Arwen's meanderings

Hi everyone and welcome to my dinghy cruising blog about my John Welsford designed 'navigator' named Arwen. Built over three years, Arwen was launched in August 2007. She is a standing lug yawl 14' 6" in length. This blog records our dinghy cruising voyages together around the coastal waters of SW England.
Arwen has an associated YouTube channel so visit www.YouTube.com/c/plymouthwelshboy to find our most recent cruises and click subscribe.
On this blog you will find posts about dinghy cruising locations, accounts of our voyages, maintenance tips and 'How to's' ranging from rigging standing lug sails and building galley boxes to using 'anchor buddies' and creating 'pilotage notes'. I hope you find something that inspires you to get out on the water in your boat. Drop us a comment and happy sailing.
Steve and Arwen

Saturday 5 July 2014

Lots of sailing coming up

Well week after next is my annual aspirations week. Six students with me at our local water sports centre attempting to complete their RYAN levels 1 and 2 in a week. This year, my sailing heroine will be in attendance. This 15 year old lady first started sailing with me three years ago. It was her very first time in a dinghy. During this forth coming week, she will be undertaking her dinghy sailing instructors training. In only three years. It is her passion and it all started on one of my aspiration week sailing courses. What a tremendous inspirational little story.

We will also be dinghy sailing in Greece during the summer. Well I will. 'Her indoors' will be doing her windsurfing thingy. My missus is soooo cool!

I will be trying to sail a Bahia in force 4+ winds......so no chance really. I ordered a new rash vest since I will be spending most of my time in the water rather than on the dinghy!! Still, one must try these things before one becomes too old!!

I'm torn for my summer trip between

  • Sailing along the coast to Dartmouth and up the Dart to be taken out at Totnes
  • Sailing along the last overnighting at Salcombe, then onto Dartmouth, and around to Torquay 
  • Sailing down to Falmouth, up the Fal, around the Helford river and then towing home from Falmouth, once I've worked out how to get the car and trailer down there as her indoors doesn't like to tow a trailer
  • Towing down to Falmouth, storing car and trailer, sailing for a few days down here and then coming back
  • Sailing up the Lynher to St. Germans and back
Decisions, decisions, so much to do, so little time to do it in!!

3 comments:

Jonathan said...

I'd like to learn more about "aspirations week". I once organized what I called a "sailing 101" course for a group of 12yr boys and it was fun. This time I'm interested in taking recent refugees and immigrants stuck in the city out sailing. We have had a canoe outing and it was popular. Tell me more about aspirations week and how you organize it. -Jonathan Bornman Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA

steve said...

We have all school off timetable. We offer them a menu of around fifty activities
They sign up for which one they want to do. Each activity has a programme for the week. We offer a variety of activities and courses which give opportunities to learn new skills, from residential trips abroad to day trips in locality. Each activity has one leader in charge and then all other staff are assigned to activities if they didnt choose which one to support.
Some activities get heavily oversubscribed and so we ask students to have first, second and third choices ranked just in case
Every student in the school will be doing something that week or on work experience placement

Mammoth undertaking but well worth it and quite a tradition here in uk schools, most operate some kind of activities week. We called ours aspiration week because we wanted students to aspire to a new challenge, learning something new whether it be skilled based, socially based or knowledge based.

Steve

steve said...

I use a local centre who run our national RYA scheme and so students with me are aspiring to gain adult level 1 and 2 dinghy sailing qualifications
A challenging tall order to do it in a week

Steve