Practically speaking
Groups of primary school youngsters are a familiar sight at The Official Test Centre, located at the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy.
Here the instructors have developed an approach to give schoolchildren as young as five the best first experience in windsurfing as possible.
Running these sessions are necessarily heavy on manpower, with high teacher to pupil ratios to overcome the natural shyness that very young children typically have with strangers, while also acting as chief cheerleaders for encouragement.
To start with the youngsters get a short joyride on a board with an instructor. For five-year-olds, the centre uses metre-wide 200l super floaty boards with a 1.5m2 sail.
To start with the instructor sails a reach across wind 20-30m, with the child on the board, and then comes back. At some point the instructor will momentarily let go of the boom and get the youngster to hold it. If they don’t, the instructor can very quickly and easily pick it back up. The whole taster lasts a minute or two.
The next stage is to put a child on a wide, stable board suitable for their size – OTC has Naish Kailua, Starboard Rio and Tabou Coolrider boards ranging from 160-230l – and then encourage them to pull the kit up themselves.
There is always an instructor right next to each child helping them, this also means the instructor can step onto the board and point them upwind again.
“Keeping things fun and short is the key,” says Tris Best, OTC director. “By doing it as a group thing they are all together having fun, and we play lots of games.
“For a child to turn up and see this vast area of sea can be scary, and you can tell pretty quickly who is water confident or not, so we always make sure they know early on which buoys we will be sailing too. Little goals of attainment.
“The joyrides work really, really well. Some youngsters can be pretty gung-ho straight away, whereas others are more reserved and that’s where the teachers come in. But they soon realise there is an instant level of success and enjoy themselves, which is ultimately all we want; for them to have a positive first experience windsurfing.”
