Summary of Youth Training 2006
Saturday Morning Training:
This year for the first time we introduced an extra two weeks training for New Young Sailors in the club. This allowed us to assess their sailing ability and also to teach them the fundamentals before the main courses began.
Everyone is delighted with the results. Overall we have found progress for the new sailors significantly higher than in previous years and it is being repeated in 2007.
Currently we have Young Sailors Progressing through the RYA scheme from Stage 1 through to Stage 3 and in 2007 we shall see a few progressing to Stage 4 and again onto Seamanship
.
Saturday Afternoon:
At the start of the season we introduced Saturday Skills, aimed at Young Sailor Seamanship skills. Once the weather warmed up we restarted the Saturday Club. One week was spent carrying out “fun” sailing activities. The alternate week being geared towards seamanship and racing skills, which has included a number of lee shore landings etc. Special mention must go to Philip Lee, Tony Alton and Kevin Hall who are there every week.
Thursday Skills:
Take up for this was excellent and we have had eight people on it. The evening training is aimed at Young Sailors, but also available to anyone who wishes to improve their sailing skills. During the sessions the sailors have covered Light Wind Sailing, Lee-Shore landings, Man Overboard recovery, Jetty Landings and Towing other boats. Whilst practising Backward Sailing skills we had a Sailing Backwards race.
It was a delight one evening to watch the youngsters, including eleven year olds competently sailing the Comets, using their skills to recover each other in Toppers and then sail back to the club house.
The evenings training finished with them taking some visiting Guides out, again using the Comets.
Holiday Pick N Mix:
2006 saw the launch of Pick N Mix flexible training sessions, which allowed us to keep junior Stage training on over the holiday period. It has been a great success and saw several of the juniors attend who had only just completed taster sessions. By offering flexibility over the holiday period we hope to ensure that the youth keep sailing and also bring their friends along.
Saturday Club:
The Saturday Club was re-launched this year, which has again proven to be popular. Sadly weather booked for the BBQ weekend failed to arrive. Instead of sailing we motored over to Fishermans Creek, which was the calmest place on Carsington. After that a visit was made to the Visitors for Ice Creams, or Hot Chocolate!
Thanks must go out to all who kindly gave up their free time and helped with the Saturday Club.
Autumn Training:
We again continued with Autumn training and ran two morning sessions, both of which proved to be very popular. This session is largely responsible for the much higher calibre sailors we now have as it avoids the large gap in sailing / training which used to occur.
Seamanship Training:
For the first time this year we put on a Seamanship course, which was also open to some of our younger sailors who acted as crew, although not all the time !!
This course is great for improving to a high level, all-round boat-handling skills and also proved to be great fun for everybody.
We spent a fair amount of time working on rudderless and centreboard less sailing. It really was a pleasure to see how well everyone developed their skills. After a couple of weeks practise it was difficult to distinguish who was and who wasn’t sailing rudderless!!
We covered anchoring, which is an area a lot of dinghy sailors never cover along with the normal syllabus.
Being an Advanced training module this course was also ideal for those people going on to become Assistant Instructors.
Richard Daldorph March 2007