When I was a teenager, I spent a summer teaching sailing to the blind. This was 35 years ago, and at the time was a fairly revolutionary idea. Conventional wisdom says to steer anything, you need to be able to see. My experience that summer, and the experiences of countless others has proven that to be a very limited viewpoint.
As we started taking out students, I saw one person after another who appeared to be a natural at the helm. Within the first lesson, students were often steering as if they had been sailing for quite some time. The boat we used to teach was a Lightning class sailboat. Lightnings are very fast and very sensitive boats, every twitch of the tiller has some impact on the speed and motion of the boat. Without having sight, our students relied on their senses of touch and hearing to steer by. They quickly learned to steer by using the feel of the wind on skin, the feel of the tiller tugging, and the heel of the boat. The sound of the water against the hull and the wind in the rigging offered more feedback to guide the helmsman.
Contrast that with the experiences I had later teaching to fully sighted people. They relied almost exclusively on their sight to steer by. My early experiences teaching sighted people had me missing my blind students. The natural feel that my blind students had for the boat seemed to be missing. Instead every movement of the tiller, was mechanical and exaggerated. The motion was choppy, and the boat's speed slow. Tacks often resulted in the boat coming to a complete stop.
My sighted students relied too much on their sight. They would move the tiller and expect to SEE an immediate result. When they didn't they would keep pushing the tiller over until they did, which resulted in over steering first in one direction and then another. You can feel the effects of a tiller adjustment before you can see the results, and that is what my sighted students had to learn.
Relying more on sight than feel, they would plow into waves on a windward beat. You need a light touch in a chop on a windward beat to keep a boat moving well, you need to have a feel for the give and take of the seas. My blind students seemed to have this naturally, my sighted students not as much.
Of course the sighted students would learn over time to pay more attention to their sense of feel, it just did not come nearly as naturally for them.
There is a lesson in this for a racing sailor, where a fraction of a knot of boat speed is worth so much. I would suggest that you spend some time practicing blindfolded. I know this is going to conjure up images of the Karate Kid, but there is a real value in this. It will force you to use 100% of your other senses. If you do this with some regularity and take it seriously, I can guarantee your boatspeed will improve, and your tacks and jibes will be smoother letting you carry more boatspeed through them. In short, it will make you more competitive. Of course you should bring a sighted navigator with you, as a newbie to sailing blind, you are going to need someone to tell you where the other boats are and where the shore and other obstructions are.
Give it a shot, and then let me know how you do.
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