1. STARTING FOLK SAILING — OF ANY AGE

Those accustomed to water are seldom aware of the terror which those who have not made friends with it can experience. These fears are so often reinforced by elders who, quite unintentionally, pass on their own. For such, no one boat is the best — it might even be better to have blue sails… because they look so pretty. And the familiarisation might well entail canoes and paddle-boats which a youngster can control alone, away from Dad’s all knowing eye!

Roland Denk in The Complete Sailing Guide has a DIY course which seems to me to adopt a very sound principle — Discovery learning is probably more important than using ‘family ties’.

2. BOATS

In the mid-fifties I wrote for advice to, I think it was, Practical Boat Owner — we had three children. We wanted to go beyond the fun we had been having in the una rigged dinghies which came with Broads cruisers. The latter have good galleys, heads, a saloon to which one can retreat when it snows or whatever, good sleeping accommodation and, as it proved later, can tow two dinghies and carry a canoe on deck. So it can be fun for all; except perhaps for Mum who has to cope with ‘ginormous’ appetites and mounds of washing!

Our first very own dinghy was a Heron which we out-grew, and in ‘67 after Which had indicated a likely best-buy would be a GRP Enterprise, were one to exist, we got a second-hand 404. All we had to do to this second-hand boat was have it fitted with handles, renumbered and measured and — Hey Presto! — it was an ‘Enterprise’.

We had in the previous season’s two week holiday taken the Heron to Falmouth where we had our first real capsize in a swell while trying to cross to meet the family at St Mawes. There, too, we had used an Enterprise with cruising sails and its performance had been approved by our two ‘senior’ sailors (senior by virtue of their having been on school sailing camps).

We joined a club and shared the boat with another family. None of their four children have remained keen, though Dad eventually got a boat of his own and moved to another club. The practice of sharing boats, after we realised the children had ‘left the nest’, was resumed in the mid ’70s when we linked with some dozen or so youngsters from a local church youth group. By the early ’80s we’d linked up with the owners of a Heron, an Express, a Wayfarer, a Mirror 14 and a GP14. When I retired I spotted a wooden Gull which was rigged for spinnaker use — though I’ve not yet mastered it.

Our Wayfarer friends are the most adventurous, but they now also have a dory — for pootling about and water skiing. The GP14 saw three of us through the most horrendous squall and I’m a bit inclined to say, “Why didn’t I wait for that boat to go GRP?” With modern launching gear I reckon it could be sailed just about anywhere. What, I wonder, do your readers think?