Professor Rod Jackson: An epidemiologist's expert views on sailing – thanks to social media

Inspired by Sir Russell Coutts' recent foray into epidemiology and public-health policy, Professor Rod Jackson – who knew nothing about sailing until he did his own research – offers his opinion on how sailing should be done

Sir Russell Coutts. Photo / Getty

The trouble with sailing is that everyone listens too much to what the so-called 'experts' have to say. I mean: yes, the actual sailors have years of experience; and yes, the yacht designers have fancy so-called degrees. But I mean, what's all that worth?

Captain Bligh was a so-called 'expert' on sailing and look where it got him.

In yacht design, we've been expected to almost blindly follow the advice of so-called experts, just because they might have impressive credentials.

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about sailing from social media.

I saw this thing on Facebook about how catamarans are faster than monohulls because of science or something, so let's go one step further – let's race in trimarans. And then when our opposition catch up to our innovative design, and launch their own three-hulled racing yacht, we'll go straight to a yacht with 10 hulls. Eat our wind, suckers!

It's a well-known fact that yachts go faster when they use their spinnakers – so our racing yacht will be made entirely out of spinnaker. You don't get that kind of thinking with your 'years of postgraduate study' and 'industry-specific expertise'.

You see, I believe in having the freedom to be able to question so-called 'expert' opinion.

It's obvious to anyone with an ounce of commonsense that all boats on Sir Russell Coutts' SailGP circuit should have more crew on board – how many? I don't know, maybe 100 – so they can all blow into the sail to make it go faster. Boom! Literally!

We'll get rid of lifejacket mandates too. It's my body, so my choice.

As a precaution, we should only be hiring sailors with really long legs, so that when the wind is too low they can take turns hoping out the back of the boat and pushing the thing with flutter kicks. We did this with a dinghy when I was a kid, and it worked really well. Personal experience matters, people.

I hope the sailing community aren't too shrouded in fear to accept my outside-the-box ideas.

• Prof Rod Jackson is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Auckland and strongly recommends listening to experts in yacht racing, epidemiology and all other fields