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Fine example of fitted hat on a sailor
When I was a kid, I wore those cheap give-away baseball hats you get at Giants games. Their cheap plastic adjustable bands ensured that no hat would ever actually fit anybody. I always yearned to have a "fitted" Giants cap. I had just such a hat that I wore across the Atlantic. It made it but lacked one important feature. Adjustability.
Sailing is not static. The waves push you up and down, the wind gusts and lulls, changing directions at a whim. The boat rocks back and forth. No one hat should be expected to handle all of these dynamic conditions.
Enter the velcro-adjustable wind-sensing cap. At the dock, you get to wear it at whatever setting looks good, but once you hit the open seas, vanity goes out the window (err, port). You set the hat just tight enough so that a gust won't blow it off. As the wind increases, you tighten the hat, keeping it always just tighter than the prevailing wind conditions. When it starts hurting your head, you reef. This is important so I'll repeat: when the cap starts hurting your head, you reef.
This is where the velcro adjustment comes in. The only proof I need against evolution is that sailors (and Moms) don't have a third hand. If you have one of those golf caps that requires taking the hat off, turning it inside out, adjusting some weird clasp, and then putting it back on to see if it's the desired tightness, you've already rounded up and should be thinking about picking up that lost crew member out of the water. It's all about the one handed velcro adjustment, takes no more than half a second to fit it just right.
A handy set of velcro adjustable settings, consider this the Beaufort scale of hat adjustment:
- 5 knots loose, comfortable
- 10 knots snug
- 15 knots tight but won't leave mark
- 20 knots tight, hurts head
- 25 knots leaves mark on skin
- 30+ knots consider using 5200 to keep it on
This isn't a science of course. Some sailors have rather large heads (see Dennis Conner), others are more appropriately sized (see attractive sailor pictured with this article). The important thing is that there is a hat for every wind and head combination.
Comments
Excellent advice. The other thing you can do is to train the muscles in your head to hold the cap more tightly. 20 minutes a day, 3 times a week doing frowning and scowling exercises and after a few months you will find that you can expand the size of your head as necessary to hold on your cap in stronger winds.
Tillerman, excellent idea. I believe Barry Bonds is the poster child for the Expand Your Head technique.
Good point about reefing (ahem). You should reef at the first thought your hat might blow off.
But, after losing 37 hats overboard, I switched to watchcaps for sailing. Those dumb doohickeys that clip the back of your hat to your shirt work, too, but then you have to post a lookout for the fashion police.
You need a follow-up article on proper HOB procedures. Although, I'm sure the hat industry has a special interest group to discourage such practice...."better to buy a new hat, than lose VMG".
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