Sailing single-handed with cerebral palsy
Having a lifelong medical condition needn’t be any impediment to your single-handed sailing pleasure, as Martin Yates demonstrates
Where to start? First things first, I really do sail singlehanded. I have a condition called cerebral palsy: it’s not an illness or a disease, and you can’t catch it. You live with it 24/7, just like that little voice in your head (ha ha!).
There are three types of cerebral palsy – spastic, dyskinetic and ataxic. I have a mixture of all three, to differing degrees. There is no cure – life is what you make it – and, just to make things even more interesting, I am completely dyslexic. So why write this article? Well, I thought it might help to encourage any sailors unfortunate enough to have suffered a stroke to realise that there are still ways of staying afloat: and, most importantly, that you can do it on your own, or at the very least that you can have a go and take control. It is possible – and I should know!
A little history
teacher and composer. I played trombone all over England and Europe – and then the mid-life crisis hit without warning. I developed cravings for classic cars and a Topper sailing dinghy... and soon owned a Topper, an Enterprise and a Triumph Spitfire. Other dinghies followed, but the problem was always the same: if
(or should I say when) I capsized I would need to be aided by a rescue boat, besides which I required a vessel which gave me room to move, so I looked around for a suitable candidate.
Around this time I had been invited by racing coach George Barker to sail with the teams from Sailability at the UKSA on the Isle of Wight, who were using Sonars and looking for potential Paralympic sailors. This gave me the idea of trying larger boats. I also met some extraordinary people who, despite serious injuries (including total blindness), were inspirational for their courage and sailing