No-one planning their 2020 season in the northern or southern hemispheres anticipated an interruption of sail training as great as the Second World War. Almost a year after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic, sail training is mostly at a standstill. Can it get moving again? And can it contribute to the recovery of society, as well as of individuals?
Hope and uncertainty
One of the markers of sail training is optimism and some vessel operators quickly offered voyages from early 2021, in the expectation of sailing again soon. As well as the drive to fulfil their charitable purposes, there is urgency about generating income: sailing vessels are expensive to keep, even when tied up. The November 2020 International Sail Training and Tall Ships Conference was positive in spite of the surrounding gloom, with the Lithuanian contribution especially upbeat. It was a reminder that in addition to more earnest objectives, sail training is supposed to be fun. Port operators, notably Delfzijl in the Netherlands, described how they held limited but successful events ashore in 2020, while carefully observing national and local constraints.
As I write in late 2020 there is news of effective vaccines, though uncertainty remains; media headlines of health ‘breakthroughs’ and ‘miracle cures’ so often fall short of the reality. Mass vaccination programmes are expected if the drugs meet the exhaustive quality, safety and effectiveness tests. It remains to be decided who will be eligible for the vaccines, and in what order. National and local health and government authorities worldwide and within states are taking different approaches to imposing and releasing lockdowns. The consensus in public health is that, even with an effective vaccine and mass inoculation, the very earliest we can expect a return to normal is late 2021. Though by then, ‘normal’ will mean something different from its meaning in early 2020.
Since the pandemic was recognised many Sail Training Organisations (STOs) have been focusing on the future and what happens after the restrictions are eased or ended. Initial horizons were short, when it was assumed that life would return to familiar patterns by the northern hemisphere summer or autumn of 2020. Some organisations planned for reduced programmes, but as understanding of the disease grew it became apparent that even curtailed events would not happen. The international Tall Ships Races were postponed for a year; shoreside events have been put into cold storage; voyages were reduced to daysails; daysails in turn were cancelled.
Adaptation and evidence
Several STOs switched early in the first lockdowns to virtual operation, including social gatherings, voyage and race simulations, training and education for crews and volunteers. The Ellen McArthur Cancer Trust, which offers sailing for young people in the UK affected by cancer, completely recreated itself online within days of the first lockdown and maintained high levels of engagement by past and prospective voyagers. Such a big change is demanding and resource-hungry. It requires skilled and creative web designers, good communicators, knowledge of the target community and the cyber environment, with accurate databases of sailors and supporters who want to be involved. STOs that have made this change expect to incorporate online activity into their future mainstream operations.
Sail training and other outdoor activity outdoor programmes ashore have been treated differently country by country, region by region. In addition to the well-documented benefits in normal times, there is a strong case for restarting sail training as soon as feasible to help counter some of the ill-effects of the disease and the lockdowns. Some people report better physical health, liberation from the drudgery of education, the office or commuting, personal projects achieved, freedom to dream and plan. But there seems no doubt that the mental health of many people of all ages has suffered, and that poverty, digital and other inequalities have been reinforced or made worse. Personal and online safety has been undermined, with physical and psychological abuse widely reported.
Sail training does not claim to reverse this kind of jeopardy in the short episodes usual in the modern era, unlike the long term reform and vocational programmes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. But at a minimum it can offer respite, safety, and an opportunity to rethink and reset. STOs are no longer dependent on collections of anecdotes to prove the benefits of participation: credible research shows the changes in outlook and personal efficacy, self confidence and wellbeing especially among young people.
Systematic research on the outcomes of sail training has mainly been about people from mid-teens to mid-twenties, but the personal stories of people of all ages are equally compelling. Achieving a childhood ambition, being able to achieve at sea what they could not on land, recovering from depression and even suicidal tendencies, translating disability ashore into ability at sea, being freed for a time from the bonds of dissatisfaction ashore. Many humdrum and disappointing lives have been lit up by the sail training experience. For people in mid and late adulthood as much as for younger people, sail training can be a voyage of self-discovery, perhaps more powerful for being seen through the eyes of experience.
Building confidence for the return
There is a big gap to be bridged between the situation at the end of 2020 and the return of sail training as it was in 2019. What has to be done? To give sufficient confidence to future and former sailors, Item One will be the vaccination programme. At sea or on land this will not be enough on its own: time and familiarity will change attitudes, though this will take many months, perhaps even years. An index of success will be the willingness of trainees first of all to sign up for a voyage, then to walk up the gangway. Physical arrangements will be the starting point, though these are not easy either.
Apart from big sailing ships with many berths on which distancing may be possible, most sail training vessels around the world are yachts and are licensed for trainee crews of twelve or so. Running a small vessel designed for physical effort that requires close co-operation aloft and alow is the antithesis of Covid-19 secure. Maintaining safe distance is a challenge even in the open air on deck, as the ships that have tried daysails can describe. Doing the same below decks in galleys, saloons, bunk spaces or washrooms designed for co-operation and close proximity is much harder. Screens of the kind now common in shops or banks are rarely practical, and while face masks are widely worn ashore, they are a barrier to prolonged physical effort.
Nonetheless there is a menu of strategies to choose from. Requiring crew members to self-isolate for a safe period before coming aboard: testing at the boarding station; repeated daily testing; immediately isolating or disembarking crew who test positive. Evidence of vaccination will likely become a requirement. These measures add costs without increasing income, reducing the number of contributing members of the voyage crew, requiring medical crew to be carried, purchasing test kits and possibly vaccinations, or reducing the duration of voyages. Even with full safety measures, there is certain to be a mixed reaction from people who feel reassured and those who don’t.
Support and obstacles
There are government business support schemes varying between countries with differing restrictions and duration: STOs have taken these up where they apply. Few of the national associations of STOs are in a position to offer financial support: the UK’s ASTO is an
exception and was quick to make grants, but its resources are finite. Many STOs operate
close to the edge financially at the best of times. There is a high likelihood that from 2021 some will will seek mergers with other bodies to survive, or become insolvent and cease to operate altogether.
Some commentators feel this will remove marginal organisations running on optimism rather than solid results, and will reduce the overall spend on overheads that don’t directly benefit trainees. But the strongly independent culture of the STOs means that this will be painful. There is knowhow in the non-profit sector (though not necessarily in sail training) about how to manage these processes with minimum damage to services and reputation, while modest funding can help to smooth the path.
Many donors have been generous in allowing funds to be redirected from their original gifts to help with recurrent costs or new projects ashore. Ports and marinas have suspended charges and many suppliers have been lenient with payments, though they are also hit hard financially. Charity status has been helpful in allowing STOs to receive grants and donations; those reliant mainly on commercial revenue rather than grants and donations have had a very hard time. Some European tall ships that offer sail training as only a part of their revenue stream are tied up, with no prospect of early release.
An unforeseen obstacle is insurance for crews and ships. Many insurers have now excluded Covid-19 from the personal cover they offer travellers, problematic because trainees usually have to travel to join their ship. Reportedly P&I clubs are doing the same for ships, which could prevent some from sailing even when other factors are aligned. It is not known how far this will extend, but it could potentially exclude other epidemic disease, perhaps even seasonal flu or norovirus outbreaks. STOs will probably need to demonstrate how they can safely sail to insurers, as well as to maritime and health authorities.
Seafarers and social attitudes
When national restrictions relax, it is likely that international voyages will be complicated by the reluctance of some states to allow foreign ships and seafarers into their waters, an unwelcome echo of earlier centuries. During the first waves of the pandemic both commercial and recreational seafarers were once again treated by national jurisdictions as hostile aliens. Attitudes and prejudices from past centuries were resurrected, where seafarers were stereotyped as diseased rogues and thieves, a threat to settled society, come to take their property and violate their women and men. Vessels and their crews around the world were stranded in sight of ports, quarantined but not permitted to transit or even land, ostensibly for fear of infection. Even within entities – Australia and the EU, for example – cross-border voyages were difficult or simply illegal.
As the virus is suppressed or as we learn to live with it, these hurdles will no doubt be lowered, though there is likely to be a legacy of arbitrary restrictions trailing out into the future. There are very strong arguments for starting sail training when the general risks have been reduced to an acceptable level. National and international sail training bodies can help the STOs by making cogent cases for the benefits of sail training, with considered plans for safe restarts. Part of these arguments should be the evidence base for the outcomes. STOs are no longer dependent on anecdote to prove the benefits: the research studies cited above show the changes in outlook and personal efficacy.
The romantic, sometimes heroic, ideas about voyaging under sail that launched modern sail training post-WWII are no longer regularly fed by film and literature. Dreaming about overcoming adversity and achieving success in traditional sail has been sidelined. With scant resources and few blockbusters, sail training has to compete for attention and share of mind in crowded and noisy cyberspace, now colonised by commercial and governmental interests. Electronic media, video games, simulators and other interactive pursuits dominate intellectual stimulation. Yet it should also be noted that many of these have sharpened skills, reflexes and mental agility, which could be readily transferable to sailing, navigating or berthing a ship.
What has changed?
In the meanwhile, much may have changed in social attitudes that has not yet been clearly identified. Many aspects of everyday behaviour have evidently changed. It is uninspiring but important that the international shift to shopping for goods and services online is expected to last for a generation, with consequences for urbanisation. Online weddings and funerals, unknown in 2019, may remain as the norm. Avoiding close contact with other people in queues, crowds and confined spaces like public transport and churches may endure long after the Covid-19 virus is under control. For many people travel on the web has become an acceptable proxy for the real thing. The effects of these and other, as yet unrecognised, changes may be critical to the future of sail training.
In the 2000s the ‘experience economy’ began to supplant long-term commitments like yacht ownership. Chartering a yacht, hiring a standup paddle board or renting a jet-ski have become ubiquitous, replacing permanent ownership. From 2020 even that became impossible, so there will be a gap of a year or two during which the classic week-long sail training voyage has been neglected. We can only guess at the part that voyaging under sail plays in the minds of young and older people who will have spent up to two years mostly in their own company. For some older people sailing will represent the dream of their youth, unfulfilled first because of life’s obligations, but latterly because of the pandemic. What will be needed to re-awaken their dream?
For many, perhaps most younger people it is an unfamiliar concept that must be brought to life. Yet we are all dependant on ships: the pandemic has starkly shown that without them in sea-girt countries (and in many land-locked nations too) we would slowly starve, in the cold, and in the dark. So although the role of sail training in preparing seafarers has changed in recent decades, the importance of seafarers has if anything, grown. World trade may well resume its upward trajectory when the virus is subdued. Although most sail training is not now vocational and professionally oriented, this could be an opportunity on which the STOs should act.
The return to the sea post-pandemic coincides with the advent of unmanned shipping: will this spell the end of seafaring? It is unlikely: shipping as a whole is a notoriously conservative industry, slow to change, so whatever the outcome it will not be speedy. Experience in other industries suggests it is likely that new skilled roles will be highly valued. For example, the growth of offshore renewable energy in the worldwide economies has created demand for entirely new maritime roles. But while some routine processes in hi-tech ports and on long ocean voyages may diminish, it is likely that shiphandling and pilotage, for example, will continue at a premium for many years.
Rethinking sail training
The disaster of Covid-19 in 2020/21 is also an opportunity to rethink the sail training proposition. The long pause of the pandemic may mean that a new and broader offer could be its renaissance, looking not just to the present, but the future, not solely charitable, but income-generating. Learning what it is about sail training that appeals to women as well as men. Thinking carefully about how to invite groups so far left out, in spite of good intentions: black and minority ethnic people, people of different sexualities, older people, impoverished or wealthy people. Not solely focused on ‘young’ people, however defined, but including the whole age spectrum. Recognising sail training once again as a recruitment channel to seafaring of all ranks.
For older people too, sail training can be a voyage of self-discovery, re-awakening dreams from early life or from adulthood pinned down by job and family. Until the cruise industry was decimated by Covid-19 it was one of the fastest growing in the world. And though it is known for cosseting passengers, there are many who yearn for the sea and the wind, clearly shown by the expedition and adventure sector, also growing vigorously before the pandemic. New and more flexible business models will be required to reinvigorate STOs with a different mix of charity, enterprise and commercialism. The biggest obstacle is likely to be sail training itself, which is often conservative, always looking back to an earlier era, and like the wider shipping industry, reluctant to innovate or change.
Tall ships and sail training still have the power to fire the imagination, as the huge crowds in the Tall Ships Race ports demonstrate. Similar crowds are seen at the start and end of extreme sailing events such as the Vendée Globe. The great difference is that the crowds cannot take part in the extreme events, or even set foot on the yachts, whereas they can both visit and sail on the tall ships. Connecting with the atavistic vision of seafaring that still lurks inside so many women and men on land means finding the people for whom taking part in a sail training voyage would realise a dream.
Sail training has a huge amount to offer to individuals and society as a whole, to support recovery from this pandemic. To assert this and be heard amid the dire effects of Covid-19 is a huge task that will require advocacy, skilful messaging and brilliant marketing with scant resources. Between 1939 and the first Tall Ships Race in 1956, sail training began a metamorphosis that propelled it into the headlines of the media of the day for several decades. The key lesson from the last 70 years of sail training must not be lost: in the face of adversity the sector can achieve great results both for voyagers, and for society as a whole.
In summary
