This 5-week program sailed on our Force 24s is for kids 11 to 17 years who want to develop and progress their sailing skills learning to sail a small inshore keelboat.
Sailing with 3-4 other young participants and an instructor onboard. Catering for rank beginners through to the more experienced – a great program also for transferring Tackers Junior dinghy skills onto a bigger boat!
Boats, safety equipment and lifejackets are supplied and all instructors are qualified and experienced sailors themselves.
Wednesday afternoons – 3:45pm to 6:15pm – 5 weeks (12.5 hour course) – courses running all summer (school terms 4 & 1)
We run the program in two levels during the same afternoon
– OutThere Sailing
– Young Guns Race Training
– this allows us to cater for sailors of differing skill levels
It is a progressive skill program where the children will learn all of the safety aspects of sailing a keelboat as well as the seamanship skills required. The kids will rotate around the different crew positions on a keelboat, including skippering, learning to work together as part of a team. Eventually they will progress to learning to put up spinnakers!
The program is run on an ongoing basis, so if the kids are keen they can continue onto subsequent 5-week courses and continue to develop and practise their skills.
We want to work towards the kids being skilled enough to sail the keelboats without an instructor on-board – this will happen fairly quickly for the Young Guns Racing program. So this course aims to lead keen youth sailors into our Youth Squad Program run on weekends during Autumn/Winter . . . and maybe race in the Interclub Regatta against other young sailors from Sydney or even participate in our annual Newcastle Youth Keelboat Championship.
Jump on-board, have some fun and try something different!
