Dear Sailors and Supporters,

After a successful summer we kicked off our new winter training season with a weekend focused on building communications, running a safe boat and developing understanding of our crew limitations, to gain the best out of our sailors.

We looked at analysing our crews strengths and weaknesses, and how we can best utilise individuals. This lead to a lot of practise tacking and gybing with no rush to reduce the pressure, and focus on smooth steering and keeping everything as simple as possible.

With great success one of our sailors who described day one as “a light bulb moment” in gybing, with little amount of steering needed to gybe the boat. The weekend ended up the perfect environment for new potential skippers to train and build there confidence.

In keeping with our focus on inclusion and everyone being an individual, we find a lot of our disabled sailors have more sailing experience than the able sailors. One of the key challenges is to change the way some of these disabled sailors approach a problem, thus the trainee becoming the trainer, or as we put in the coaching world, training our sailors to become their own coaches.

It’s all about experience and encouraging social discussions; what worked well, what didn’t work so well, having a laugh about the things that went wrong and genuinely wanting to help your friends improve.

The best thing about a friendly social environment is you can say anything without someone taking it personally. If individuals are struggling then we just encourage conversation, enabling them to help come to a solution, be open, honest and supportive. Conversations develop a supportive team approach which helps everyone improve and grow.

Having just completed our first year of re-building opportunities for disabled sailors, we now have the challenge of doing it all over again, with new and progressing skippers and sailors (both disabled and able). With this exciting prospect ahead of us, we have a growing demand to help spread the word, encourage support and help towards our goals.

Please help us do this by sharing our;
- News – https://acfsailing.teamapp.com/articles
- Social media pages like Facebook – https://acfsailing.teamapp.com/socialmedia

Helping to find new participants;
- Pass on to friends, think of individuals who many benefit from sailing with us – https://acfsailing.teamapp.com/contact_details?_detail=v1

Or maybe you can help with a little fundraising by;
- Donating and/or spreading the word to a contact whom may be able to help/donate – https://www.paypal.com/gb/fundraiser/charity/3775401
- Shop via Smile Amazon and support us – https://smile.amazon.co.uk/ch/1057742-0

We really appreciate help in anyway, including those who come sailing with us to keep us motivated or just thank us for what we are doing.

We are trying and achieving true inclusion which isn’t happening anywhere else in the country or world, unless a one off, and we are excited to keep these opportunities going.

Thank you all for your support.

Kind regards,

The ACF Sailing Team

Location

Cowes Corinthian Yacht Club