The Old School

I touched on why I am so grateful to be taught by followers of "The Old School" of teaching sailing, and this includes in particular Tighnabruaich Sailing School's Derek Andrews, who was 20 years ago a very young proponent of traditional means.

In contrast to the "new school" - I get really confused by the new RYA courses- they seem to be either with kid gloves on, or a bit too focused. I liked the old levels 1-5 and the competent crew course. People apparently want everything like bubble gum, chewed quickly and enjoyed. I found much of my sailing tuition a bit frustrating because I was always trying to run before I could walk, and there seemed to be a hundred things involved in walking before you were allowed to run!

...and that my friends was a good thing. Education has to focus on the basics, and ok some kids will need special help, but most will cluster around the average time and the good ones can help the slower ones and so on, like schools functioned for hundreds of years. In sailing there are some definitive things you must pass and you must do in a particular way. You must right a boat correctly, and learn the varying preparations for different dinghies and stronger wind once you can the basic righting movement.

The Old School attitude is about seamanship first: knots, safety, weather, tide, rigging, derigging, rolling sails, reefing, planning a day trip....so on.

I did do things a bit in reverse order: I came back to sailing after a 12 year break and started in at the deep end on foredeck of a tweaky regatta machine. I then went BACK to dinghies, having pottered around in Wayfarers in Sea Sprouts many years before. Wayfarers and laser 16s it was! But this was what I mean by walking before I could run.

When I turned up at the old Tighnabruaich school in the town, I was almost alarmed to see no tell tales in the sails!! How do they expect me to trim the sails ?? Some boats had birdgees but not all.

I think I will do a separate page on what the old school taught me in detail, but you can see the clash of wills starting. It felt like being copilot in a jet fighter and to become pilot I had to go back and fly a 50 hp biplane.

I clashed immediately with several of the summer instructors, one of them a whitbread veteran. However as the week went on I found I was really learning some fundamentals which I had not understood, or not had the feel for before. It may for example seem very grove to sail without telltales, but in fact it teaches you the larger principles of point of sail, and how to feel the boat in the water rather than being stuck to telltales. Sound familiar? You read some stuff top sailors say about boat speed and heel- they go by feel and the bounce of the forestay, tell tales are a kind of double check.

We ended up sailing some of the week in force 7 to 8 gales, all under control, and then a nice fresh sector with force 3-4 to round the week off, when I found myself having a terrific beat a good way up the west kyle and finally feeling like I was master of the boat in this weight of wind.

Later on also I sailed with people of the Old School, and recognised that one of the guys on the FC Europe, regatta machine, was of the old school actually and taught me some good stuff. Finally after four years of racing I got invited with a very established family of modest means, but they mastered the boats they sailed. Then the instrument covers rarely came off, and I learned a lot about tactics and some small "cheats" like pointing your bow low when you can fetch the mark to fool the followers even further past the layline.

I am a bit of a natural HSE man, procedures and check lists and thinking about worst-case-scenarios must be in my blood. So that is also something from the old school - take a dose of caution after feeling any bravado coming on.

Finally I kind of came full circle when sailing on a hunter 707 on the Forth with a guy who called winches "pooleys" and liked tweaking the rudder hard when we were planing because it felt good. He had a regular habit of winning and that was for two reasons: firstly he didn't like sailing with more than 3 or 4 on board, so we were quite light. Secondly he didn't bother with tweaks and fine adjustments or even the top tell tale on the main as far as I remember: he sailed by feel and cunning: he saw the big picture out of the boat and kept it simple. He sailed pretty basically, with a deal of bravery actually, but he could keep his head out the boat and on where we were going often either sailing the shortest route or remembering to duck out the ferocious tide under the forth bridges in water a 707's draught would tackle. So that taught me again that instruments and tell tales are all well and good aids to racing, but nouse is the thing that counts.