The elusive “superorganism” found at the climax: A sailing analogy

As some of you know, I do a fair bit of competitive sailing in my free time, and while my thoughts often drift to the open ocean, or when I’m in Montreal, a bottlenecked river, I found myself reflecting on all that is beautiful about sailing as I contemplated the ideas surrounding order and chaos discussed by Worster (1994).

Sailing is an interesting sport in that it involves the incorporation of countless naturally occurring variables into a strategic plan that must also account for decisions made by your fellow competitors.  With proper preparation, wind patterns can be detected (sometimes oscillating in regular intervals, sometimes shifting persistently as a result of weather patterns), water currents can be estimated, and the effects of landforms on wind can be predicted with a degree of accuracy.  Armed with this knowledge you set up your boat and sails so as to best manage the wind velocity and waves, and develop a course of action for making your way around a fixed track. 

You would think with all this information in hand, victory would occur on a regular basis, but nature often throws you a curveball, and observations made before the race are not always relevant during the race, in order to be successful you must be able to adapt and change, no variable is fixed, including the rationale of your competition, and you must avoid chasing what was.  Sometimes you get lucky and a wind shift vaults you from the back of the fleet to the front, and sometimes the opposite occurs.  In order to achieve success you must be patient and find balance in all the chaos and order that surrounds you.  Frustration leads to reactionary courses of action, which in my experience seldom translate into success.

I always found it interesting that with all these variables at play, the same people can usually be found at the front of the fleet, and I think they are the ones that are best able to reconcile the predictive order and chaotic nature of wind and water.

This is an image taken moments before the start of a race (That's me steering 14905)

References:

Worster, D. (1994). Chapter 13: The Ecology of Order and Chaos The wealth of nature: environmental history and the ecological imagination (pp. 156-170). New York: Oxford University Press.