Water, freedom, space — at sea with S'pore sailors

Out in the warm, comforting blue of the morning sea on July 19, far removed from the suffocation of the city, the sailor speaks with a quiet smile as the boat cuts water.

- Rohit Brijnath

"The wind is coming."
"The boat will tilt."

And so it does, the sails catch the wind, and this marvellous contraption of fibreglass, carbon fibre, aluminium, rope, bends like a motorcycle on a turn. As nature so very gently flexes its muscle, I feel no fear, only glee.

My guides are Ryan Lo, 28, a modest fellow with an immodest CV (two Olympics, Asian Games gold and two bronzes) and the rising Keira Carlyle, only 19, who earned an Asiad bronze in 2023. Unlike us pathetic landlubbers they are capable of nautical magic. They read the wind like sun-screened prophets.

They tell it, Lo explains, from flags, ripples, clouds, tidal currents, from a wind indicator on top of the mast, from the colour of water. "If you see a darker patch approaching you," he says, "that's generally where the direction of the wind is coming from." But you can't quite read nature's mysterious mind and the wind keeps changing "and every day is different, even the same day can be different during a race itself".

What's happening at Raffles Marina is a joyous sporting education given to me by young professors of the waves. Water, for me, is best used for whiskey. Seventy-one per cent of the Earth is covered by it, but I've lived entirely on unshakeable land with a mostly illiterate idea of rafts, gondolas, dhows, galleys, arks, catamarans, tugboats and sailboats.