The Royal Akarana Yhat Club is about 15 minutes from Parnell, where we are staying. My mom had signed us kids up for a sailing camp from 9-3. Our instructor was named Will, and he was very friendly. It was a pretty stormy day, and in the end, we could only be in the water for 1 hour. We were using a Quest boat, which was smaller than most cars. We had to rig it up, and we had no experience doing this, so we got to learn how to.
Putting up the Boat
First, you must take out the sail; then, you must feed it into the track. Then you must get the main sail’s steering and attach the ropes. Then, you get out the jib, which is the secondary sail. There are three sails, but the third one we did not have today (the colorful kind). After hooking up the jib, we rolled it up so that we did not immediately cruise away when we went out on the water. Our teacher Will said we would be working on tacking for most of today. Tacking is where you turn the boat so the wind hits the other side of the sail. That makes the sail swing over to the other side, and if you are not careful, you could get your head whacked. Zeb and I were controlling the jib sail, and whenever we tacked, we had to quickly un-cleat the ropes attached to the jib and switch the way the sail was pointing. We also wore helmets and life jackets, just in case the sail wanted to hit us in the head. A long fin in the middle of the boat would go down when we got out of the boat in the water. Also, in the unlikely event of the boat flipping, please stand on the side rims with your back facing the ship. Then, pull towards you to convert the boat back up again. After the storm started pounding us, we went inside to do some dry land work.
Working on Dry Land
We went to this ginormous shed that held a bunch of boats and practiced how to rig and unrig other kinds of crafts there. We went into teams, me with KB and Zeb with Emmy, and then one person from each group was blindfolded and had to rig up the boat while the other person told them what to do. Emmy and I were blindfolded, and the race began. I and KB won narrowly. He then took us upstairs to see all of the trophies. There were SO many.
The Hall of Trophies
My mom came to pick us up at 3:00 pm. We said bye to Will and told him, “See you tomorrow.”