The first time might’ve been entirely accidental, but I can’t get away with that excuse any longer. I’ve been doing it far too long. I’m addicted. I should be arrested. I pinch wind and love it!
Pinching means sailing a yacht extremely close to the breeze—one degree closer to it, and the boat stalls. The wind will even start to blow the boat backwards.
Stalling is not an ideal position for a sailing boat. Skippers rely on the wind to propel their yachts forward so they can control their behaviour. When a boat stalls, it’s vulnerable. It bobs around, drifts aimlessly, and booms can swing dangerously across the cockpit and injure people. No skippers want to be out of control of their boat.
Craig got me into sailing many years ago, and I immediately took to it. He first noticed my ability to read the wind and find the highest windward angle. He used the pincher term almost right away.
We took his Hartley 16-footer out on Moreton Bay and headed to Peel Island on a single tack. That one ‘tack’ was my idea. Craig didn’t think it could be done. He measured the wind at the start of our voyage and assessed that we needed more than one tack (zigzag our way into the wind) to get where we were going.
Craig laughed at my one tack suggestion, gave me the tiller, trimmed the sails and then assumed a reclined position on the windward side of the cockpit.
So I watched the boat’s action, its sails, their shapes, and listened to the whooshing sounds of the water running off the boat’s hull. The face under the hat called, ‘I know you’re pinching again. Fall away. We’ll get another knot and a half if you come off the wind.’
‘But we’ll have to change direction to do that.’
‘We’ve got all day. What’s your hurry?’
‘Dropping a knot for a more direct course would take about the same time to get us there, right?’
Shoulders shrugged in reply. ‘Okay. You’re in charge skipper. Wake me when we reach Peel.’
And that was all I needed. I decided to hold that position and patiently wait for the island’s shoreline to approach us.
Did we get to the island any sooner? We’ll never know. To answer that question accurately, we’d need another boat of the same size and type with the same mass moving through the water simultaneously. The tides would have to be identical too.
Tides and currents matter in my next novel. I use them to hide a body, move it back and forth and then reveal it at an optimum time. It all happens north of a slack tide zone close to Moreton Island. It’s a place where I frequently anchored. I got the idea from a plastic bucket I accidentally dropped into the water. It disappeared and then reappeared six hours later!
I can’t wait to show you how I developed that experience into a murder mystery!
My last novel is available for download and free for a limited time. Use it as a taste tester and enjoy the dark side of storytelling.
‘Forman’s writing style is artful, with the protagonist Mitchell’s warped thought processes masterfully exposed. The author has a powerful and vivid command of language and his word pictures are stark and disturbingly real.’
Linda J Bettenay, author of ‘Secrets Mothers Keep’ and ‘Wishes For Starlight’
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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