Editor's Note: Guest blogging for Producer Joan Johnson is QUEST team member and sailing fanatic Sandy Schonning.

The real physics of sailing are so deep and so complex, people
are still debating it.

It was another average Tuesday. I was sitting at my desk, looking at my calendar. Another day of budget meetings, returning emails, reviewing contracts, yawn. The usual buzz of production was going on around me, a crew going out to do a story about… sailing. Ah sailing, my favorite topic. My husband and I had recently moved both ourselves and our Tayana 37 up the coast from Long Beach. Okay, a well-qualified captain had actually moved the boat to San Francisco for us… but since Polaris had gotten here, we had become a bit obsessed about Bay sailing. Sailing in So Cal had not prepared us for the currents, tides and winds of the Bay, so we tried to get out there as much as possible.

Okay, back to Tuesday morning. The buzz moved over to my desk… the shoot was supposed to show a group of beginners on a sailing lesson, but the family that was booked for this purpose had suddenly cancelled that morning. Could I fill in? I considered my clothes… skirt, heels, not really sailing clothes. And moving all those meetings… but a day on the Bay… the beautiful, sunny, windy Bay. Plus, sailing with an instructor, there is always something to learn about sailing, how could I pass this up? Okay when are we leaving? No wait, what am I going to wear… isn't there a West Marine near the sailing school. Can we stop to get me pants and a pair of shoes? Yes, that's how much I really wanted to go out that day, I bought new clothes to do it.

It was a great day on the Bay. Stan, our instructor from the sailing school, was great at explaining the physics behind why a boat sails. At the direction of the producers, I asked every sailing question I could think of. Who has the right-of-way, what is this line for, what do we do when the wind blows harder? Okay, I knew many of the answers, but I babbled on anyway. Was I having fun? In much of the segment, I have the goofiest grin on my face. I wish I had a job that took me sailing every day…

Anyway, it was over too quickly – and then it was back to my meetings. But I'll tell you the biggest surprise of the whole experience: I though the physics behind sailing were pretty simple – a little Bernoulli Principle, a little lift generation. But what I learned made my head spin. It turns out that most of the simple explanations of sailing physics are ‘helpful models' that make sailing understandable to sailors. The real physics of sailing are so deep and so complex, people are still debating it. If you'd like to see what I mean, check out Arvel Gentry's website. Gentry was an aerodynamicist for 40 years, is an avid sailor, and an America's Cup boat designer. His technical papers will give you an idea of what's really going on:

http://www.arvelgentry.com

I first met Ugo Conti a number of years ago when we discussed an inflatable boat he had designed to sail from the San Francisco Bay to Hawaii. This adventure was born from Conti's passion for the sea and was somewhat of a follow up to the round-the-world sailing adventures he took with his young family decades before. I think it takes someone with a lot of self-assuredness to quit their job, buy a sail boat, load up their family, and sail off into the big blue with relatively limited sailing experience.

The funny thing is, Mr. Conti actually claims to be a "coward." He even named that first boat "Phobos" after the god of fear. He quickly adds, though, that the fear he felt was actually one of the things that kept him safe. He approached sailing around the world from the perspective of an engineer… and then he over-engineered the situation to be doubly or triply safe. As Mr. Conti told me, "If you go at sea, and with other things in life too, either you are an expert, or you're scared. If you are both, it's even better. If you're not one of those two, any sailing endeavor becomes very dangerous. If you're scared, or you're so worried about everything, then you're very careful. And so you can go into difficult situations because you are careful. If you're not scared and you're not an expert, if you go to sea you'll get clobbered, and maybe even die." He continued, "but by going through that, you face, but not conquer, fear. They say it's a courageous person that goes on despite the fear, not somebody that is not fearful. Because that person is an idiot."

I have been lucky to meet many unconventional thinkers who have changed the world by "thinking outside the box." That term has become a cliché. But when I spoke with Mr. Conti, I saw a person who has never seen "the box." It seems as though each of his projects starts with a clean slate and he borrows little from collective engineering standards. He designs boats but does not claim to be a marine engineer. One thing he told me that I found very interesting was how someday "someone is going to invent a powerful engine, something that runs on water, air or some unlimited resource and makes no pollution. This will kill the combustion engine and every car, boat, train, airplane and power-plant will be generating power in a completely clean way. The person who invents that machine will not be someone from the car industry or anyone who studied combustion engines or conventional engineering." True groundbreaking progress comes from outsiders who don’t follow the pack.

Watch the "Ugo Conti's Spider Boat" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST.