Sailing Caps and MOB

You all know about sailing caps. Those hats which are often a treasure and which are telling you years after you got them, where you have been. The most sought after item I think are the Mount Gay caps. And you have to get them at the event. Sometimes you have to fight to get one.

Some of these caps are fitting nicely, some of them you are loosing when looking up into your windex or checking the twist in the sail. The current fashion (coming from the Volvo Ocean guys?) is to wear your sunglasses on top of the hat. Yeap. Looks cool mate. Costly when you loose both.

With the sun low in the West and beating home at the Wednesday night race it makes sense to wear your best fitting cap and I found it to be useful, when the shade is of green colour on the inside. My "company" caps do not have that at present. They are grey and yellow. Corporate colours of course. A colour which people seem to like, counted on the number of caps which we are handing out. Funny, the second batch (1000 pcs ea) did not fit as the first batch. I am sure that the manufacturer must have saved 1 cm all the way around at the bottom. This made the cap useless in strong winds, no matter how tight you were doing the Velcro. I mean, small heads would fit into it without the danger of the cap being blown away whilst controlling your sail shape, but big heads, afterguard heads... OK, hit me with a rhythm stick, this is not Americas´s Cup talk.

My best cap at present was one, which had been secured to the sailbag of my new SL13 sail from KA sails, when I recently purchased it. A Moth sail. And sailing a Moth it is useless to wear sunglasses. You need a good cap to protect yourself against the sun, to avoid dizziness from the sun. Proudly going out sailing with the new cap I lost it of course when I took a swim. It drifted away from me, whilst uprighting the boat. But I managed a good MOB maneuver, being able to reach for the cap at the first encounter after gybing and sailing into the wind. A good practise. I had another COP (cap over board), maneuver. This one took me two trials to grap it from the water. Come on, not bad with a black carbon Moth, to find a black cap in near black water...

Now I have kinked the cap with a chock cord to my swimming vest (PFD?). You can see me on the photo coming back ashore, centerboard up already and cap saved. Yes, and all the scratches on my rudder and centerboard due to groundings on my homewater are another story.