Youf Sailing

Well that turned out to be a wasted morning, I'd drawn short straw on rescue boat duty, but a bit of a nasty North Sea swell put paid to all ideas of chucking loads of kids in the Channel off Downs this morning, so I had a look around at what they sail and listened to some of their 'motivational' (means their eyes glaze over and they study the effect their toenails are having on their little rubber booties) team talks, then wandered down to watch another bunch of obvious pondies who were wondering why the dog they'd seen in the sea that had dived under the wave hadn't come up for air, it's a seal said I, they have whiskers as well.
Some other kids came up to me and politely asked if I was local, 'sort of' said I, 'how can I help?' kind of expecting them to ask about local sailing knowledge stuff. "Do you know where Subway is? Subway? no trains in Deal, 'use the zebra crossing' said I..
I'd helped brief Gemma/ Jenna (can never remember which) on how to deal with pondies that come down to sail in tide, so arrive with all their lay lines shot to pieces and how to deal with it in the various directions, then I had to sort out her kicker, the cascade was going block to block before the kicker was fully applied and she' had been having trouble pointing.

But the rest of the time I was simply marvelling at the organisation that had gone into the Event, Downs had certainly nailed it down, they have an even nastier beach than ours to launch from without obviously the predominantly South Westerly dump we get but today the wind was in the North with the forecast giving it shifting East which would be even worse, I said to someone earlier if it were my call I'd bin it off, then come lunchtime they did, wise decision.

There were already broken 29er masts in the boat park from the day before when the wind was a lot lighter, so light apparently they had to tow loads of boats in, I got shown a new knot (always a joy to learn something new)some Alpine Butterfly doo dah, (loop knots to put in the line to attach other boats to so we could tow four or five off one line.)

It's a brilliant thing to behold though, all those kids, all in teams, loads of boats, makes you think maybe the sport has a future after all..

Very uplifting.

Edited by iGRF - 22 Jul 14 at 1:49pm