Friday, December 7, 2012

I-YEL Dives into a sailing adventure with the St.Francis yacht club!


What would you do if you had the chance to go to a yacht club and sail in the middle of the San Francisco Bay?

Well, that is what 9 IYEL-ers, and 3 Crissy Field Center staff did this past weekend.

We all arrived at the center on an early cold rainy Saturday hoping that we would have the chance to go sailing. We had some muffins and Jie led a check-in activity where we played a game. The concept of the game was to have the team stand on a tarp and to work as a team to grab a sharpie marker for every single IYELer because that was the only way to survive.

After that check-in we walked on over to the St. Francis Yacht Club. When we arrived we met our instructor and guide named Katie. We walked on up to our very own personal room, where there was coffee and orange juice prepared for us. Once we put down our belongings we were led on a tour of the club and we got to see “behind the scenes” of the club. We saw the Olympic medals from past sailors who were a part of the club.

After the tour we headed back into our room for a very informative introductory lesson about sailing!

We learned how to tie specific knots with the lines (what they are called in sailing). Once we learned 3 different type of knots, we raced each other to see who could do them the fastest! We also played other games where we got to test our skills from what we learned from the lesson! It got quite competitive and some participants got bruises, but at the end it was a lot of fun.

After that we had a beautiful deli buffet set out for us!

Once we were finished eating we met two other instructors named Adam and Steven and prepared for our sailing trip. Everyone looked warm and cozy and got ready to sail. Thankfully the rain cleared up just in time for us to sail!

We headed down to the boats and  were split into 3 boats! In the beginning it was quite scary knowing how the boats could capsize but in the end we knew we were safe! I was in a boat with with Renee, JM, and Silver. We all got the chance to steer. When we got back to the club we cleaned ourselves up a little and went back up to our room with hot chocolate and cookies prepared for us!

We had a little debrief, played a couple more games, thanked Katie and headed on back to the center! All in all it was a great experience as terrifying as it was in the beginning! Alright that’s it for today! Until next time!




This is Kathleen logging off!

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