What a difference a day makes
Learning to windsurf has its ups and downs. One day you can feel great! Great about learning a new skill and being able to do something you found almost impossible before. Other days (and there seem to be many of these), you find the skills impossible. You become more and more frustrated with yourself and more and more exhausted as, during these early stages, you tend to spend a lot of time being catapulted into the water and having to clamber back onto the board as elegantly as possible (nope, not possible!).
As well as going out for a quick sail on a Hobie 16 catamaran on my day off this Saturday, I also spent some time practicing some of the skills we’d been taught in our windsurf lessons that week: beach-starts and using the harness. Being able to ‘beach-start’ means that you don’t have to start standing on the board and haul the sail up when you want to set off on your way. It means you can just hop on the board, using a nice gust of wind to pull you up and thus far less energy. It does take practice but, as the title of this post suggests, just one day (or one afternoon in this case) can make a whole world of difference.
Learning to do beach-starts
Watching this back even now, just two days later, makes me realise that these skills do come eventually. I can confidently say I’ve nailed my beach-starts now on a variety of different boards in a variety of different wind conditions with a variety of sail sizes. Just two days later. I can’t wait to learn to water-start: this skill would mean I could use the wind to pull me up and out of the water again after having fallen in, rather than having to clamber onto the board each time and haul the heavy sail up.
Learning to use the harness in semi-windy conditions
Using the harness, on the other hand… Every time you think you have it mastered, the instructors push you to go out in harsher conditions with different kit and… ugh. Even since I took this video on Saturday, I know I’ve made progress with that particular board and with those half-windy conditions and that sized sail. But then today… the wind went ballistic, I had to take out a more advanced board and even with a smaller sail I was being catapulted all over the place. Incredibly frustrating, not to mention exhausting! Then changing to my instructor’s board with a BIGGER sail even in those mad conditions… it was easier again! Just because the board was slightly less sensitive. It’s all so up and down! Some days, you come off the water on a high, other times extremely low.
Pushing yourself to take on challenges like this is a really good thing though. You learn a lot about yourself from the way you manage failure. I learned this last year when doing the dinghy instructor course… Taking risks and pushing yourself to the limits of your capabilities, becoming frustrated and having to practice something over and over again, you can truly learn a lot about yourself and the ways in which you deal with failing. It’s so important for schools to allow children to have opportunities to ‘fail’ and then fix things. Learning from failure and picking yourself up again is such an important life lesson. It makes you wonder why we so often take the easy road and cruise along without allowing our ‘self’ to develop.