Winter maintenance is continuing however to call it winter is perhaps a misnomer as its around 16C-17C although a little chilly earning morning and evenings. So what have the children been up to.

This last week we had a session on Ropework, most can now tie a reef knot successfully even behind their backs, so we built on this by tieing sheet bends and bowlines and played an imaginary game of climbing a mountain and the need to tie the right knot quickly to keep those behind them safe. We used an end of a Hawser as a starting point with the first person attaching themself with a double sheet bend and a bowline around their waist. I walked down the line undoing any knot wrongly tied and called on another child to attach themself with the correct knot before they fell down the mountain.

We also worked on sheet bends and the fishermans bend.

Monday was spent rigging one sail and laying it down next to the hull and having a nautical version of Simple Simon, I called out a part of the boat or sail and they had to stand alongside it. Once the game was finished the children were given the task of measuring out new mainsheets and were given a coil of rope and a tape measure, first to work out how long a main sheet needed to be and then how many sheets could be made from the coil of rope. It was interesting to observe the different methods adopted by the two teams.

David Ogden
Sailing Master