ITCA (GBR) open training at Spinnaker Sailing Club
by Finlay and Elena 7 Jan 19:55 NZDT
6 January 2024
ITCA (GBR) open training at Spinnaker Sailing Club © Clare Rhodes
What a fantastic January day for our first event of 2024, ITCA (GBR) open training, hosted by Spinnaker Sailing Club. Thanks to Finlay and Elena for their reports below and Clare and Mimoza for the photos.
Next up it's our Girls Training camp at Warsash Sailing Club on January 21st.
Finlay:
It was nice to be back at Spinnaker on Saturday 6th January after the Christmas break, and was good to see lots of familiar faces and a few new ones.
We started the day after our morning briefing with sunny weather, but it was still quite chilly. It was light wind on the edges of the lake, but when we got into the centre it was nice and breezy. The first half of the day we focused on mark roundings, split tacks and other fun games that helped us blow away the cobwebs and focus our sailing.
In the afternoon we did a number of games such as hunters and hoverers which teaches us how to find space on the line. We also did three running starts and on the fourth start we did a one lap race. Once we had finished that skill we tried a few two-lap races to finish of the sailing for the day.
During the debrief we discussed what went well, what we needed to improve on, and chatted about how we could get better at the skills we were struggling with.
I think we can all agree that our coaches were fun, cheerful, kind and very helpful. My favourite part of the day was definitely the running starts, because it helps people such as me get better at starting. All in all a FUN day of sailing and learning.
Elena:
It was very fun today, the wind was very good, I had a great time meeting some old friends I haven't seen in a while. The instructors were very nice and I learned how to perform starts properly.