Learn to Sail 2024/2025 Season
Learn to Sail 2024/2025 Kicks off with our Muster on Friday 18th October 4.30pm at Hamilton Yacht Club, Innes Common. If you would like to join, please register your interest on the link below:
Learn to Sail Expressions of Interest
For returning Sailors, Register here:
Session Times
Learn to Sail Levels 1,2,3 - Fridays from 4:30pm onward. 1st Session of the year, Friday 18th October 2024.
Green Fleet - Wednesdays from 4.30pm onwards. 1st session of the year, Wednesday 16th October 2024.
Learn To Sail - General Information
What age to start?
You can learn to sail at more or less any age though most would recommend introducing children to learning to sail after the age of 8. We do have plenty of older children including teenagers and indeed adults who have learned to sail with us and a number have become very successful sailors. For older sailors we will tailor programmes and boats to the sailor as appropriate.
Learn to Sail: Levels 1 and 2
The sailing season starts at the beginning of School term 4. Through terms 4 and 1, the club runs weekly junior learn to sail sessions on Friday afternoons after school. The basic aim of learn to sail is to introduce new sailors to the sport and get them to the point that they can sail themselves around a course independently. In keeping with many clubs in New Zealand, the Learn to Sail programme uses Optimist dinghys.
The Optimist is a very well tried, simple design that is easy to handle when first starting out, yet can be raced at a high level. The club has a number of Optimists that we provide free of charge to Learn to Sail students in their first year for their lessons.
Along the way they should develop greater confidence in the water, learn to right a capsized Optimist dinghy, and hopefully realise that sailing is a great sport and HYC is the place to be. Sailing teaches self-confidence, self-reliance, initiative and ingenuity - great skills for the future.
The Learn to Sail course is split into two levels. Level 1 is aimed at sailors who have never sailed before and Level 2 is aimed at sailors with some experience and wish to improve their basic skills. Most sailors spend 1-2 terms in Level 1 and 1-2 terms in Level 2. From Level 2, sailors may progress to Level 3, Learn to Race.
Learn to Race: Level 3
From Learn to Sail, students can progress to Learn to Race. The “Learn to Race” program helps sailors make the step from sailing around a course to racing around a course with other competitors; start sequences, rules for racing, adjusting sails and boat trim, - enough to enable them to be able to get involved in the club racing. Learning to race is a great way for sailors to hone skills and to learn more advanced techniques of sailing in a friendly and easy-going environment. Sailors are now encouraged to join with club racing which occurs on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons during the sailing season (October until the end of March).
Through the season the Race Officers will arrange shorter simpler race courses for those sailors in Optimists who are new to racing. This is called the OptiGreen fleet. The emphasis in this fleet is on participation rather than performance and generally one of the coaches will follow them around the race course offering encouragement and advice. Most sailors stay in the OptiGreen fleet for half a season or maybe one whole season before moving up.
Green Fleet: Intermediate Level Sailors
For the more advanced sailors, looking to kick on with racing, we will cover a broad range of racing skills – efficient manoeuvres, sail tuning, starting, tactics, reading the wind on the water etc. We will arrange the sessions to suit the sailors taking part. Often intermediate sailors move into more advanced boats such as the P Class or Starling, dependent on the size of the sailor. These boats are more demanding to sail but at the same time, faster and in many ways more rewarding. Coaching for Green fleet sailors takes place on a Wednesday after school and those sailors are strongly encouraged to join club racing on a Wednesday and Friday to hone their skills. We also arrange to go to regattas in Auckland, Tauranga, Cambridge and Raglan to name a few and sailors have competed in the P Class and Starling Nationals with good success.
OptiSail (See Optisail Page)
For those junior sailors looking to develop their skills in a short space of time the club runs a ‘live in’ camp called Optisail in January. We aim to get sailors on the water all day for 4 days with sailing activities and exercises. Sailors live at the clubrooms for the 4 days so HYC really does become the place to be. Optisail is the only course of its kind in the region and may become booked out so let us know as soon as possible if you are interested (talk to a coach or email the club secretary). The club tries hard to keep the cost of this camp as low as we can but at the same time we have to employ enough coaches that each sailor can get plenty of help with their sailing skills.
Adult Learn to Sail
We will be running an Adult Learn to sail programme this year. The course will run on Monday from 5.00pm - 6.00pm for Adult Learn to Sail 1 and 6.15pm to 7.15pm for Learn to Sail 2.
Learn to Sail 1 will be held in our Club RS Quest dinghys (https://www.rssailing.com/project/rs-quest/). These are large multi person dinghys that can comfortably accommodate up to 4 adults but can be sailed comeptitvely by 2. They are safe and very stable and are excellent training boats. In Learn to Sail 1 we aim to cover basic of sailing and acquint you with a boat, it's component parts, the terminology, basic knots, safe launching, recovery, points of sail and basic manouvers. By the end we would expect most students to be able to rig and launch a quest themselves, sail round a triangular course in light conditions and come back into shore safely.
Learn to Sail 2 will also be in our RS Quests and will be about gaining confidence in sailing, cementing skills and getting to grips with more advanced techniques such as using the Gennaker sail, coming alongside, picking up buoys, man overboard, basic racing techniques and rules. By the end of this we would expect sailors to be confident handling a boat in moderat conditions and participating in some racing.
Parent Learn to Sail for those of you who have enrolled your children and want to find out what its all about or beat them at their own game we will look to set up a Parents Learn to Sail to run alogside the Childrens Learn to Sail on a Friday if there is enough interest. This will be run in the RS Quests. A great way to get the family together sailing, maybe looking forward to a family sailing holiday in the Bay of Islands of Fiji perhaps in time to come!
Where to from there. We are a dinghy racing club and we race on a saturday afternoon and wednesday afternoon. If you'd like to join the club us and race the Quests with us you'd be most welcome. Others may be keen on branching out into faster single handed boats and the club has 3 Lasers for club members to try out. These are much more physically demanding but also exhillarating to sail and though initially designed as a fun beach boat, have evolved into a highly cometitive Olympic class boat. Some of you may wish to consider bigger options such as a trailer sailing yacht or even a keel boat. Although we don't sail these on the lake, some members are keen enthusiasts of these larger boats and will be able to help you with these.
Costs (See Fees Page here)
The cost for the Learn to Sail Levels 1 and 2, consists of club membership for one year (see here for fees) and coaching fees of $150 for each of term 1 and term 4.
When your child does Learn to Sail, your child (under 18) joins the club as a Junior Sailor and a parent joins the club as a Non-Sailing Member. Sailing parents are very welcome to purchase a full sailing membership and join in club sailing if they wish.
There are corresponding rates for more than one child joining, with a maximum charge for a family membership with a discounted rate for additional members after the first sailor member.
For those starting in term 1, we charge half a year membership plus coaching for term ($150). Level 3 and Intermediate sailors pay the same membership fees but Coaching fees for intermediate sailors are $200 per term.
We allow first time sailors to use our club boats for their first year with us free of charge and we have a small fleet of club Optimists. We strongly encourage sailors however to purchase their own Optimist after their first year, however Optimists are often cheap to purchase and a number of the current Optimists being sailed in the club have been sold on through club members for quite a few “generations” of sailors. For those moving up to other classes of boats, there are a very limited number of club boats that can be hired by session or by term (see Fees page).
The club membership allows full use of the club facilities and allows us to maintain the clubhouse, patrol boats and other assets, without which it would be impossible to run a learn to sail programme. The coaching fees allow us to employ a professional head coach and junior coaches to teach the programmes. The club however is very much run as a club and is not for profit and much work is also done by club members themselves on a voluntary basis. We welcome parents to use the club facilities and get involved in the club as much as possible.
If you are interested in enroling your child in the learn to sail programme please register an expression of interest on the link above and we'll get in touch or if you'd like more information, you can contact our Head Coach, Nathaniel Short: CoachHYC@gmail.com or our Rear Commodore, TV Liew:hycrearcommodore1938@gmail.com or both.
