Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

One of my current gigs is as one of the ad sales directors for Good Old Boat magazine, a job I share with Behan Gifford from Sailing Totem. The magazine has a house during the Annapolis Sailboat Show where we all stay, coming and going to the booth and out to meetings as the week progresses. On the Saturday night of the show, we had homemade pizza and good wine and got into quite the discussion about inspiration and relevant sailors and how any of us gets information.

The show this year has a number of YouTube sailing “celebrities” in attendance, including some of the big names. Is this a good thing, this rise of YouTube and the attendant glossy depiction of life on board? Where did they get their start, their inspiration? And is THAT generation, the cruisers who sailed before the age of blogs and videos, the cruisers who wrote the original books and magazine articles - is that generation still relevant?

The more I think about it, the less I like the term “relevant”. Maybe that’s a side comment, maybe not. How else, though, does anyone learn and grow except by what has been done before? Does it really matter if you don’t know who Lin Pardey is if you know about the idea of going simple and going now? Does it matter if you don’t have any idea about who Dan Spurr is if you subscribe to Practical Sailor (which he started, I’m pretty sure) or don’t know the Hiscocks but you know Beth Leonard (both of whom wrote cruising “handbooks”, one more recently than the other.) Nobody does anything in a vacuum. We all are inspired by someone or something, even if we don’t exactly recognize it as inspiration - and that chain continues along. Just because you can’t see the beginning doesn’t mean it’s not critical.

Regardless of your opinion about the YouTube sailing sensations, it’s hard to ignore the fact that they’re there. If they spark curiosity and interest in this lifestyle we love so much, if they get people (even those who will never ever leave a dock of any kind) to start to see cruising as a legitimate way of life? Sure, they leave out aspects of reality in their glossy depictions. We’re all guilty of that from time to time.

Everyone is inspired by someone. We all stand on the shoulders of giants in some ways, reaching for the stars in the best way we can. Just because someone is a giant in my eyes and not in yours doesn’t mean they’re not important.

Here are some of my giants. Do you know any?