Dear Sailors and Supporters,

As you may have heard (if you weren’t hiding inside), Saturday’s wind hit record speeds with 109MPH at the Needles on the Isle of Wight. Plus there was the Rugby on the Saturday morning. Oddly this combination worked perfectly for us, as the Rugby meant a delayed start preventing death by much needed theory.

Our day started with the Rugby between 9-1040, disappointing as it was we kicked off at 1100 in the clubs committee room, starting with breaking down the different areas of sailing and looking at the skills involved. Then we focused on learning the rules, but not the rules themselves as such, more an intro and exploring a different approach to the norm. We looked at how they are viewed from a jury perspective and then a tactical approach of how to use them. With this only being an intro, it created a backbone of how to process incidences, and how to look at scenarios as they play out on the water.

Saturday did us another favour, in that it kept people away from the Solent on Sunday, leaving a nice empty central Solent for us to play in. We put our 2 training skippers through their paces, starting with them helming the Sonar to settle in, and then moving the crew around roles. We then moved the training skipper to the main sheet, and rotated sailors through the helm position.

The wind started very light, so that just practicing tacking off the entrance to Cowes kept us in place. This was going so well, we just continued tacking away upwind rotating the sailors. Along with this we kept rotating the training skippers in the RIB. This enabled a great opportunity to discuss what they could see from the outside, in areas such as Sail Trim, tacking in different conditions as the pressure filled and lulled.

One of our main focuses with the new skippers is to recognise that safety always comes first, for example, you are only as strong as your weakest/least experienced crew member, and that you should only be tacking and gybing the boat as fast as you can with the crew you have. With this approach it enables us to keep and grow individual’s confidence, and in turn that confidence along with discussion, allows us to push sailors harder showing them what they can do.

This tacking was going so well that as the wind filled in, it took us all the way up to the entrance of the Beaulieu River, followed by simple 2 sail Gybing all of the way back. Slight panic ensued when Matt realised the time, having had such a great morning, but luckily it turned out he hadn’t updated his watch (to everyone’s amusement).

Having had such a great weekend training it felt like we had another day to go, thus despite being knackered, we were gutted to not be out the next day, as we’d had such a good time in amazing weather.

Our next weekend is looking to be great fun, as some of our summer sailors come back to play, which means we are close to having 3 boats on the water, so fingers crossed for 1-2 more participants and there will be some great fun to be had.

Huge thank you as always to all of our supporters, especially to the team at the CCYC that enabled this to happen, from use of the training room, launching and recovery of the RIB, as well as great work by the shore team, who keep the decking clean and safe as we move into the winter months. Also to our local Cowes photographer (John Green Cowes on Facebook) for the great photos from shore which can be viewed on our FB page www.facebook.com/acfsailing/ .

We can’t wait to get back out and keep the foundation driving forwards.

Yours sincerely,

The ACF Sailing Team

Location

Cowes Corinthian Yacht Club