SAILING… HAVE A GO!
It was a lazy start in the morning, but when I saw the date on the calendar, my eyes nearly popped out of my sockets! It is today! Everything is going to happen, today! All the days of training will pay off! Well I was over reacting to be honest, I haven’t been trained at all, the only thing I did was swim 40m in the school pool and only once, but one thing I was sure was that today I was going have the most fun than ever before! Today, Tuesday the 23 March, I was going sailing at Buckland’s Beach with 11 other children.
By the time I got to school, most of the students were already there, but I wasn’t the last one. Since there were 12 children, our teacher Mrs. Russell took three children in her car and the rest of them went in a van. I was one of the kids that Mrs Russell took in her car. I was her co-pilot. I gave her the instructions on how to get to the beach. However, halfway through we started following a taxi driver.
When we reached our destination we hopped out of the car, we saw a caravan that said SAILING…HAVE A GO, inside the caravan we saw our instructor Carl. The first thing we did was, to wear our togs. Then we equipped ourselves with our safety gear, which were our spay jackets and our life jackets that go on top. After all the safety checks we went over to the sailboats. Before we could even start sailing we leant the different parts of the sail boat like the
-mast (a vertical spear that supports the sail)
-the bow (the front of the boat)
-Stern (the back of the boat)
-Rudder (a board that acts like a fin which moves in the water)
-Centerboard (this piece of wood helps you to stay in one place when there is a strong wind)
-Port (the left side of the boat)
-Stern (the right side of the boat)
-The boom (the part of the boat that swings back and forth)
-Main sheet (it helps go faster and keeps the sail in place so it doesn’t flap).
These are all the things you must know before you can start sailing and the tiller is for steering the boat. Well I’m giving you a lesson on the sailboat; let’s get on with it. After the lesson on sailboats we hopped in and started sailing, we sailed roughly about 50m away from shore.
We had to sail in pairs one to handle the mainsheet and one to handle the tiller. Carl’s assistant Gerry joined us half way through, every time someone stopped, they were there to give us a boost using their speedboats. After one and half-hours of sailing, all the kids towed their sailboats to shore and had our morning tea. Some students sat near the teacher and I was one of them, we were looking at seagulls waiting for us to throw food at them, but we weren’t allowed to.
By the time, we finished having our morning tea there was no wind left, so Carl told us that if the water is like a mirror you can’t sail because there is no wind but there was an up coming wind on the horizon. While we waited, Carl and Gerry taught us how to tie knots to use while sailing. Two of the knots they showed us how to tie were the reef knot and the figure of eight.
After we had paddling races, were we had to use paddles to move, our team came last but we never felt sad but just a little bit disappointed. By the time our races were finished the wind come back, when Carl said we could go sailing all of us rushed out to our boats and did the same thing again. This time it was my partners and I turn to go on the speedboat. After ten minutes, I wanted to sail on my own, but I should tell you that it was not a good experience. The reason was I could not control the rudder and the main sheet at the same time. After sometime, we had to return to shore to have lunch.
While we had lunch we watched the seagulls again, we saw a bully seagull that was saying this was my ground get lost! After lunch, we were ready to go sailing again but no sooner had we got into our boats and started sailing the sea got rough and it kept on blowing us back to shore. So instead we pulled all our boats back to shore and started packing them away into the caravan everyone helped. After all the packing was done we got to swim in the extreme waves. We couldn’t feel the sea surface because we were in our lifejackets. After we got changed, we were awarded certificates.
We learnt a lot about sailing that day.
By: Chris |
