Sailing History
Adrian
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He's been sailing on and off since the age of 12, but its spread pretty thin........
Got the bug in the Boy Scouts while acting as ballast in a Wayfarer dinghy on some school field trip.
With friend "Fred" Gooden he crewed for a week
in a Cadet dinghy.
Their most notable moment was getting stranded in the middle of some river
estuary
after loosing the (metal) rudder during a capsize. It should have been
tied on.
The Norfolk Broads, (England), saw some great times out in
clinker-built dinghies on family vacations.
Cruising in rented live-aboard (motor) boats, they towing a dinghy with that
angled pole rig (look it up) for recreation.
There was Boy Scout trip to the Norfolk Broads too in rented live-aboard sail boats, with hinged masts to fit under the low bridges and, as I recall, NO MOTOR. There may not have been much in the way of waves but, for youngish teenagers, tacking down a narrow river under the watchful adult eyes on a line of "gin palace" motor boats waiting to time their sprint past...it seemed like real sailing.
Out in the adult world, he kept a Laser sailing dinghy at a nearby reservoir. As a sailing neophyte weighing in at about 140 pounds in a (dry) wetsuit, he spent a lot of time either arched back at full stretch to balance the sail or standing on the center board to right the capsized boat. Due to his extreme familiarity with this last maneuver, particularly on windier days, he rarely got wet doing it.
The closest-to-Cariad experience (pre Bottoms Up), was a very memorable flotilla sailing holiday out of Corfu.
This threw him on a boat for a week with a married couple
who had NEVER been on a boat before, and a single woman who had sailed somewhat
with her father. Miscast as "captain", due to his shamelessly
padded application form, he was at least conscious of his lack of experience and
compensated by drilling the heck out of the boat. In an act of bravery (or
stupidity), he graduated his crew from their "man overboard" drill by
jumping off the boat without a life jacket. By the end of day 2 the boat
was well up to par and, by the end of the week, could hold its own with any boat
in the flotilla.
PS - That married couple, (those absolute newbies), went on to become real hard
core sailors with tales of adventures around the British Isles. Last seen
sailing a day cruiser within distant sight of New York, from a dock about 100
yards from their Darien, Connecticut home, Jim and Jill have since graduated to
a larger boat in a bigger dock on the far side of "their" estuary on
the "Good Wives" river.
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