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The Canoe
Trip for Lighthouse For The Blind started a series I'm very excited
to present. A New Zealand friend has written a book called 'My
Life With Guide Dogs', and has graciously allowed me to write
a few stories in a section we've recently opened up in the Dogs
chapter called K-9
Service Dogs.
This next
episode was a part of that series, but since I had begun the canoe
and sailing theme here, thought it would best be presented as
part of 'Treks Unusual', rather than the K-9 feature.
A
Dream Becomes Reality
This story
concerns a trip that Sieger and I took to Auckland New Zealand
to participate in a sail training school for blind and partially-sighted
wanabe yachties.
Before
we started the training proper, we had to do a short course in
water safety. This entailed falling out of life rafts, thus simulating
falling overboard, and climbing back aboard.
This,
I found to be no easy task. The falling out was accomplished with
great skill but an equally great lack of grace, but when climbing
back aboard, I found myself spreadeagled like a stranded whale
across the rubber sausage forming the side of the raft.
The occupants
gave me a heave, upon which, I landed on my head in a foot of
water. Having avoided that attempt on my life, I then had to extricate
myself from under a sail in the water. Halfway
out, I swam out of my life jacket and had to stop while I repositioned
it.
I took
Sieger with me to the Commonwealth Games Pool where we did the
course. She was greatly distressed as she was quite sure that
I was going to be drowned. [She was not far wrong] and she was
unable to come to my rescue as she was being held.
The training
given by The School consisted of sail handling, steering and the
lore of the sea.
Keeping
the boat on course for a blind person requires a great deal of
skill and sensitivity. There are audio compasses available which
are set to the course to be steered. If the boat veers off course,
a tone sounds which is different for port or starboard. I think
that even talking compasses are now being used.
However,
we did not have the benefit of such advanced technology, so we
were supposed to hold the course by keeping the wind blowing on
the same part of the face. I found this very difficult as wind
blows on a large area and I was unable to detect the microscopic
shifts. I could only distinguish between the right or the left
side of my face.
If the
wind went over my shoulder, I knew that I was very far off course,
and could bring the boat back to approximately where it should
be, but the skipper rarely allowed me to wander to that degree.
On one
boat, I found that I could keep a fairly steady course, as the
metal slugs on the mainsail, would rattle in the track on the
mast if the boat came off the wind. Experienced blind sailors
can become quite accurate helmsmen.
However,
at my level of expertise, I had to depend to a large extent, on
instructions of "upwind" or "downwind" given by the skipper. At
first, I even found it difficult to remember quickly which way
the tiller went to bring the bow of the boat upwind or downwind,
but then I found, like `Superman`, that the phrase "up up and
away" worked wonders.
As I was
standing on the windward side of the boat, pushing the tiller
away from me would bring the boat up into the wind.
The first
day, we trained on keelers. The one that I was on had only the
owner and his wife and myself aboard so there was plenty of room
for Sieger. She loves the water, but floating around on these
little insubstantial islands, she thought was an idiotic idea,
and when I started walking around on what is laughingly called
"the deck", she was greatly perturbed.
The next
two days, I was on very crowded boats, so she was left ashore.
After the keelers, came the sailing dinghies. We took Sieger with
us that day. It was so calm in the morning that we just floated.
The only time we made any progress was when the boys did a bit
of rowing.
The water
was so flat that like Edward Lear's "The Jumblies", I could have
"Gone To Sea In a Sieve" and not taken a drop of water aboard.
In the afternoon, a wind got up so we were able to do some sailing.
Sieger,
by this time, had become resigned to the insane antics of her
handler and others of the same species, but when the boat bounced
over the wake of a fast-moving launch, she looked at the water
with a very furrowed brow.
Wind
And Water
The next
story does not directly involve Sieger, but I think that it is
well worth the telling.
The last
two days of the school were given over to races; firstly, in the
dinghies and then the keelers. The weather forecast for the time
that the dinghy races were to take place was for calm conditions,
so in view of this, the course which was supposed to be covered
in ninety minutes was shortened.
]Weather
forecasts being what they are, a half gale was blowing for the
first race, and the boats were back in about 30 minutes. The crews
were partially or fully sighted with the exception of the helmsman
who was blind.
When it
came to the race in which I was to take part, the wind was blowing
even harder than before. We set off with me at the tiller, and
then for some reason of which I was not aware, the skipper who
was a sea scout volunteer helper, but unused to working with blind
people, came down the boat and took the tiller from me and started
to steer himself.
Then,
without telling me that he was handing control back to me, he
went back to the bow of the boat, so there we were in the middle
of a gale with no hand on the helm, not a very healthy position
to be in.
A particularly
violent gust of wind caught the boat, and we started to heel over
most dramatically. It was then that I realized that Jonathon had
gone and I was supposed to be steering.
He shouted
out "port! port!" [what a time to call for a drink.] By then,
the tiller was out of reach and besides which we had capsized
and were "in the drink". The boys got the dinghy upright and I
clambered back over the side.
I had
mentioned when we first started training on these "crown class
cutters", property of the Royal New Zealand Navy, that I was surprised
at the lack of safety equipment. Even
basic bailers were conspicuous by their absence. My shipmates
just laughed and told me not to make such a fuss.
Anyway,
when we fell over, there was not even as much as a baked bean
tin aboard to get rid of the water. I began flicking it out by
hand, but a boat seventeen feet long, by four feet wide and two
feet deep holds a great many handfuls of water.
One of
the rubber duckie rescue boats then arrived, and I transferred
across to it, and our craft was ignominiously towed back to the
wharf. I suffered no injury of any sort, but one other member
of the crew was hurt when he became entangled in the submerged
rigging and he was taken to hospital.
I thought
that the adventure was great fun, and I said that no one could
claim that they had been yachting until they had been capsized.
At least we had a genuine reason for tipping over, unlike another
crew from the school who had capsized their boat while still moored
to the wharf.
THE
FINAL CHALLENGE
Now we
move to the next day which was the keeler race. We drew for what
boat we sailed on. For this race, there were two blind helmsmen
to each boat.
Trevor
Motion and I were drawn to sail on Hornblower, skippered by Jim
Blair. The weather forecast in every respect was a reverse of
the previous day. It was supposed to be a baby gale, whereas,
it was an almost complete calm.
Jim was
the `gun skipper` of the keeler fleet, and very rarely lost a
race, so as he was the handicapper, he started six minutes after
the last of the fleet had been given the signal to start.
The course
was divided into four legs out and in, and at each leg, the helmsman
was changed. In spite of his knowledge of harbour conditions,
Jim made a mistake in his search for wind.
We crept
off to one part of the harbour, but the rest of the fleet went
the other way. They found a little wind, while we "fell into a
hole"**. However, we eventually struggled out and got going again.
We caught up with the rest of the fleet, and started to overtake
them, one by one. I was steering when we went around the outermost
buoy. Trevor had a considerable amount of sight so he found keeping
the boat on course a little easier than I did. Jim set me up so
that we would go about with plenty of water between the boat and
the mark, but by the time we reached it, we skidded around the
buoy with very little room to spare. After we had `gone about`,
Jim patted me on the back and said "well done! a tad closer than
I had bargained on, but we did not touch the buoy and we have
made up a good boat length by doing such a tight turn. [If we
had touched the mark, according to racing rules, as happened to
KZ7 in the final of the challenger races for the America's Cup
at Perth West Australia, we would have had to go around the mark
again]. It was my turn to have the tiller as we crossed the finishing
line. We were in third place, but there was only a couple of boat
lengths in it. We thought that it was a top effort considering
the conditions and that the entire fleet had been in front of
us on two occasions. The course had been laid out with a three
hour time limit, so at the end because of the lack of wind, we
were racing against two additional competitors, namely, time and
tide, which as we know wait for no man.
**(In
an earlier chapter of my book from which this excerpt is taken,
I told a story in which I fell into a hole in the road. I was
eventually helped out by a carborne passerby,*) but on this occasion,
there was no passing motorist to help us out of the hole, and
even if there had been, we were not allowed to accept motorized
assistance and had to rely on what was sent by Mother Nature,
who was not being very generous on that day. the story of "The
Hole" appears in the K-9 Service
Dog chapter.
If
your appetite has been whetted by these stories, they and others
are to be found in "My Life With Guide Dogs". The book is available
directly from the author, Jewel
Blanch on 3.5 inch computer disk at a cost of 10$US, p&h inclusive.
Text and
Images copyright property, contact Jewel
Blanch
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