The Sailing School at Spa Creek teaches kids to sail before they can read the instructions or worry about details. In this picture the boat is pulling the four dinghys behind. This is the first step where they teach the kids to control the boat with the rudder.
The instructors pull the boats around for days until the kids know how to steer the boat. It is fun to watch. At first the different boats wander back and forth but the kids learn fast.
My guess is that these kids are from six to eight years old.
At that age they learn pretty fast how to steer a boat.
The next step is to add a sail to the boat and learn to sail. The boats with the striped sail are the rookie sailors. We spent many hours watching the kids learn to sail. The instructors used the mooring bouys as objectives for the sailors. For example they would tell the class to go to bouy 57 and some of the kids would head there. Other kids would point their boats into the wind and the boats would have sails aback and out of control. The instructors would patiently tell them that they were pointed in the no go zone. They helped to get sailing again and point at the bouy.
Since two or more sailboats constitutes a race, as soon as some of the kids figured out how it works they were racing and having fun and learning how to sail.
I think that this picture shows that they all learned something. In the first days of striped sails the boats would be all over the mooring field and this picture shows a tight group. The next step is white sails and more races.
The picture with St Mary's Church and High School has a
good story with it. The church was founded by Charles Carol who was one
of the signers of the Declaration of Independance. He was the longest
lived signer of that document and also the only Catholic. Annapolis
was the Capitol of the U.S. so Mr Carol started this church and was
later an Archbishop of the Catholic Church.
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