Teaching aid

I have been delivering yachts and teaching beginners to sail for many years now, so I have a fairly deep well of embarrassing moments – it goes with the job. But it was an incident in the classroom that always comes to mind when I read YM’S Confessional.

About two years ago I found myself in the classroom, standing in front of about eight potential Day Skippers, eager to start the first day of their theory course. Unusually, the class was mainly comprised of middleaged women, two teenage daughters and a token man. I was running through the equipment that we would be using and pointed out that they had all equipped themselves with the standard Portland course plotter, whilst I had the smaller, but more flexible RYA Handy Plotter. As I was waving my plotter around, the words that came out of my mouth were ‘…and I’ve got a small floppy one.’ The silence that followed lasted about one second, followed by uproar and raucous laughter. A great ice-breaker, the rest of the course was a joy to teach.