With his Learn to Sail programme, Kerikeri Cruising Club’s Derry Godbert introduces families to sailing. For many it is the first step on the voyage of a lifetime.
Growing up, I was a lucky lad. I rode my bike. I hit, chased, and caught a ball on grassy playing fields. Then one day in 1961, when I was eight years old, my dad – an aeronautical engineer, a former U.S. Air Force navigator of a B-17 Flying Fortress, and a WWII prisoner of war in Germany – brought home a 14-foot fibreglass sloop. I didn’t know what to make of it. A boat?
Soon we were out on our first sail, my dad, mom, and older brother and I seated on the windward side in an 18-knot sea breeze. I had the jibsheet in my hand, my dad had a grip on the mainsheet. “Now we are going to tack,” he announced. We, the crew, exchanged glances and shrugs. “OK, Dad.” He pushed the tiller across with authority and the boat capsized on top of us. We didn’t know that when you switched the sails you had to switch the bodies, too.
The Linskey family spent the next 30 minutes dogpaddling around our mostly submerged boat, retrieving soggy sandwiches, my mom crying, my brother and I splashing each other, my dad trying to put the rudder back on. Finally, someone towed us to the beach.
It was the most amazing day of my life. Sailing was the best thing ever. I never set foot upon a playing field again. Then it got even better: my dad built an eight-foot pram [dinghy] in our garage. The daggerboard trunk leaked, but now I could sail my own boat, go anywhere, anytime. I learned how to steer with my big toe while mopping up the leak with a sponge and bailer, peeking under the foot of the sail for boats and docks, trying not to get knocked by the boom.
For the next 60 years the Linskeys kept sailing – dinghies, racing boats, cruising boats. We learned, or tried to learn, by doing. We made a lot of mistakes. We had no one to teach us how to sail. We really needed someone.
Derry Godbert is 90 years young. He is kind, knowledgeable, encouraging – the sort of person who becomes the heartbeat of a sailing club. At the Kerikeri Cruising Club, a cruising and racing fixture on the Kerikeri River in Northland, everyone has benefitted by knowing Derry. Through the club’s Learn to Sail Programme, which Derry started and has been running for over 48 years, he has shepherded nearly 600 children and their parents into the world of sailing.
“I’ve been a school teacher all my life,” says Derry, “and the major part of Learn to Sail is, of course, teaching people how to sail. But as important as everything else is having the families, the adults, heavily involved. Either by learning themselves, or by using their parenting skills to turn their kids into good sailors, or helping on the shore, or at least by being there.
“That’s my approach. I really feel that the family involvement is really, really, really important. There’s two major benefits. First, if they are a cruising family and they want to go off sailing, it becomes a family affair and everyone enjoys it. Second, if their children are keen, competitive sailors, they absolutely depend on parental involvement to drive them on.”
Learn to Sail takes place on nearby Lake Manuwai, a man-made reservoir created to sustain Kerikeri’s horticulture industry. A steel boatshed houses the programme’s fleet of 30 boats, from Optis to Ables to Spirals to Sunbursts. The programme provides boats, safety gear, qualified coaches, and a gentle beach for launching and retrieval. The course teaches Yachting New Zealand’s Basic Certificate Courses, Levels 1 and 2 (see sidebar). Along with Learn to Sail, Derry has introduced team racing, sailing’s most strategic form of competition, to Kerikeri Cruising Club, and over the years he has worked as a New Zealand Yachting coach and coached the Kerikeri High School sailing team. All his work at Kerikeri Cruising Club, and that of the many club members who work ashore and afloat, is voluntary.
SO MUCH TO LEARN
Imagine you are a beginner: there is so much to learn. So many moving parts: rudder and tiller, the ropes called lines, the pulleys called blocks. And all the nautical terms: mast, boom, beating, reaching, running, tacking, gybing. Where to start? A crowd gathers inside the boatshed as Derry sets up a boat and shows how to move the tiller, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, pushing or pulling it the opposite way you want the boat to go, while pulling in or letting out the mainsheet and moving your body in response to the wind in the sail. Once out on the water, children and adults new to sailing will begin to notice, to look for, to try to read the wind on the water: smooth as glass, ripples, whitecaps, each with its own color, announcing itself in a gust and or a wind-line.
The first time you sail a boat by yourself is special. The wind fills the sail and the bow wave whispers and the boat moves. No engine, no noise. You feel the brush of the wind on your face and arms and the back of your neck. Your first sail may be puzzling, maybe even a bit scary, but it is a good kind of scary. Because you have found something special. You are sailing, drawn into an age-old art.
Given Lake Manuwai’s tricky breezes, Learn to Sail people, who are between eight and 80 years old, can find themselves in a pickle. Alarming puffs. Surprise gybes. Getting stuck in irons. With 10 to 35 keen learners turning up each summer Saturday, there’s a lot to manage out on the water – getting all the boats headed the same direction to the same place can be like herding cats. Derry has a handful of qualified coaches, along with some great parents, working from the programme’s inflatables.
A Learn to Sail day on Lake Manuwai is busy. Very busy. “It starts at 8:57am with a race to see who gets there first, me or one of the keenest families,” says Derry. “Typically, excited nine-yearold volunteers unlock the boatshed while Mum collects the ‘Lost and Found Recording Book’ – very important. Sign out, get ‘lost on the water,’ get ‘found’ and sign in before lunch. While Dad is helping me launch one of the RIBs, more families arrive. Quick learners of all ages check out two more RIBs, an assortment of sailing boats and lifejackets and find crews they want to sail with. The stored boats are extracted from their storage sites while trying to avoid pinching fingers and toes between boats and trolleys. The most dangerous time of the day!” Then, a brief period of chaos as boats are rigged, missing bits are located, and sailors organise themselves into boats. “You’ll have 8- and 10-year-old sisters with experienced sailor parents launching a Sunburst. Other young sisters, 11 and 13, who have just reached the Solo standard, help each other get their Able dinghies ready to go. An older Learn to Sail student, now 75 and Spiral-proficient, gets help to trolley his boat to the water. A mixture of various ages of boys are spread between singles or pairs in Optimists or fitted into Sunbursts with reliable adult helm/coaches. A course is bellowed out: “First you’ll have a beat, take care to avoid the no-go zone, remember to find the edge of the wind, then head onto a reach, ease sheets round One Horse Island and head onto a run, boom right out, beware the gybe!”
Later, the sailors manage a range of on-water games – sponge tag, treasure hunt, perhaps a triangle race, a relay race, or a stop-go race. And naturally, kids will be kids. Younger children can’t resist trailing their fingers in the water as their boat sails along. When the wind drops to zero, bailer battles can break out between boats. And, even though they are not supposed to, some kids become fascinated with the anarchy of capsizing, a drama you can’t pull off on a netball court or cricket pitch.
Then it’s back to the boatshed to unrig and put boats away, checking for any damage. Every moment of a Learn to Sail day is time in the boat, time under sail. Each student, whatever their skill level or experience, is to some degree discovering by doing – a watery classroom under Derry’s knowing eye. “Usually it’s a good day for all,” he notes.
“I’m not sure exactly why I like sailing,” Derry says. “I mean, sailing is a silly sport – it is expensive and complicated, and it depends on the weather,” Derry says. “But it’s a broader sport than any other. I don’t think any other sport can involve so many different age groups and abilities and aspects. Which, I think, is a solid advantage. You can learn in one type of boat, then evolve to the opposite type of boat, and end up sailing in the next America’s Cup. I do find that people benefit from learning to sail. It’s not magic. It’s just another activity. But I think it’s a very good one. When I am coaching beginners, I do say, ‘Look, word of warning: sailing can be a bit addictive.’ And if you get addicted to it, like I am, it’s a bit of a washout. You do it because you’re addicted.”
Addicted? Of course. Completely. Derry Godbert is a keeper of the flame. Someone who cares deeply about people and sailing, a generous volunteer, a teacher adept at explaining the mysteries of sailing, a man who delights in posing the possibilities of a life under sail. Because of all the ‘firsts’ in life, whether for a child or an adult, few are as life changing as the first step on the journey to becoming a sailor. BNZ
YACHTING NEW ZEALAND BASIC CERTIFICATE COURSES LEVELS 1 & 2
Level 1 will teach you:
- Safety and wind awareness
- Know your boat parts and how to rig
- Knots practice
- Balance, steering and sail trim
- Launching and retrieving
- Boat handling, tacking and gybing
- Capsize and recovery
- Upwind and downwind
- Sailing collision avoidance rules
Level 2 extends the skills learned in Level 1 and also covers:
- Weather and tide
- Rules and hiking
- Launching and retrieving
