I learned to sail when I was around 12. The
local sailing club put an ad in newsletter of the primary school I went to,
and, having recently found Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows
and Amazons” series, I was open to the idea of learning to sail.
A librarian had directed me to that series
when I had read all the books on camping in the school library, saying it had
sailing and camping – which was true, and I don’t think my parents were going
to be too upset that I would stop borrowing a sheet to make a makeshift camp in
the backyard. (Later, I would borrow a
sheet and two broom to erect make
believe sail, mast, and boom or yardarm . . . so maybe it wasn’t
quite as good as they hoped :) .)
The conditions included being able to swim,
and having been “encouraged” by Mum and Dad to go to the local lifesaving club
as well as going through the swimming lessons my school compelled everyone to
go through, that wasn’t a problem. I actually hated swimming at the beach
though, and it wasn’t until I got to swim around capsized boats in around 50
feet of water (sailing has come along the
metrication path a bit more slowly than the rest of Australia) that I
really started to relax and enjoy being in the water.
Did I mention my part Irish heritage? Primary
school me thought Dad used to get the best jokes from the Irish club – and Dad
could appreciate the humour in not being comfortable swimming until I was in
water way over my head.
On the Irish connection, a few years later
I taught an Irishman to sail, and we used to consider it a fair deal: when we
came back into the beach, he knew more about sailing, and I had more of an
Irish lilt to my Aussie intonation.
Then again, maybe my accent wasn’t as
strong as I assumed. A couple of decades later on my way to commission a
treatment plant in China, while the plane was sitting on a tarmac in another
city it had been diverted to, waiting for the snow to stop in the city I was
heading to or for another plane to leave there so we could slot in, another
passenger leaned over, and asked if he could practice his English. I said no
problem, and closed the book I had been reading – which was “Lion of Ireland”, about Brian Boru. The
other passenger started by saying “I am guessing you are from Ireland”; when I
was telling that story to my friends back in Oz, at this point I would say “so
much for the Aussie accent”, and was floored when they told me I had more an
“international” accent.
Damn I must have watched too much American
tellie when I was a kid and had run out of books to read.
Going back to when I was a kid, and was
learning to sail, I thought the programme they had set up was quite good, and
it guided the series of lessons I subsequently used to teach others how to sail.
The lessons included some obvious safety notes, such as staying with the boat,
air spaces under capsized boats, jury rigging (at my second sailing club, we towed kids who were had learned to sail
50 m or so off the beach with the elements of their rig, and set a challenge to
create a jury rig to get back in to the beach), how to cope with waves
breaking on a beach, keeping warm (which
used to be a problem for me in that pre-yoga breathing technique part of my
life I was so scrawny that one joke was
my arms had the muscles of a chicken leg :) ), etc.
Actually, jumping ahead a bit, what is hot
or cold is always a combination of personal preference and what you're used to.
Nowadays, I don't like temperatures much over 18, but when I was a kid in Qld (in the 70s, when “air con” [air
conditioning] was rare - my adoptive parents didn't like or have air con
throughout their lives) I would put a jumper on if it got below 25°C - and
I have a friend who doesn't like anything under 28°C :) . However, after a day
on a construction site when the unofficial temperature was in the 50s, I
decided to move from Queensland back to cooler Melbourne – which it is, most of
the time, but the highest official temperature I experienced in Queensland –
albeit pre-climate change - was 46°C, whereas here in Melbourne, 2,000 km
closer to the pole, the highest official temperature I've experienced was ~47°C.
Being used to temperatures makes a
difference, but most people are so out of touch with the effects of their
emotions (particularly, some mild version
of seasonal affective disorder) and what is happening to their bodies
that they rug themselves up so much in winter that their skin temperature is
probably higher than in summer, and they think the weather is colder than it
is.
I also, as alluded to, found some yogic
breathing exercises that were quite effective for me – but not others,
especially the sceptically inclined - at staying warmer. (Their effect tended to be accumulative, so I gave them up as it was
too difficult to keep fitting in to society.)
So . . . Mackay.
When I first heard we were moving there, my
greatest concern was: did they have a sailing club?
Boy, did they ever! However, I’ll keep most
of that for another yarn.
Copyright © Kayleen White, 2019 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit and due financial recompense, of course :)
