Having been a horse girl all my life – since before I have any memory of anything at all – I realized the other day that sailing and horses have many things in common. Perhaps the similarities are the reason why I was hooked on sailing in the first place, on a somewhat subconscious level.

Sounds a bit far fetched, doesn’t it?

Well, I’ll try to explain.

Point number 1: Money. Both are real black holes that suck all your money and then some.

Point number 2: Social status – it’s a common understanding (mostly based on the previous point) that sailing and horse riding are the best loved hobbies among the upper crust, along with golf and alpine skiing.

Seriously speaking, this is not really what I mean – at all. Surely you can sink all your money into just about any hobby you like, and buying a sailboat will certainly not put you in a higher class if all you can afford is a 45-year-old, 25 ft boat.

To me the link between the two is being close to nature, being immersed in nature. It’s about using a force of nature to your advantage, having control over it – up to a point. You can make a sailboat go where you want it to go, using the power of the wind. And you can communicate with your horse, essentially a wild creature, and he will faithfully carry you to your destination. Funnily enough, both are accomplished by pulling some strings!

You can learn to understand and, to a certain extent, predict these forces, but you will always have to keep in mind that they are far greater than you are. A nice breeze can turn into a gale force wind with little warning, and inside even the most docile horse there’s a prey animal ready to escape a sabre-toothed cat, no matter how you try to explain to him that evolution did away with those buggers thousands of years ago.

Then there’s the beauty and elegance of sailboats and horses. There are few things more pleasing to the eye than a sleek sailboat gliding on the water – and of all the living creatures that ever roamed the earth, the horse must be the most graceful. See what I mean?

 

Behind the scenes of this elegance there is a flip side, of course. Quite surprisingly, what it boils down to is exactly the same thing in both sailing and horse riding!

https://fi.pinterest.com/CompassHeading/behind-the-scenes/

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