She's a larger gal. S/V Obelisk weighs in at 44,000 lbs. Your typical SUV weighs about 4,000 lbs; a typical car about 2,000. Yes sir, she's one hefty lady.
I've seen her "nudge" a 2' diameter dock piling with her bow pulpit (the steel railing encircling the front of the boat). I don't have a complete explanation for the physics involved, but I can tell you it's pretty scary for a 155 lb mammal straining against the forward motion of 22 tons worth of fiberglass, metal and wood. Newton's 1st and 3rd Laws of Motion run something akin to this: "An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force," and, "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Translation in this situation? No amount of action in my arms can produce enough force to stop this from happening.
She's a tall gal too. S/V Obelisk boasts a 70' mast, 66' of which stands above the deck. The mast is the ultimate backbone on which most all the rigging of a sailboat is measured and hung, as well as the sails. As a general rule, the taller the mast, the taller the sail; and (given a set sail shape of course), the taller the sail, the larger the sail.
The largeness of sails is the important point. Larger sails are simply more powerful than smaller sails, and you'll need a large amount of power to woo a twenty-two ton lady.
Some people might snicker a little, given that even under maximum sail power our top speed remains under 10 mph, but the power behind a sailboat is a different kind of power than the need-for-speed, combustible kind on which modern society thrives. That kind of power is removed from the earth, refined in a factory, transformed and directed by the machine; and ultimately exhausted. The power of sailing is the power of the wind itself; the balancing breath of the earth, and we catch merely the tiniest portion of its inexhaustible, ever renewing energy in the cup of our sails. The larger the cup, the more wind you can catch; and the more wind you can catch, the more power in your sails.
Remember the strongest wind you have ever experienced? For most of us, it was probably in the 40-50 mph range. You might remember leaning into it so you wouldn't fall over, or maybe you played like you did.
Now think about holding your arm out the window of a car moving down the interstate; those are 65-85 mph winds, depending on what state you're in and who's driving. The slightest cup of your hand sends your arm flying around.
In those situations, your hand and your body are acting on the wind much the way sails do. Granted, we don't go out sailing in 85 mph winds, and we'll try to avoid even 40 mph, but our sails are a little bit bigger than the average 5'9" male - let's say 10 times taller and more than 10 times wider - so even if you knock the wind down to 20 mph or so, you're talking about interrupting the path of a lot of 20 mph wind.
But there's a catch: whereas a person can compensate for the force of the wind on their body by leaning into the wind, Obelisk lacks the legs to do the same. She does, however, have 15,000 lbs (yes, 7.5 Tons) of iron sitting in the keel beneath her hull, and the base of our mast is bolted into it. The trick is to balance the 44,000 pounds of boat (most notably the 15,000 lbs in the keel), with the tremendous power generated by the wind on the sails.
Child's play, right? Maybe so. This is where the cupped-hands-out-of-windows come in.
Arms holding cupped-hands-out-of-interstate-traveling-car-windows do not like being banged against interstate-traveling-car-windowsills because cupped-hands-out-of-interstate-traveling-car-windows interrupted too much interstate-traveling-car-wind at too perpendicular an angle. Likewise, 44,000 lbs of sailboat does not like having its mast banged down into the water when the humans attached to it let too much sail interrupt too much wind at too perpendicular an angle.
So what do cupped hands and sails do? Well, they don't do anything at all, but the humans they're attached to will likely adjust their angle to the wind. And, as all cupped-hands-out-of-interstate-traveling-car-windows know, the result is a simple joy.
Sailing Obelisk is not quite so simple - she's a hefty, iron-toed and nylon clad tall drink of water with natural power in her stride - but the joy is the same.
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