Sorry about the dramatically deteriorated weather for Mothers’ Day, it was our fault.
As part of our efforts to develop the sailing and racing at Marconi (which is mainly focused on our youngsters, but a number of slightly less young members have joined in over the years… and they’re always very welcome), we ran an RYA course over the weekend for a disparate half dozen of keen instructors / racing coaches / mentors. With an intense mixture of sailing and coaching theory, briefing / debriefing skills and practise at running exercises on the water, the course (thanks to coach Bruce Bonar) was excellent. The challenges of a strong north-easterly, unreasonably low temperatures, intermittent rain, RIB problems, 4 broken spars (from 5 boats), unreasonable sailing brilliance from some and grumpy ineptitude from others (well, just me really) were overcome to leave us with a great learning experience and inspiration to pass on what we’ve learnt through the season.
Our new ‘Racing Coach Level 2’ skills will help improve our Sail Training sessions. We also plan a programme of mentoring or more personal coaching for any of our cadets who are thinking about coming to NSSA with us, or who would like to develop their sailing in that direction even if they can’t do NSSA… more of that later.
Thanks from me to Fia, David, Tom, Andrew and Lee… as well as Bruce… for making the weekend so much fun, and committing to help us build the skills in our club, especially with our new ‘Champion Club’ status!