Playing Politics

Earlier this month, ISAF voted to kick the sport of windsurfing out of the Olympic games in 2016, and to replace it with kiteboarding. They effectively said that windsurfing should go the same way as other former Olympics sports like...

Cricket

Croquet

and Lacrosse.

For the record, this is the tally of votes at the ISAF meeting...

For kiteboarding 19: United States (3 votes), Canada, Qatar, India, Finland, Norway, Spain, Dominican Republic, Cayman Islands, Bulgaria, South Africa, Ireland, Venezuela, Singapore, Italy, Puerto Rico, Australia. 

For windsurfing 17: France (2), Poland (2), Argentina, Britain, Turkey, Slovenia, Germany, Canada, Greece, Italy, Brazil, Belgium, New Zealand, Russia, Japan.

Of course, the windsurfing community is up in arms about this decision. What are those Olympic people thinking? Controversial. Awful. Ill-informed. Dreams crushed. There is a petition. There's even a Facebook group to Keep Windsurfing Olympic. Wow!  These people are really serious. 

Meanwhile there are wild reports circulating about what really happened at the ISAF meeting. The Venezuelans don't like the way their representative voted. Israel say some of the delegates were "napping" and didn't know what they were voting for. The Australians are accusing the Spanish of "incompetence or bribery."

It's politics, people.

This is how every democratic organization works. Delegates vote in favor of their own interests, or their voters' interests, or the interests of people who shovel them money, above or below the table. Deals are made and broken. Compromises are made. People agree to vote a different way on one thing to win votes from others on another issue.

It's called playing politics.

Some people think that "playing politics" shouldn't happen.

Get real. It happens.

If you windsurfers want to overturn this decision you had better learn how to play politics better and harder than the kite boarders do. Get stuck in. Twist some arms. Bend some ears. Do some deals. Apply pressure. Threaten. Cajole.

Play politics.

Shipping Forecast

Some of my friends not blessed to have lived in the British Isles may not be familiar with the tradition of listening to the Shipping Forecast on the wireless, and so will have totally failed to appreciate the delicious nostalgia for the land of Marmite on crumpets and Melton Mowbray pork pie with Branston Pickle that is conjured up for expats like me by the tune in yesterday's post.

So, for you, here is the Shipping Forecast...

 

No?

You don't get British humour (sic) either, do you?

Play Sailing By

Sailing By is played every night on BBC Radio 4 at around 00:45hrs before the late Shipping Forecast.

Play Safe

Thanks to Craig Russell of H2uh0 - Bonehead Moves on the Water for drawing our attention to this amazing video of a boating accident and the subsequent rescue attempts.


 


It is, of course, a reenactment, from an "informational reality-based television series" called Rescue 911 which apparently was hosted by Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise before he landed the gig with priceline.com that made him famous.

I am sure that my eagle-eyed readers with their wealth of boating knowledge will, like me, be cringing at the various mistakes that led to this accident and that could easily have caused a real tragedy.

It's a gorgeous early summer weekend in my part of the world that is certain to bring many boaters, experienced and novice, cautious and reckless, out on to the water.

Please feel free to contribute your wisdom in the comments.

Help boaters learn the lessons from this video.

Tell them how to play safe.

Big Boys Playing

(Sailing) Games People Play

Fifteen sailing games you can play can be found at the website for Mountain Lakes Sailing Association.

Hint. Click on the link in the line above to go to real videos of these games. The picture on this page is only a screenshot of the page with all the videos.

Kids Learn by Playing - Duh!

Another brilliant post today by The Knitting Sailor - Five Go Sailing - in which she documents the ups and downs of teaching five kids "RYA stage three." According to the RYA website this involves getting the kids to the point where they can "launch and sail a dinghy around a triangle in moderate conditions."

Hmmm. This is about the stage I have been stuck at for the last thirty years but, apparently, kids in England master this level after about six days of instruction. No wonder the little bastards are winning so many Olympic medals these days.

I had a good chuckle at this post because the knitting sailor (I think her real name is Victoria) experiences in the one day of teaching these five kids to sail many of the perils that I faced too when first working as a junior sailing instructor. These included...

• Kids with a limited attention span not paying attention to my very limited briefings.
• Kids launching their boats and scattering to all five corners of the lake. (Coincidentally Lake Hopatcong where I taught sailing is almost exactly the same area as Kielder Water where Victoria is teaching. Five kids going in five different directions can spread a long way in 10 square kilometers!)
• Multiple kids (by now spread out in 10 sq kms) needing simultaneous urgent safety support from the one available safety boat.
• Little kid unable to right capsized boat because little kid's weight on centerboard is insufficient to right the boat even with instructor trying to lift the top of the mast so instructor has to jump into the water and right the boat. (I have to give Victoria extra points here. I'm sure Kielder Water in May is a lot colder than Lake Hopatcong was in July.)

After what feels like a wasted morning, Victoria rethinks her approach over "a luxury lunch of a tin of Pea and Ham soup," (more bonus points to Victoria here - the lunches at Lake Hopatcong YC were definitely more luxurious) - and comes up with a plan for the afternoon involving...

• Fun
• Competition
• Bribery (a prize of chocolate for the winner of a tacking competition.)

And it worked. The kids were engaged and actually learned something.

Sooner or later everyone teaching kids to sail learns these lessons (or goes crazy.) Kids like to play. Kids like to have fun. If you can make it fun, kids will learn faster.

At first I struggled a bit to balance Safety and Fun and Learning.

Safety is important but if all you do is focus on safety then the kids don't have fun and don't learn anything either.

Learning is important too. (Isn't that what the parents are paying me for? No wait, they are really paying me to look after their kids while they go shopping and out to lunch with their friends. But hey, they call me a sailing INSTRUCTOR so I'm damn well going to INSTRUCT the little bastards something.) But if all you do is teach boring theory lessons and then run boring sailing drills the kids soon lose interest and don't learn anything either.

Fun is easy. Kids will have fun on and around the water even without your help. But they won't learn much. They might even drown themselves or their friends. The secret is to organize safe structured play that is fun that will also help them to develop their skills.

After a while you realize that you don't really need to make trade-offs between safety and fun and learning. They actually complement each other. Create a safe environment, and organize fun activities on the water and on the land that help the kids to develop specific sailing skills. And they will learn. The little bastards had better learn.

I think it took me the best part of six years to figure all this out. Victoria seems to have got it right on her first day.

Check out her story at Five Go Sailing.

Bonus points if anyone can figure out WTF the kids in that picture are doing and WTF it has to do with this post.

Playing Hurt

The only American sport that I follow at all regularly is baseball. My wife is somewhat disdainful of my interest in baseball, and even more disdainful of how baseball players come out of games and miss games for the most minor of injuries (in her view.)

"Poor diddums. He has a sore pinkie. He can't throw the ball any more."

"Ridiculous! He earns $10 million a year and he can't run because he has a bruised leg?"

"What? He pulled a muscle so he takes 15 days off work? What is an "oblique" anyway?"

Apparently, modern day baseball players are not made in the same mould as Cal Ripken Jr. who played 2632 straight games without missing a single one. That's more than 16 seasons. He must have played through injuries on numerous occasions.

If you want to read about a Laser sailor who has been playing through an injury, check out the blog of top flight Australian sailor Ashley Brunning.  Since June last year he has been battling a serious problem with his lower back, originally triggered by cycling but surely related to all that Lasering too.

But Ashley didn't give up. He missed some regattas last summer in Europe as he worked to rehab his injury. He was still "managing" his injury when he placed 7th in the Laser Worlds in Fremantle last December. In January he was receiving some scary sounding treatment for his back and then after getting back into training (gingerly at first) he placed 13th at the recent Laser Worlds in Germany.

Reading of how Ash has been "playing hurt" over the last year made me think that if I ever had that serious a back problem I would probably give up Laser sailing. But his perspective as a young guy with so much talent for the sport is probably different from mine.

Last Tuesday, after that epic Laser play session in  30 knots Bristol with my friend, my back was hurting a bit. To be expected, I thought, after not sailing for a month. While gardening at the weekend it hurt a bit more. Then while doing something totally crazy and dangerous (sitting at my desk using my computer) it started hurting a LOT more. I hope I haven't done in my back like Mr. Brunning did.

I'm too old to play hurt. I'm placing myself on the 15 day disabled list.

Playing with Friends

A few weeks ago I mentioned that this month I was going to be participating in National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo for short). My self-imposed challenge was to to publish one post a day on the theme of "play."

So far so good. 13 days and counting and I've managed to post something sorta kinda vaguely related to play every day.

I didn't invite others to participate with me in this pointless quest but, intentionally or unintentionally, some of my blogging friends have been writing about play too...

Captain JP wrote a somewhat philosophical post Playing at sailing in which he mused on the purpose of children's play and the value of "pain, cold and tiredness."

Bonnie at Frogma has been Playing with a New Toy! and sharing the results with us.

Baydog of 829 southdrive committed a Fowl Play in which he showed us some chickens before and after.

Keep Reaching at Reaching Broadly wrote The Play's the Thing where he ventured into etymology, whatever that is.

And Doug of Improper Course pointed me to some videos on Wednesday Night Fun from May 2010 which showed him doing some very playful things with a Laser including sailing it like a windsurfer (top and bottom left.)

Did I miss anybody?

Update: I knew I missed one: The Wisdom of Play also from Improper Course.

Owen

My mother never had the chance to meet her great-grandson Owen before she died.

I love this little guy.

Who wouldn't?