I joined a team of five Otters who completed the RYA Dinghy Instructors course last week, the course was held at the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club under the watchful eye of an RYA instructor, the assessor arrived on the final day to give us our final assessment.  There were three girls and two boys doing the course which I was told was good for girl power!!

To be able to your Dinghy Instructor course you have to be 16 years old and complete a pre assessment day where you have to prove you can sail.  For me this clashed with one of my 29er qualifying events but there was no getting out of it as attendance is mandatory and so I did the pre assessment day in the Otter’s Topper Sports on a sunny Sunday in March and we all got through.

The Dinghy Instructor course was a challenge for me.  Not necessarily because of the level of sailing but because you have to remember you are being trained to be an instructor and that is a very different skill to charging around a race course which is what I am used to.  But I did find that I was able to use the training skills used by my trainers very helpful when asked to do a presentation on “Sailing Games”. I have learned lots of those over the years whilst waiting for the wind to fill in!

I did struggle a little with the man overboard, not because I found the task necessarily difficult but because my man, a plastic bottle, disappeared from view and so was literally lost!!!!  My ears will also never be the same again as we sailed the Topper Sport in strong winds and Lizzie Rands, who was sailing with me, screamed my name more times than my Mum has nagged me as she thought we would capsize……..  we did not capsize!

The course was a great experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I started instructing last year at the Burnham Sailing Club and I had a great time training people and seeing them improve.  I am looking forward to now doing the same safe in the knowledge I am now qualified!!!

Well done to the Otter team, thank you to the RYA team for putting up with us and thank you to the Club and Steve Rands for arranging everything.  It was a great experience and I now look forward to giving something back to the Club in the form of being able to help train children less experienced or younger than me.

Ben Hutton-Penman