THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
Irecently participated in a sailing clinic held here on Nantucket. Actually, to be more precise, it was the "North U Performance Racing Clinic," sponsored by North Sails. It was a week's worth of both classroom and on-the-water instruction, all of it geared towards making participants better sailors and, if we were lucky, better racers. The proof is in the pudding, as they used to say in Texas, and the results from last week's racing suggest that the clinic was successful as a teaching tool.

Gauging success in a sailboat race is, by definition, pretty easy. Either you win or you don't. But the way you get to that coveted status of "race winner" is where things can get interesting, and the guys who were serving as instructors for the clinic acknowledged that there wasn't any kind of secret formula they could give us to make us suddenly go twice as fast as our competitors. Wouldn't it be nice, though? Rather, we were stuck trying to claw our way up the rankings by taking small steps. And I'm talking micro-baby steps here, kids.

Consider the recently completed America's Cup. The courses for the America's Cup final series, by rule, were between eight and twelve-and-a-half nautical miles. In most of the races, the boats covered the distance in about an hour-and-a-half, give or take a few minutes. That's quite a while to be out there sailing. But consider the finish of race five in the best-of-nine series. Alinghi, the Swiss boat that was defending the Cup, finished the course that day in one hour, twenty-two minutes and twenty-six seconds. Team Emirates New Zealand, the challenger boat, finished the course in one hour, twenty-two minutes and forty-five seconds.

This devil knows the right lures are important.

For those of you keeping score, that's a difference of a whopping nineteen seconds. And if you want to get down-right mathematical about the whole thing, that's about thirty-eight ten-thousandths of the total race time.

So these guys race over a course of ten-or-so miles, spending over an hour and twenty minutes out on the water, and it comes down to nineteen seconds. That's close, folks. Real close, in fact. And if you look at the specifics of that race, New Zealand had a five second lead at the start and a twelve second lead after rounding the first mark. Then Alinghi turned it on, and the rest is, as they say, history. In the end, it all boils down to a difference of nineteen seconds, though. And that's a pretty important nineteen seconds, especially if you're sailing.

But more important to my purposes here, it's that nineteen seconds that the guys from the North U program were preaching during the Performance Racing Clinic. They wanted to show us ways to get that nineteen seconds, that thirty-eight ten-thousandths of the elapsed time for the race. Because when you get right down to it, that's where it counts. In other words, it's the team that deals with the little things - the pesky details that are always such a pain in the neck to keep track of - that can mean the difference between winning the America's Cup and getting the lovely consolation prize which, to the best of my knowledge, is pretty much non-existent in the world of competitive sailing. So the goal is to be on the right side of that 19 seconds.

And when you think about it like I do on a daily basis, the same thing is pretty much true for fishing.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you look out the left side of the aircraft, you'll see a beautiful segue. Those of you seated to the right, however, are out of luck. We're real sorry about that.

Friends and neighbors, it's getting to be that time of year when the fish are a wee-bit picky in their eating habits. And a lot of people out there think this means that they can't catch fish. Hate to break it to you, kids, but you're wrong on that one. The fish are still there and they've still got to eat. It's just that you've got to think a little bit about what it is you're throwing at them.

You can cast until you dislocate your shoulder throwing a three-ounce plug at little fish in the harbor, and you'll probably still come back emptyhanded. It's nothing personal, it's just that you're throwing a plug that's literally too big for the fish to eat. And while bluefish aren't real picky, if the plug is too big for them to eat, you're not going to be catching any.

And for the sushi lovers out there, the bonito have showed up, sort of. I'm getting scattered reports of bonito being caught, but nothing like last year's onslaught just yet. But the same theory holds true for those little torpedoes. You have to throw them something of an appropriate size. So leave the seven-and-a-half-inch Bombers in the box and throw the five-and-a-quarter-inch Yo-Zuri Crystal Minnow instead.

That two-and-a-quarter inches, which is, incidentally, about three-hundred-seventeen ten-thousandths of yours truly's actual height, can mean the difference between fresh bonito for dinner and a quick pit-stop to the Stop-and-Shop for your lovely consolation prize.

Tight lines. I