boring sailing
Apr. 12th, 2024 02:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scrottieNo students by the time I got to the club, which is right around 2pm with the train landing a bit after 1:30. Walking out on the Berkeley peninsula always involves indirection. The couple snogging on a park bench by the bay gets a wide berth. The turkeys get a wide berth. Give the crows some room too. There's the famous Berkeley Drum Circle and inexplicable meetups of 30 friends on the path. The Humane Society is right by there, which is lovely, so all kinds of nervous and shy dogs get walked, or if the dogs aren't nervous or shy, they get walked in big packs. Staying with my friend A and catching up with him at his park, it was similar but different, with martial arts practice taking place in the park, casual adult soccer games, people practising taunt line, couples camping out, friends gathering. There's no straight line through that kind of stuff.
Week day lessons start at 1pm. Sometimes (contemporarily and historically) I'll show up and there will be no students waiting and a bunch of boats already launched in that time with more instructors wandering around looking for students. Other times I'll show up and there will be a mass of students and no one else rated to teach anywhere. Today there were an abundance of instructors, three boats already out, one boat with an instructor and two students getting ready to launch but stuck in a protracted "dock talk", and no other students, so I sailed with someone else who showed up to teach and had the rare pleasure of sailing with someone senior rated, Camille. By the time we were about to launch (which took about 10 minutes), a student showed up, so Camille had him get and suit up a harness, after asking him if he'd done trapeze before and wanted to. Winds were moderate. Camille was a drill seargant; everyone demonstrates their docking and does it again if needed; everyone demonstrates their crew-overboard recovery; capsize recoveries; etc. The student is frazzled and overwhelmed and is no longer interested in the trapeze, so we do a hot swap in the boat, of taking off PFDs and doffing and doning the harness, and I'm on the trapeze, whee! It works something like this:
I'd only done that once before. Technically people of my rating (junior, the popular rating in the sandwich of novice-junior-senior-cruising skipper) are allowed to do that, but not fly the spinnaker, but for some reason, we don't very often. It's kind senior insanity to just decide that *someone* *must* trap out. When we came back, there was one late straggler student, so just he and I went out and did small circles after a bunch of tacks and gybes. As happens a lot with students working towards their junior rating, there were almost-broaches, where he went through the gybe too fast and didn't hold the boat down (stops multiple positive feedback systems that culminate in you getting wet the boat laying on her side) and the boat violently headed up and nearly capsized from a broach. So, we worked on that. Gybing a dinghy in 20 or 30mph winds (was probably 12 or 14) and not getting wet takes a lot of precision. **
99% of the people I've taught I never see and are gone but a few are holding the fort in a major way. One is Gene. Almost every time I've been there, I've run in to him. I was his first instructor. He won't let me forget that I let him capsize. I told him to let the mainsheet all the way out before tacking so that if he went too far, he wouldn't capsize. He asked what would happen if he didn't let the mainsheet out [mainsheet hauls in the main sail which can easily wind up sideways to the wind, which makes a crap wing and a great lever when 90 degrees to the wind]. I asked him if he wanted to find out. He said sure. We tacked and capsized. It was probably blowing 24 or 28mph winds. The waves were half as high as the capsized boat. CSC is positioned just at the receiving end of the straight the Golden Gate Bridge is built over, so winds are like a jet. He's now the type of instructor who has a detailed safety "dock talk" with students before leaving the dock. I'm pretty sure that didn't traumatize him, and this has come up many times and I've asked a lot of questions, and often capsizing and recovering from it builds confidence in students that mistakes are ok and the worst that can (likely) happen isn't that bad *, but verbal foreknowledge is good too. Theory and practise have a yin-yang relationship at CSC. Also, ask a stupid question, say "yes" to "do you want to find out", get wet. (I do now generally ask students individually how they feel about getting wet and work hard to accommodate people who don't want to... but also, the water is really really nice right now.)
* It often happens that the largest crowds of students show up on the hottest days, but the hottest days smoother the winds. So you have this combination of not being able to sail and being too hot, so it often happens that people just capsize and chill in the water. The dayleaders are used to this and don't even drive the rescue skiff out to see if people are ok. It's a good time to practise righting boats, and some of that happens, but often we just bob around in the water with a half overturned boat. Capsizing with no winds requires intention but isn't difficult.
** Sometimes these boats will break free of the water and start skimming the surface, or "planing", but unless that happens, you wind up in situations where you have 28mph of wind and the boat's hull really, really, really wants to do absolutely anything except push a trench faster than maybe 12mph through the water, and the boat will do anything she can to escape pushing that trench, and that typically involves everyone getting wet.
Week day lessons start at 1pm. Sometimes (contemporarily and historically) I'll show up and there will be no students waiting and a bunch of boats already launched in that time with more instructors wandering around looking for students. Other times I'll show up and there will be a mass of students and no one else rated to teach anywhere. Today there were an abundance of instructors, three boats already out, one boat with an instructor and two students getting ready to launch but stuck in a protracted "dock talk", and no other students, so I sailed with someone else who showed up to teach and had the rare pleasure of sailing with someone senior rated, Camille. By the time we were about to launch (which took about 10 minutes), a student showed up, so Camille had him get and suit up a harness, after asking him if he'd done trapeze before and wanted to. Winds were moderate. Camille was a drill seargant; everyone demonstrates their docking and does it again if needed; everyone demonstrates their crew-overboard recovery; capsize recoveries; etc. The student is frazzled and overwhelmed and is no longer interested in the trapeze, so we do a hot swap in the boat, of taking off PFDs and doffing and doning the harness, and I'm on the trapeze, whee! It works something like this:
I'd only done that once before. Technically people of my rating (junior, the popular rating in the sandwich of novice-junior-senior-cruising skipper) are allowed to do that, but not fly the spinnaker, but for some reason, we don't very often. It's kind senior insanity to just decide that *someone* *must* trap out. When we came back, there was one late straggler student, so just he and I went out and did small circles after a bunch of tacks and gybes. As happens a lot with students working towards their junior rating, there were almost-broaches, where he went through the gybe too fast and didn't hold the boat down (stops multiple positive feedback systems that culminate in you getting wet the boat laying on her side) and the boat violently headed up and nearly capsized from a broach. So, we worked on that. Gybing a dinghy in 20 or 30mph winds (was probably 12 or 14) and not getting wet takes a lot of precision. **99% of the people I've taught I never see and are gone but a few are holding the fort in a major way. One is Gene. Almost every time I've been there, I've run in to him. I was his first instructor. He won't let me forget that I let him capsize. I told him to let the mainsheet all the way out before tacking so that if he went too far, he wouldn't capsize. He asked what would happen if he didn't let the mainsheet out [mainsheet hauls in the main sail which can easily wind up sideways to the wind, which makes a crap wing and a great lever when 90 degrees to the wind]. I asked him if he wanted to find out. He said sure. We tacked and capsized. It was probably blowing 24 or 28mph winds. The waves were half as high as the capsized boat. CSC is positioned just at the receiving end of the straight the Golden Gate Bridge is built over, so winds are like a jet. He's now the type of instructor who has a detailed safety "dock talk" with students before leaving the dock. I'm pretty sure that didn't traumatize him, and this has come up many times and I've asked a lot of questions, and often capsizing and recovering from it builds confidence in students that mistakes are ok and the worst that can (likely) happen isn't that bad *, but verbal foreknowledge is good too. Theory and practise have a yin-yang relationship at CSC. Also, ask a stupid question, say "yes" to "do you want to find out", get wet. (I do now generally ask students individually how they feel about getting wet and work hard to accommodate people who don't want to... but also, the water is really really nice right now.)
* It often happens that the largest crowds of students show up on the hottest days, but the hottest days smoother the winds. So you have this combination of not being able to sail and being too hot, so it often happens that people just capsize and chill in the water. The dayleaders are used to this and don't even drive the rescue skiff out to see if people are ok. It's a good time to practise righting boats, and some of that happens, but often we just bob around in the water with a half overturned boat. Capsizing with no winds requires intention but isn't difficult.
** Sometimes these boats will break free of the water and start skimming the surface, or "planing", but unless that happens, you wind up in situations where you have 28mph of wind and the boat's hull really, really, really wants to do absolutely anything except push a trench faster than maybe 12mph through the water, and the boat will do anything she can to escape pushing that trench, and that typically involves everyone getting wet.
