Out Instructing Again

With teenagers perhaps glued to snap chat, or training their gluts down the gymn, our clubs' sail school lacked anyone needing instruction or race training in the bowsprit'd Fevas, so my year of being a volunteer instructor for the first time since  2012 looked like they werre out the window. However there was the grown up sail school which I had thought about last year, but found some excuse for myself. This year I was keen!

So was my first victim, just two up in one of the classic day sailers we have hear, loaned by aquaintances of mine this very one I chose in fact. Wind was nice and weak , just enough to sail very gently round the bay and then dare pop our snout into the North Sea's gentle swell.

I must say I was nervous, so many folk bobbing around on the dock, people seemed to know each other and I felt a bit out of it while I rigged the boat ready. It is always pretty cool to have the boat ready to sail, especially since they are paying customers for this school.

I realised that it had been a while since I taught sailing from scratch, and that made it a little more nerve wracking with a boat I didn't know the foibles of rigging on. All the boats, depsite being supposedly an OD, vary in how they arrange their running rigging and deck gear. A good deal of them are annoying laid out, or have 'crow foot' rear lead mainsheet, which is just a bore, with cleats both sides. This boat had a rear cockpit traveller which meant the tiller extension had to be 'feathered' during tacks and gybes. Also the jib sheet solution snap shackle didnt fit, and the caribiner style shackle at the tack point was rusted in the thread. I always have a little stainless shackle on me for small boat sailing, and by god I have used it on numerous occaisions!

I took my paying guest out and she seemed to have a lot of nouse about boating, getting onto the transom without falling off and being generally eager and helpful. Turns out she's an engineer, so head and shoulders above other folk who dont have that kind of spacial thought process and ability to understand physics in action. In fact I began to think she was a ringer!

I approach sailing in my own much distilled way, rigging the boat as mentioned, sails ready to go. Then it is three controls only - two sheets and the tiller. After this it is four manoevres. Nope not tacking and gybing, but starting, stopping , luffing and falling off. Sit on the right side of the boat, to windward, and get a feel from where the wind is coming from. A luff eventually becomes a tack, and a fall off eventually becomes a gybe, with associated safety points about using the 'lazy jib' as a warning for sailing by the lee, and thus keeping the wind off the qaurter by luffing a little from time to time.

Either she was a ringer or this really worked with her, because I had a woman who took to it extrenely well and I would say could cruise a boat competently after just a few sessions given light airs. Her spatial awarness was very good, but I kept up that old wind awareness thing, using the boat in quarters as a rule of thumb.

For me the whole thing was a little more stressfiul than it should be, but that is in part because I work alone so often these days. It very like a tainer customer situation as indeed it was, and I should be darn nervous, I could be doing this for a living in the summer given a market for it here!  Volunteering shouldnt involve stress! But if you care about what you do, and haven't done it for a while, then nerves are a good sign not a bad one.

======================================

Week 2

New recruits who couldnt make it last week, whom I was landed with. After so good progress with my pupil last week, this week was a Pain in the.....

Firstly I wondered who the hell they were, and then the lady of the young lover pair starts talking about tell tales (which the boat has only oneside of course on the lower ones). So she is a former sailor and that kind og makes it hard to suit two audiences in the one. I did have a high degree of control though so that part went well. Oh, apart from a gybe on the pontoon which hit the guys head, not known to me he had a previous head injury and had a kind og post traumatic thing going. He was unattentive and looked bored, or maybe a little scared. Learning wise he was like having an autistic 9 year old out. But his girl friend chibbied him on, and she enjoyed gybing round the lee mark in some degree of control 

It wasnt a very enriching experience, but it was going about average to expectations, last week having been high above all expectations with a star pupil.  Then we came to come back to the dock, last boat in, and this meant a squeeze so I elected to paddle from quite far out. The wind got up, offshore of course just at this point and we ended up having to get the main up and sail her in. The others ahead of us were struggling with the last two boat lengths to the outer bouys of their dock moorings, so I elected to sail all the way in. My pupil, former oppie sailor way back whenever, lost grip ont he bouy of course and we drifted really fast back to the opposite dock and had to bumble along the outboards to get back out. I should have taken the jib down when we came in, but tweedle dee was maybe not the right guy to ask. 

Third time lucky and I took her in on a series of tacks and did a text book bouy pick up. Of course being my club they have opted for that nice stern in look, so we had to turn the boat round completely, which is easier when the dock is only half full of our would be OD classic day racers. 

I feel quite honestly a fever coming on, so I secretly hope to miss out on the following week. I would rather have absolute beginners or those developers who can sail pretty much round a course, but here I am stuck maybe with a little motivated boyfriend and enough-knowledge-to-be-interfering girl.