As the bow crashed into wave upon wave, the six-man crew on the Elan was quickly soaked by a chilly spray of water off the Hudson. It was a cool, gray Sunday in early May with 30-knot winds and the two-to-three-foot swells gave the day an oceanic feel. A diesel leak from the engine had made the cabin uninhabitable so we were forced to brave the weather. Our clothes were soggy but our spirits were high, because it was the first day of the spring sailing season for the Kingston Sailing Club.

Barry Medenbach, a mild-mannered civil engineer from Stone Ridge is the skipper of the Elan. He is in his eighth year in the Kingston Sailing Club and his third year as Race Committee Chairman, a volunteer position that sounds sexier than it is. Imagine mediating disputes between grown men as they play with very expensive toys for nothing more than a plaque and bragging rights. "I'm a lot better at it now, and complaints really dropped off after I required that to be acknowledged, protests must be filled out in triplicate and approved by the Committee Board and the US Sailing Association before being considered," he laughingly said.

Sailing has its own language, and the first thing everyone learns is the designations of port and starboard (left and right). The next important lesson is that right of way always goes to the boat on a starboard tack, which means having the sail on the port side of the boat. The most tense part of any boat race is the start, as people jockey for position running back and forth along the start line waiting for the air horn from the committee boat, which referees the race. As it was early in the season, the fleet was a little thin, but many of the usual suspects were there, including the Elan's two main competitors, Jammin' and Free Verse.

"Starboard!" I yelled, announcing our right of way as we threaded the needle between two boats that veered off our course at the last moment. As the clock counted down the last 10 seconds, Jim Reynolds, a guest helmsman, timed the turn upwind perfectly, and we had a great hole shot on the rest of the fleet. The force of the high winds was too much on the 36-year-old Elan, however, and with a tremendous crack the tiller broke off in Reynolds's hand. Suddenly, we were an 8,000-pound, rudderless vessel, crammed inbetween eight other 30-plus-foot boats all on the same tack.

Asked to describe his favorite part of sailing, Medenbach told me, "Getting out on the water, turning the engine off, and letting the wind take over. The quietness. And then there's just you, your sails, the river, the wind and the currents. There's nothing else like it." It is an undeniably atavistic feeling when traveling across water under wind power, especially considering it is the skill of sailing that is largely responsible for humanity's spread across the planet. This river has been a major nautical thoroughfare since 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon as far as Albany. The Hudson River remains a shipping lane, and huge tankers are another obstacle encountered by sailors on the river. When sailing on the Hudson, one encounters an ocean current that shifts direction an hour after each tide, adding another element to the tactical considerations of each race that is as important as wind direction and speed.

I yelled to the boats on each side of us that we had no way of steering, but my words were gobbled up by gusting winds and our competitors thought I was just gesturing and screaming in the excitement of the moment. Reynolds struggled to control the heavy boat in high winds with three jagged inches of wood. Medenbach unbelievably pulled a back-up tiller and a socket wrench out of a storage bin and started the operation of changing a tiller midrace. This is akin to having the steering wheel of your car come of in your hands, luckily having a backup, and changing it while racing in extreme conditions. Barry got the tiller attached just as other boats were beginning to tack back across the river, and we ran our leg a little longer. Our disadvantage worked out perfectly as a tactical maneuver, as the rest of the fleet turned into a heavy tidal current in the middle of the river.

All types of boats can race each other in club sailing, regardless of size and speediness through a US Sailing Association performance handicap rating formula (PHRF). The Elan is a 30-foot racing cruiser, a 1970 Hinterholler Redwing designed by C & C Yachts. It's a multiuse boat designed for leisure sailing and racing. It has a small cabin/kitchenette, a sleeping area, and a huge, 3,500 pound keel, which makes it very slow to get to speed, but very stable in rough seas. The Kingston Sailing Club's fleet is comprised of 10 to 15 boats on any given Sunday.

There are a few boats similar to the Elan: the swift Merit 25s (25-foot flat-bottomed race boats with a dagger keel); the Beneteau 311s (newer 31-foot racing boats that are also flat-bottomed with a dagger keel); and a pair of beautiful new 30-foot trimarans that simply dance away from the rest of the fleet. The Elan is a floating antique by comparison; competition against the faster boats is only possible with PHRF handicapping. The fleet is divided into the Spinnaker class which are larger boats that fly a spinnaker, a large parachute-like sail that is only used on downwind legs, and the JAM (jib and mainsail) fleet, comprised of smaller boats that race with just a mainsail and headsail or jib (also known as a genoa).

The Kingston Sailing Club has a spring and fall season, taking summers off due to lack of wind and unrelenting heat. I found out why, firsthand, the second week in August, when the Poughkeepsie Sailing Club and Kingston Sailing Club held the Mid-Hudson Regatta, an 18-mile marathon from the Poughkeepsie yacht club to the rail bridge and back to Kingston. We were on the water on the hottest day of the summer, from 8am until 5pm, and four of our six crew members (myself included) succumbed to the heat and retreated to the shade of the cabin. Only our seaworthy crewmate, Woodstock artist Hera, and skipper, Medenbach, were strong all day as we plugged through to a respectable sixth-place finish.

Sailing has an exclusive reputation that won't be helped after this summer's movie Wedding Crashers, but is much more accessible than most people realize. You don't even need to own a boat to get involved. Skippers are always looking for people to help crew or for ballast (dead weight). All you have to do is just show up on Sunday morning at a skippers' meeting (10am) at Block Park on Abeel Street and ask if anyone can use a hand. If you have a boat, even better, and everyone is welcome, because there is a PHRF for you. Gerald Cuffner, the skipper on the trimaran Gaudi, said that he just got his sons a starter trimaran for $2,000, including sails. Cuffner advised: "Do the research and get something with a decent resale value, because I guarantee once you get a boat, it won't be your last."