Skipper’s View
MANY YEARS AGO, a yachting journalist, I secured a job at the RYA in their marketing department. Perhaps the most disturbing part of my job was monitoring yachting forums to 'gauge the mood of the average sailor'. Quite frankly, it was a terrifying experience and I was dragged into a sort of black hole which seemed to be mostly populated by people who refer to their wife as SWMBO. Pent up fury seemed to abound on these forums and I noted over time that sailors were referred to in vaguely derogatory terms as 'raggies'. This intrigued me as it indicated that a group of boaters I generally looked down on also looked down on me. For sailors, looking down on powered boats is a tradition that goes back centuries. To…