Sailing School Chaos.

I love to sail. My parents signed me up for sailing lessons at the age of 8. Off I went with my lifejacket, my bathing suit, my boxers with hearts all over them, my Hypercolour cap and my brand new Teva sport sandals.The amazing thing about learning to sail when you're 8 is that they don't put an instructor in the boat with you. You pile into the bathtub-like boats with 3 other kids and away you go with minimal knowledge of sailing, let alone actually skipping a boat. You get a theory lesson or two, and then they just throw you in head first.

I went pretty far with sailing. I graduated from the bahtub boats, or as we called them "sea cows" and moved on to a Laser II. This was the only time I actually enjoyed wearing a diaper. The wire that comes down from the mast (trapeze wire) hooks onto the diaper that you're wearing and then you 'hike out' as the below picture displays. The feeling of trapezing is awesome, especially when you put both hands behind your head and stretch out over the lake, your body parallel to the water.

It's not me, but it's what I looked like when I was a cool sailor.

I got up to Silver Sail VI but when I was sent to boarding school, my sailing dreams came to an end. Taking sailing lessons was a thrill, and racing gave me a competitive edge that I didn't know I had. This being said,  there was also a kind of chaos that went on behind the scenes at sailing school. A couple of incidents that I'll never forget...

I think I was about eleven or so, and being that age you sometimes forget to do important things. It just so happened that all four of us forgot to put the plug in our boat. About an hour out, in the middle of the lake, we noticed that our boat was sinking. Slowly but surely our speed decreased and the gunwale (pronounced / "gunnel" to rhyme with "tunnel"- a nautical term describing the top edge of the side of a boat) was almost underwater. The emergency sign to hail the instructors over is to stand on the deck and flap your arms like a bird. We were in total panic mode and by this point we could swin in and out of the boat without any effort, meaning the whole top side of our little sailboat was under water. I flapped my arms, flapped and flapped until the instructors saw us. The zodiac turned in our direction and came at us full speed. I sat down/floated in the boat with a sigh of relief (and terror as I didn't know what the consequences would be for sinking a boat).

The zodiac approached really quickly and it was almost too late when we noticed the instructor putting up a battle with the steering shaft of the engine. He was freaking out, flailing his arms in every direction, yelling at us, making crazy hand gestures...and then... WABANG!!!! He ran us right over. Did you know that the bottom of a zodiac dinghy is made of fiberglass?

I think we all semi got out of the way when we realized he was going to run us over, but we got pretty pummeled. Four hysterical crying children swimming around in lifejackets, trying to figure out which way was up. I sprained my wrist, one of the girls broke her arm, my other friend got a concussion along with a HUGE egg on her head, and all of us were traumatized. The bruises were pretty hefty as well. Apparently they had the wrong motor on the zodiac and the driving shaft got locked. Don't ask me why the motor wasn't just turned off, but the instructor was all of 17 years old and probably wasn't thinking. I'm surprised the motor didn't chop anything up. We were legendary, and I'm sure this story still circulates at my sailing school.

'Chopping up' leads me to the next best sailing story that I can remember. I was about 13 years old. As we drifted along in our boat, my sailing buddy and I noticed something white floating in the water. It turns out it was a GIANT catfish. I'm not kidding, it was about 3 feet long, white, and super bloated. It was just bobbing along, belly up, and it stunk to high heaven. We poked at it a bit and every time we sailed by we tried to get a better look at it's face. This is what teens do, okay? Finally the sailing instructors (their nicknames were Toast and Jam, so you can imagine what kind of hooligan teen boys they were) came over to see what had peaked our interest.

They got so insanely excited about the catfish...they hauled it out of the water and started throwing it around. It was putrid and it smelled terrible. Toast and Jam thought it would be funny to throw it in the water and run it over.

Fish explosion. They took to that catfish at high speed and the thing got shredded in the motor. Fish guts flew up into the air for miles and our sails were sprayed with fish parts. Goo all over us, rotten fish, stinky fish. I can't even explain how gross this experience was. Toast and Jam pretty much died laughing and of course they didn't get one ounce of fish guts on themselves. We were unfortunately in the line of fire and we were shunned by the sailing community for the rest of the day.

I sometimes wonder where I could have gone with the sport if I had actually climbed to the top. For starters, I would be in wicked shape and I would probably be way more cocky than I am now. I would also have a great farmer's tan, calloused hands, blistered feet, a sense of invincibility, and advanced knowledge of cloud formations and wind changes.

And maybe I would even have a sailing medal or two hanging in my bedroom.