Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona
How it started
Sailing is where Joan learned to read a situation before he learned to argue about one — wind, current, and other boats all converging on the same mark don’t wait for anyone to finish a sentence. That instinct for watching a scene develop in real time and deciding fast is the thread that runs from the dinghy fleet at Club Nàutic El Masnou through to the judging work described on the Judging page.
Coaching at Club Nàutic El Masnou (2022–2024)
Joan coached dinghy sailors at Club Nàutic El Masnou from 2022 to 2024.
What sailing taught me
The homepage already draws the line from sailing’s protest-and-argument culture to the courtroom: testimony, cross-examination of the account, a reasoned decision at the end of it. Being on the water adds something that page doesn’t say — races are decided by conditions nobody controls, and the sailors who do well are the ones who adjust their read of the situation continuously instead of committing to a plan and defending it past the point it still makes sense. That’s turned out to be useful off the water too: in a protest hearing, in a legal argument, in debugging a system that isn’t behaving the way the design doc says it should — the discipline is the same, keep checking the read against what’s actually happening, not what you expected to happen.
Coaching sharpened a second, more specific skill: explaining a decision — a tactical call, a rule, a line in the sand — to someone who disagrees with it, in terms they can actually use next time. That turns out to be most of what a protest committee does too.