Last Tuesday we had a fairly windy training session.  We canceled the new sailors in the Bronze and Green fleet to keep them safe.

For our more experienced sailors, they got some great training in strong winds in the Optimist Gold and Silver fleets.

For our new transitioning sailors from Optimists to 29er, it was a thrilling ride doing 20 knots of boat speed.

The sailors are using the club owned transition boat and cut down rig.  It goes surprisingly quick downwind and is a really appreciated piece of club kit by the sailors and coaches.  The way we are approaching helping our transitioning sailors is to pair them up with an experienced coach and teach good skills and technique from day 1.  These sailors at 14 only have 4 years before they start to outgrow youth classes, so getting skills early is very important so that when they hit the perfect size and weight, they have the complete set of skills to take their sailing to the level they are capable of.

At South Perth doing cross-training in Lasers, Windsurfers, Foiling equipment all round out their “Watermen” and “Waterwomen” skills so they can adapt quickly to any new challenges they encounter.

We purposely focus on transitioning skills and the sailors already have great foundation skills from their earlier training, so we can build on that very quickly.

Doing that before their growth spurt is really important and a big focus of our training syllabus.

So the videos show sailors ripping around having fun but we have is: controlled equipment and we carefully select where they sail, where they hoist and gybe.  We make sure we know they will be successful before throwing them in the deep.

The experiences will no doubt keep them coming back for me.