I arrived first thing on Monday and was greeted by Lea, who was full of energy and enthusiasm. She was from Germany so had flown over just for the course. She had worked a few seasons in Greece whilst studying physics at a university in the UK. Soon after the 3 boys arrived, Callum, Kit and Rory (the Irishman) were all very friendly and mostly Mediterranean sailors. We were all around the same age and it was interesting to hear their experiences of working abroad.

On day 1, we started off with a briefing, introductions and what we could expect from the course. I was then asked to walk everyone around the site and talk through the sailing area. As the others had never sailed in tide before I spent a while talking through the sailing area and where the tide was strongest. Then we got the double-handed boats out, we used Laser Bahias. We started working through teaching the RYA double-handed method. It involved a bit of role-playing, one of us acting as the dinghy instructor and one as the senior instructor with everyone else as students. It took a bit of getting used to, but it went okay and we would then have a debrief with the trainers after each session.

Day 2 followed a similar method of brief and debriefing with the SI, the DI then the students. This time with single-handed boats, we used Picos. The wind was averaging 15 knots so we put reefs in because that’s what you would do with beginners. But to be honest I was grateful for the reef because I’m a little small for a Pico. I was the SI for the tacking land drill and DI for tacking across the wind on the water. My sessions went quite well, but I found the debrief rather scary. It felt like the trainers were constantly watching you and trying to trip you up. There were constant questions on why or how we did everything. We also had a halfway through debrief with the trainers, my feedback was nearly all positive but I needed to leave people room to make mistakes. I was excited to know the answer and wanted to prove myself but I needed to learn to step back and help others learn rather than giving away the answers.

Day 3 was a seamanship day, we were teaching sessions on the seamanship syllabus. I was the SI for reefing afloat and the DI for rudderless sailing. My session on rudderless sailing didn’t go too well, I missed some of the tips and tricks in my briefing so they struggled on the water, I also wanted to do it one at a time so I could coach them through it but ran out of time so one boat had a lot less time sailing rudderless. I was a bit disheartened but knew that on the whole it didn’t matter all that much and my debrief went well because I knew where I had gone wrong. We had some theories to cover in the classroom before going home

On day 4 we covered spinnakers and after doing a land drill we got on the water and just got sailing in 420s. I felt really confident as I’d sailed these boats for several years and the others had hardly used symmetrical spinnakers. I got to have a go at coaching from the power boat which was surprisingly different to instructing. We had great fun, and I think we may have even converted Lea from multihulls. It was the perfect end to the course. After lunch, we covered safeguarding and setting up an RYA centre before dipping into a bit of chart work.

Overall I enjoyed the course, I found myself learning how to hold back and help others rather than jumping in and doing it myself or telling them how it should be done. I learned to ask questions and help people come to their own conclusions It was great to meet other sailors from different backgrounds and see their ways of doing things, we also just had such fun together. I would really recommend this course to anyone who thinks there ready for it, it’s hard work and you’ll learn a lot but it is also just fun.