South Beach Yacht Club Hosts Summer Camps in McCovey Cove
Every week from June 8 to August 14, the South Beach Yacht Club is holding summer sailing camps for kids ages 8–16 at McCovey Cove, a wonderfully unique location for dinghy racing to be enjoyed.
Each week begins with a morning of instruction in safety practices, boat handling, teamwork, wind awareness, terminology and knot tying, followed by afternoons out on the Bay. Each day exposes the students to different wind/water combinations, which they must learn to understand in order for their boat to go where they want it to go. After four days of skill acquisition, the young sailors have friendly competitions on a race course set up with one RIB and offset buoy serving as the starting line, and two other RIBs providing on-water instruction and crew-change management.
Under the direction of new program director Stacy Cronin, summer camp instructors are charged with the mission of imparting a sense of responsibility for each young sailor’s decisions to enable them to trust their judgment on the water, whether sailing alone or with crew. The resulting confidence gained carries over into all aspects of their lives both at home and at school.
Established in 1990, the SBYC youth sailing program employs a fleet of RS Teras for use by one or two sailors with mainsail only and RS Tevas that can sail with two or three sailors using both a main and jib. For more advanced students, several Lasers are also available. Storing and rigging the boats to sail takes place on floating docks adjoining Pier 40 at the north end of the South Beach Marina basin. Once rigged, boats are either sailed or towed out into the Bay, where windy conditions routinely cause capsizes that sailors are trained to recover from wearing wetsuits, PFDs, helmets, and lightweight shoes. As part of this training, each sailor is required to swim 100 feet while wearing a USCG-approved PFD.
On Fridays, after a morning of racing, sailors are treated to a special lunch at SBYC featuring a variety of healthy foods to choose from, a departure from the hot dogs and burgers that were originally served by the club. A sample plate is created by chef Anita Cole for the sailors to use as a guide for what their own lunch might look like.
After lunch, a graduation ceremony is held by the instructors, who hand out paper-plate awards to each sailor recognizing their unique contribution to the week’s activities. Perhaps the most heartwarming “plate” went this week to a third-grade girl who had capsized nine times, but stuck it out to finish the week with skills much improved!
Openings remain for the weeks of July 6 and 20, at a cost of $700 for the week. Participants do not need to be members of South Beach Yacht Club.
For details and inquiries see here.