To be honest I am really too old now for dingy sailing, you
really need to be young and bendy to do this sort of thing, however I promised
to teach the youf of today how to sail a dingy and so today I am recovering
from bending in ways I no longer bend.
A fairly large problem when teaching someone to sail a dingy
in Thanet is the lack of non tidal water, there are no inland lakes and a
technical error could involve being swept away by the tide.
A bit of a discovery here is Walpole Bay boating
pool, as you can see from the picture it is big enough. The top of the pool appears
about 2 hours after high tide at Margate which means that the pool is usable
from about two and a half hours after high tide to about two and a half hours
before.
At the other end of the car park is Jetski World, café
toilet and jetskies at about £50 per half hour, there website is http://www.jetskiworld.co.uk/ pleasant
people, didn’t get a chance to try the café but will do. I managed to buy a
wetsuit there that fitted my frame short and fat, euphemistically labelled
large short.
Rules and regulations are fairly limited for unpowered
watercraft, I got third party insurance at http://www.newtoncrum.com/
£19 and joined Thanet council’s water users group http://www.thanet.gov.uk/environment__planning/water_users_group.aspx
£30, neither of these things is compulsory, but at the very least I would
recommend the insurance.
If you have limited time slots the water users group means
you get a key to the slipway barriers, which seem to be locked or unlocked in a
fairly arbitrary fashion.
Dingy sailing is a bit like riding a bicycle, you can only
really learn to do it by being pushed off and messing things up until you get
the knack and I would say a great many of the accidents and boat wreckings that
happen to larger boats are caused by people operating them not acquiring this
basic skill.
The basic imperatives of keeping away from a lee shore and
if you can’t change directions by turning to the wind do it by turning away
from it soon become apparent.
I am sure I still ache from being crew for a boat club race thirty years ago I was completely clueless but did manage to avoid that pole thing that waves around. I can even now after all these years feel those wooden seats bashing my bum. I must say my lasting memory is the sun light on the waves all faceted into zillions of little diamonds of light.
ReplyDeleteDon the youf of today learnt an important lesson, which is don't sit on top of the dagger board when approaching shallow water. it suddenly comes up like a dagger underneath you.
ReplyDelete