N12 Coaching May 2012

National 12 Coaching Session 12th May 2012

The day dawned bright and breezy……. Well……, it is better than ‘one dark, stormy night….’
A coaching session for National 12 sailors was held upon the Trent River in Long Eaton, hosted by Trent Valley Sailing Club; a club with long, long memory and association with the N12 class.
Eight boats, with helms and crews, arrived to take full advantage of the gems of knowledge, skill and education provided by David Peacock and Kevan Bloor.
Due to the recent significant rainfall in the East Midlands, the Trent was doing her best to make this far more interesting than usual. There were comments about when is high water – ‘last Thursday evening’ came the reply from Paul Turner; and if the tide does turn “we are in serious trouble”.
The morning was spent very usefully finding out how to attack this stretch of water. After an initial foray by all participants, many of whom were to be heard commenting upon the difficulty of going forward, David has us all back ashore to regroup and to give guidance about how to tackle the conditions. His best quote ‘don’t let it beat you, you beat it’. So off we went again to see if we could do any better: I think we did.
Certainly it was a good occasion to learn how to take on the challenge of river sailing.
In the afternoon, we were all treated to a great session by Kevan Bloor upon how to set our boats up to take on such conditions. Both David and Kevan gave us ideas, suggestions, clues and useful sailing tips which could all be translated to any conditions, not just those for river sailing. My lasting visual memory is of David showing us how far off he can let his shrouds when on a run!!!!! – yikes – as a crew in a vintage boat there are only 2 options – ON or OFF – so this was a revelation – muscles boxes ??Paul??
We followed this up with some short course racing to bring it all together.
I think all who attended would agree we enjoyed the day. The short races at the end of the day were much fun, although as a hardened Trent River sailor I could be accused of not being too sympathetic, however I could really see the change in all participants. The rictus grins of fear had changed into the smiles of enjoyment – possibly…..
Many thanks to :
David Peacock for his instruction and facilitation of the day
Kevan Bloor for excellent knowledge on tuning, sail setting etc
Janet Bloor for photographic record of the day (which will be added to this report, soon)
Steph Marshall for driving the safety boat – thankfully she had little to do but entertain David.

 

Report by Christine Preston
N12 Class Rep. Trent Valley Sailing Club