Some active ladies from our yacht club have thought of a great sailing experience: ladies'sailing. For most of us "Sailing" normally means being on the own boat, with the own partner/family, having own ways of doing things and own rules on board. The whole idea of ladies' sailing was to sail someone else's boat, to be part of a totally new crew... to cut it short, to go beyond own comfort zones and to learn from each other. This event was not official one this year, it was just a trial, having some volunteers, willing to exchange their skills and have fun together :) This event was not a competition, everyone sailed with their own pace and we are all winners, as we have our learnings.
So we ended up having nine ladies participating and sailing three boats. The three skippers got their crews and we were ready to go :
In the first boat we had Rina (skipper), Merja and Hanna. I had the honor to sail with this super-experienced ladies :)
The second crew had Kaisa (skipper), Tiina and Anita.
The third team consisted of Inkku (skipper), Mervi and Kaisu. Unfortunately, there is no crew picture of the three ladies together.
The weather was not really perfect for sailing, in the morning it was rather windy and rainy, but by the time we left the harbour and lifted up the sails, the rain was over, but so was also the wind.
Hoping to get some wind later on, we decided to leave the main sail up. The black triangle mark (meaning that we are using motor, no mater that the sail is up) was attached in a visible place and we continued the trip.
At the end, we never got wind strong enough to sail. But despite of this fact we had a great time!
Like our skipper said, the trip could have been much longer, time was flying in a nice company... and suddenly we arrived to the destination :)
I did not feel bad at all that we reached the destination before those clouds reached us!
Once all the participant were safe and sound in the harbour, both rain and celebration started :)
And this was not just sparkling wine, but champagne... :)
with some peanuts :)
For the main course we had some Vietnamese summer rolls. This was a totally new and fun experience not only for me :)
Kaisu making the dessert :)
For quite long time dessert remained a mystery, but at the end it turned out to be great idea: watermelon with mashed mint leaves, lime zest&juice and a little sugar.
Overall the event was a big success! And no matter we did not sail much, still I have a learning: boom preventer can be used very easily and quickly (currently in our boat it takes time to install it and requires many moves to have it in place...). By next summer we plan to copy and adopt this awesome idea!
Not to mention the fun we had all together. I hope events like this will become a tradition in our yacht club. And like someone proposed, we don't have to make any gender differences, we can just have mixed crews and sail different boats.
Big thanks to all the ladies for the great company and awesome experience! :)
PS: pictures in this post are not all mine.
