Sailing School Drop Out

At Eastsail Sailing School I must have been the most eager student they ever had. I wanted to know everything and never stopped asking questions in class and on the water and when on the Boats always volunteered for any chore that needed to be done - except maybe cooking which I am hopeless at. Once the instructor so misinterpreted my questioning of things he was asking us to do that he spat the dummy and said there was no way he could teach me anything and that he was taking the boat back to the Dock to find someone else to take the lesson. I was shocked at his outburst and explained I simply wanted to understand why he, Brian, did this particular thing differently from the way another instructor , Wendy,had previously told us to do it - was it an important difference or maybe I had misunderstood him or the previous instruction - I just wanted to know and get it right.
The instructors were interesting people who had one thing in common - they knew heaps about sailing and were all very experienced sailors. We all loved listening to their stories of hair-raising near misses, groundings, storms, men overboard, gear failures, rescues at sea and all their other adventures. One instructor was more interested in talking about his high speed runabout than sailing, and another had us learning to do a gybe in wind and weather that another instructor the same day had described as too wild for beginners.

. Brian was a Captain Bligh sort of character with major financial problems that made him moody and unpredictable.On our first day out, after he had agreed to stay on board and continue the 5 day Course, he cursed me and suggested I go and hang myself because I was so usless, but later when I suggested I should be the one leaving, he begged me to stay because if I went he would lose his job. So I stayed after he agreed to try extra hard to teach me.

In spite of these personality issues from all my instructors I had learned an enormous amount, and I enjoyed every minute of it.The one thing I needed was time on the water, which unfortunately I could not download from the internet - I just wished I could have been like those instructors who had been around yachts and yachties and been sailing all their lives.
I wasnt too upset or surprised when at the end of all my Eastsail training on New years Eve 2006 Brian failed me. However he passed another student who on the last day had said he still wasnt sure what the difference was between a tack and gybe!I hope Brian didnt think that failing the course meant I was going to walk off the Jetty and never set foot on a boat again because if he did he would have been shocked to have learned that six weeks before I had actually bought my own boat! Not only that, Sue and I had been sailing it by ourselves in Pittwater.Once, on an Eastsail training day we had even sailed right past my boat on her mooring - but I didnt let on as I stared like an infatuated teenager at my new girlfriend, Sapphire.