels hire to pilot them into unfamiliar and often dangerous ports. In the days prior to government intervention in ports the first pilot to arrive at a visiting ship not only got the first opportunity to sell their services but also demonstrated them upon arrival. Moreover, while the boats needed to be fast there was also considerable economic incentive for a minimal crew to return them to port once the pilot took control of the arriving ship. To this day they’re a favourite amongst live-aboards and world travellers.
The same cannot be said of modern sporting designs. In recent years computer aided design has made for some truly remarkable designs able to make their way around race marks in incredible times. Yet they’re miserable to sail anywhere other than a racecourse. And boats that prioritize comfort often either maximize cabin space, making for a design as boxy and unwieldy as it is ugly, or they compromise on sailing performance in favour of ease of handling or performance under power. If that’s not enough, early fibreglass boats were so over-built that many manufacturers went out of business in the eighties trying to compete with their own used market. Since then they’ve learned their lesson and introduced planned obsolescence for the sake of mere survival. While there are some excellent modern designers and builders the incentive to make an excellent all-rounder is no longer there, which means for those who wish to see the watery part of the world under sail with enough determination there are some very accessible options available. This is especially the case here in The Great Lakes where the water does not eat your hardware.
The other obvious benefit of sailing is the environmental impact. To be clear, sailors can do better. Fibreglass, or glass reinforced plastic, excels at creating microplastics when work is carried out in addition to creating a lot of plastic waste from old scrap hulls. And the punishing nature of marine environments means that work is carried out frequently. Wooden boats can therefore be a much more environmentally friendly option but in most regions the maintenance industry around them has died out, meaning work is either expensive or carried out by the owner. However there are ways around this and to mitigate environmental impact. Sailing has been a low-impact way of getting around the world since well before Christ was a twinkle in God’s eye.
The primary consideration, however, is propulsion. Sailboats, should their owner care to do so, can entirely eschew auxiliary propulsion. Marine internal combustion engines are notoriously disgusting. For most of their history outboard motors were two-stroke to save weight which means they’re significantly less fuel efficient while burning oil along with the gasoline. Pollution controls are entirely non-existent in boats and they often vent their exhaust underwater to cut down on noise. Inboard engines are often archaic inefficient designs and running an engine at wide-open-throttle powerful enough to bring at least a few hundred pounds, let alone something the size of a house, up on plane uses incomprehensible amounts of energy. Yet displacement hulls, those designed to cut through the water rather than climb up on top of it, remain one of the most efficient ways to move heavy items. So efficient, in fact, that they can reach their theoretical maximum speed on the power of a beautiful summer breeze.
In fact auxiliary propulsion is only a modern need, coming about in the middle of the century. Prior to what sailors affectionately call ‘the iron genny,’ genny being short for genoa or an extra-large headsail for lower winds, all sorts of ingenious systems were formed instead. Primarily, mooring a large boat is far superior to keeping it at a dock. Sure one must reach it via a swim or a smaller boat but tiny rowing dinghies are a dime a dozen among sailing communities while picking up a mooring is an extremely elegant solution for sail-powered craft and letting them swing at anchor in a blow is much better than letting it bang against a dock. One must simply ease sails as they approach the mooring, pick it up as the boat comes to a stop, and the boat will naturally face to wind making lowering the sails an easy treat. This is possible in a slip but an advanced skill most marinas prohibit altogether to prevent accidents. In the event that the wind dies altogether there are several solutions, chief among them being rowing. Sailboat hulls, being so efficient, tend to row a lot better than one would imagine but Chinese sailors invented a special sculling oar called a yuloh specifically to pilot large junks up rivers with minimal effort. It’s not a fast solution but it will get you home if you forgot to check the weather.
As you can see I am passionate about my watery proclivities and it was a great privilege to be able to share them with my fellow wanderer this past weekend, Rachael Boardman. Introducing someone to sailing is always fraught. The boat is never level, which many find unnerving at first, and the conditions are almost always poor. There seems to be an unwritten rule that whenever one is introducing someone new to sailing there is either not enough wind or far too much of it, leaving them with the impression that sailing is either boring or terrifying. Yet the conditions of this past weekend seem to have produced an enthusiastic convert.
-Jules
