On The Water Session 5
On The Water (OTW) Session 5.
OTWs are supported sailing sessions for all ages - children and adults alike - but with an emphasis on getting our younger sailors out on the water! Club boats will be available to share or you can go out in your own boat. For these sessions participants are grouped by ability then assigned to an instructor with a safety boat, meaning sailors have safety boat cover for the whole time they are on the water. The emphasis is on FUN and we go out in all weathers within reason!
'On the Water' sessions are proving very popular. To allow the club to run them a multitude of adult volunteer helpers are required, and In particular parents bringing children down are expected to help crew the safety boats, move trailers, help with dinghy launch and recovery, etc. The session is scheduled for 3 hours around high water. Participants should be ready, changed into sailing gear, for the start of the session.
Where children are taking part they must be accompanied by a parent or responsible adult
who remains availble on the shore throughout the session. If we have a cold child, one who no longer wishes to sail, or an injury (thankfully a very rare occurrence), the instructor for that session needs to be able to hand the child over to his or her parent quickly so as to be able to focus on the remaining sailors still on the water.
Change to booking process for OTW5:
RC Training took the rather drastic decision to cancel OTW4 because of lack of instructors, having decided that it would be unreasonable to expect just 3 instructors to safely manage 50 participants. In an attempt to do better than reaching another all-or-nothing binary decision we have changed the booking process for OTW5 to gradually increase availability of spaces as capacity for the session grows. We'll try this for one session and review it afterwards to see if works any better than opening up all 50 places at once.
Spaces are limited by the number of instructors and safety boat crew who volunteer to support each session. To manage demand against number of instructors the booking process is:
- Booking for volunteers is open at the start of the season, so instructors and powerboat crew can commit well in advance.
- Booking for participants opens 2 weeks before each OTW session.
- Initially 30 spaces will be made available, on the expectation we will have at least 5 instructors volunteer for each session.
- An additional 20 reserve spaces will be created and allocated when all 30 participant spaces are taken. As more instructors volunteer members with reserve places will be promoted to participant places, in the order they booked.
- Separate tickets will be available for adult and junior sailors. In the event that we have inadequate instructor cover for all participants priority will be given to juniors over adults.It may be that adults are offered a supervised sailing session with just a powerboat for safety cover, thus freeing up instructors to concentrate on the junior groups. This decision will be made by the Senior Instructor for the session.
OTW sessions are for
members and their families only.
If you have any questions about On The Water please speak to RC Training (rc.training@tisc.org.uk), Training Support (training.support@tisc.org.uk), or ultimately the Commodore (commodore@tisc.org.uk)