Max Ebb — The Art of the Squirrel
“To quote Cmdr. Jack Aubrey,” I shouted up the open companionway hatch from my seat at the nav station, “‘The Spanish are good fighters, but they are never ready.'”
“Actually,” Lee Helm corrected me less than a minute later, “The full quote is: ‘The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.'”
Lee was in the pilot berth outboard of my nav station, and I had no idea she was still awake. It was a long ocean race on a big boat, and I was signed on as navigator and assistant cook. Lee Helm was a watch captain. But the titles didn’t fool anyone: Lee was calling the shots, I was doing the grunt work of downloading new weather files as they became available.
“Yikes, Lee, have you memorized the whole Patrick O’Brian series?” I asked.
“Thank Starlink and my favorite AI server, and, like, my cellphone’s Wi-Fi,” Lee admitted from her bunk, phone in hand. “I’m trying to, like, make a point. We might need to go back to the A2 spinnaker any time; let’s be ready!”
The A2 runner had been doused a few minutes earlier, and had been left as a big, tangled heap of sailcloth on the cabin sole.
“Jack Aubrey is a fictional character, and his words are made up,” protested a very tired voice from the quarter berth. He needed to sleep on his too-short off-watch rather than crawl out of his berth and pack a spinnaker.
“But you know, Patrick O’Brian made extensive use of narrative lifted right out of the contemporary Naval Chronicles,” Lee answered. “That’s why his battle scenes read so true. I’ll bet that British naval officers in the Napoleonic wars actually said things very much like that quote.”
“It’s a clever combination of respectful praise and a prejudicial insult,” I added. “Point is, if the wind drops we’ll need the A2.”
But the crew in the quarter berth had already started to snore.
“Let’s get the chute packed,” I suggested to Lee. “I’ll run the tapes and run the zipper, if you can help me stuff it into the bag.”
Ever since leaving broken rubber bands in the ocean became verboten, racing sailors have been looking for an alternative. Velcro looked promising, but tended to be too easy or too hard to break out. The answer is zipper luffs.
At least, zippers are the answer for big sails where the extra weight is not significant. They reliably unzip from the bottom up, so the sail fills with no twists. And zipping up a sail is faster than rubber-banding, and much faster than tying yarns.