Spinthesis: My Dubai Dialectic
- Apparent
- The cockpit is where the action is.
- True
- The pointy end is a different culture — and Dubai has the same two ends.
When I lived in Dubai, I got to both play anthropologist and learned to fly spinnakers. There’s more in common there than is obvious. I’m going to try to explain this via dialectics.
Thesis (“a placing, a proposition”): be in the boat’s cockpit — that’s the control center, where crew are concentrated, where the action is, and it’s, via the companionway, closest to the cabin.
Antithesis (“to set against, oppose”): the opposite clan is made up of bowmen, and perhaps anyone else forward of the companionway. That “pointy end of the boat” has a different culture. So far away, yet so in your face.
Insiders vs. outsiders: the Emiratis are the boat owners. When I lived there, natives made up only 3% of Dubai’s population. The outermost don’t speak the native Arabic, nor the lingua franca English, but instead Malayalam or Tagalog or Urdu.
Brains vs. brawn: the habitués of the cockpit (coach, tactician, navigator, owner’s rep) make up the boat’s brain trust. They might not do any physical work at all; in some cases, racing rules actually prohibit them, short of an emergency, from doing so. The bowmen run a wider range of physical tasks: hoisting, heaving, launching, gybing, dousing. Yet Dubai’s famous, ever-evolving skyline was built by imported construction crews. Lifelines keep both bowmen and builders from falling — the former into the sea, the latter toward the ground.
Glamour vs. grunts: in Hollywood parlance, the stars are in the cockpit. The captain is the director and/or leading man. The navigator and tactician have supporting roles. The foredeck has the stunt men. They do the dirty — and the dangerous — work.
Strategy vs. safety: strategy is top-down. From stratēgos, Greek for ‘general’, it embodies hierarchy. Versus safety, which is fundamental: it’s the base of the Maslowian pyramid. Foredeck folk are looking out for each other. While everyone talks “safety first”, it’s the foredeck that lives it.
I often found roles on bow — perhaps as I’ve stayed thin and nimble as I aged. Also, I found, or at least fancied, that it suited me to be away from the captain. I’ve been an entrepreneur and otherwise self-employed nearly my entire career, so I reckoned I had issues with authority.
Synthesis (“put together, combine”): in Dubai, one under-crewed day, those foredeck skillsets led me to trim the spin too. And I was good. I had to deal with the skipper. I had to communicate closely. Downwind, I’m driving the boat — much like driving a team of oxen or horses — as well as telling the helmsman what to do.
And Dubai has the landmark spinnaker building: the Burj Al Arab, built to resemble the billowing spinnaker sail of a J-class yacht.