Sailboat racing

A friend who I work with races sailboats, and he was short of crew for yesterdays race and asked if I wanted to go. So I took my first foray into sailing. It was light winds, so tacking was pretty slow and raising and lower the spinnaker (large sail used when you are going with the wind) was also pretty slow...I imagine when the is blowing hard things happen much quicker and there are is a lot more tension on all the ropes, etc.

I've decided Sailing is like IT and they make up strange esoteric words to keep the un-educated confused as to what the hell is going on. My main job on this trip was to basically pull on ropes and then the let out ropes to help raise or lower sails... Instead of saying, feed out the red rope (so the sail can come down), it is some nonsense about "tailing the spinnaker", or pull on the little white rope on the inside, it is "raise the topping lift", plenty of other stuff I could mention.

But sailing (at least in my job) was about 30 seconds of pulling ropes or letting ropes go and then sitting on the rail (side of the boat) waiting for the next tack (again, would it be so hard to say turn ?).

The one thing that I was shocked about was the turning radius of the 38 foot boat we were on. It could basically turn on itself, meaning it basically has a 0 turning radius, which is pretty cool to see (or be on ) a 38 ft boat that can basically turn around and go back in the other direction basically by pivoting in place.

Hopefully Chris's (it's really his dad's boat) boat will be short of crew members a few more times. I'd like to go again.