Hey Blog! This week I did something I started last year, an awesome chance inspired by Arthur Ransome’s famous books ‘Swallows and Amazons’!
In 2019 I did an event with Scouts called Activation, a yearly one-day event overlooking Carsington Water in Derbyshire. You get a taster session of each activitiy you pick, and one of the activities which I picked was dinghy sailing. After this I was introduced to the Swallows and Amazons series, a collection of stories about children sailing in boats on a lake in the aptly named Lake District by the author Arthur Ransome. Someone wrote of the first book: “Watch the effect of the first hundred pages on your own children. If they want no more, send for the doctor!” and it really feels like that! I was so thrilled by ‘Swallow and Amazons’ and the subsequent books, the one thing I really wanted was a chance to do sailing like the Swallows and Amazons did. It was planned for 2020, but when the pandemic hit it wasn’t possible to take the course. RYA Stage 1 sailing had to wait for 2021.
My first course was a very interesting learning curve. I had read up on theory in the RYA’s Start Sailing guide, but not done much practice – basically, all I’d done was the taster from activation, and being on the catamaran Cool Runnings in Barbados, not doing the sailing (apart from the brief periods when we were allowed to have a go with the wheel, and that once when I hoisted the mainsail!). This meant that it was OK for the shore part, but the actual sailing part I found a bit scarier. I remember thinking “Wow, I’m sailing on my own!” at the start. However, I was fine until I was doing the capsize drill and tipped the boat over the other way when I had just righted it – I admit I freaked out. Because of this, I was nervous before going on the Stage 2 (the recent course) but by lunch time, everything was normal!
Both my sailing sessions have been at my local water body: Carsington Water in the Peak District. This reservoir was built in the 1980s, and is the 9th largest reservoir in England, so there’s a lot of sailing room! The sessions were also with the same instructor from Carsington Sports and Leisure, though different participants were on each one. In the first course, we learned rigging the boat, basic sailing and tacking (turning the boat from going left across the wind to going right across the wind by turning the bow through the wind) from Beam Reach to Beam Reach – that is, 90° away from the wind. A Beam Reach is one of the ‘Points of Sail’, directions towards and away from the wind. It is worth noting here that you cannot sail right at the wind: you need to tack. This is done by going on a zigzag course towards the wind. In Stage 2, we learned tacking Close Hauled to Close Hauled (another of the ‘Points of sail’, at an angle closer to the wind than the Beam Reach) The 5 Essentials, onshore and offshore winds, and even Gybing (sometimes spelt with a J, this means the same as tacking, except you turn the stern through the wind instead of the bow). It was SUPER FUN, and must have shown in my face as apparently I came in grinning like the Cheshire Cat…! If you live anywhere near the sea, a lake, a wide river… I totally recommend going on the water, as the list of places to go sailing is endless.
After you can sail in all directions regardless of the wind, you are allowed to take a boat out on your own. Our instructor said at the end of my last course that he thought we could all achieve this, so hopefully Dad (who used to do dinghy sailing ages ago) and I might just be able to go out on a boat each. I hope this will happen this year, as I am eager to sail again!