Coaching and Training Day at Lymington Town Sailing Club
by Karl Thorne 30 Apr 2018 13:15 BST
28 April 2018
Training and coaching session at Lymington Town SC © Karl Thorne
Last Saturday (28th) was a busy day for training and coaching at the Lymington Town Sailing Club.
In the morning Dave Mellor, the RYA Coaching Development Manager, came to run a Discover Coaching session for 10 of our regular Club racers. Dave's aim was to give our sailors confidence that they could perform their own coaching sessions within the Club, and what the format of a Racing Coach Level 2 course would be like if they wanted to attend one. Most of the morning was spent afloat in RS Aeros, putting into action a coaching session that the sailors had designed themselves and focussing on one element, tacking in light air. The sailors worked in pairs to test their ideas and feedback on what was working or not. One of our sailors, who was under medical orders not to get his feet wet, could not bear watching for more than 30 minutes and was spotted in a boat demonstrating beautiful roll tacks – I'm sure he'd taken his phone out of his trouser pocket first! Thank you to the RS Aero owners who kindly lent their boats for this session.
Unfortunately by the afternoon, the little breeze that we had seen in the morning evaporated as forecast, and a healthy spring ebb meant that any potential sailing areas would be either mud or unsailable because of the strength of the current. This resulted in our Saturday Sailors on the RYA Start Racing Course having to stay ashore. However all was not lost, we managed to cover three important topics in some detail in the classroom and dinghy park: starting, upwind sail setting for single and double handers, and the essential few racing rules you need to get by. Thank you to Chloe Martin, Richard Lilley, Liam Willis and Ben George for giving-up their afternoons to help out and share their knowledge.
This coming Saturday (5th May) is our fourth in the series of Start Racing sessions, meeting at 12.30pm on the lawn and running to about 5pm. The intention is get afloat after a very short briefing and get a decent amount of time on the water for some boat speed exercises, practice starts and short races. Fingers crossed for good weather!