We’re excited about reprising our sailing program, this one is a collaboration with the Yacht Club of Hyderabad (YCH). If you’ve been interested in learning how to sail, we promise we’ll provide you with an excellent learning experience as well as real sailing and, best of all, racing.

Kids are welcome! Ages 8+ please. We will be going through fairly technical aspects of sailing, so if you think you’ll need to accompany your child to ensure that they follow the instruction, you should do that. Likewise for the trip, parents are encouraged to come with, or even participate.

The three parts are:

1. SAILING PRIMER

This is a three session orientation for sailing terminology and principles, so a good way to get mentally prepped for the sailing trip in June. Ages 8+. You will learn:

– Basic sailing terms and principles

– Sailboat mechanics and moving parts

The dates for the sessions are:

Saturday 3rd June 11.30 AM

Monday 5th June 7.30 PM

Wednesday 7th June 7.30 PM

The primer is not charged separately, so if you’ve paid for the Hyderabad trip, you’re good to go for this as well.

2. SAILING 101 IN HYDERABAD – JUNE 9 TO 11

A three-day training trip to Hyderabad. Hosted and run by the Yacht Club of Hyderabad, this is where you get on a boat, learn about the boat and how to operate it, and learn the basic mechanics of crewing.

The three days will be at times literally immersive, you’ll be on the water most mornings and afternoons in two sessions per day, culminating in some racing within the group. There is a lot of physical skill and coordination involved with sailing, so practice is super important.

The Yacht Club of Hyderabad has Omega Topaz’s, which are nice 16 ft racing dinghies. They’re responsive and fine-tuned, so demand a lot of attention, and you’ll spend the better part of the three days just getting familiar with them. Once you do, you’ll start to get the hang of manoeuvring them, and will begin to acquire a feel for wind speed and direction, and how to get performance out of your boat.

The final day you should expect to spend racing! Hussain Sagar is really lovely, and not especially dirty or smelly (although I wouldn’t drink its water). So you’ll learn to pick up the traces of wind, tuning your sails depending on the weather, and how to deal with both low winds and ideally high winds as well, weather permitting.

A note on the date: you should keep both weekends free, the 9th to 11th as well as the 16th to 18th, in case the weekend of the 9th is expected to be in the doldrums and there’s simply no wind to sail on. In that case, we’ll fall back to the following weekend, the 16th to 18th.

You should know how to swim for this trip! It is likely that your boat will tip over, so you need to be comfortable being in water, and hauling yourself back in. The boat has a moving part called a boom, so getting dunked is actually something you should expect to and even hope to experience.

The trip is self-funded (your stay and travel, etc.) and you’ll decide as a group where to stay, when to fly, etc. You will additionally be paying Rs 8,500 for your sailing experience, to Delhi Rock, and we’ll collect payments and forward on to YCH.

3. MONSOON REGATTA – LATE JULY

The Monsoon Regatta is an annual event hosted by YCH and is a pretty monster event. Because sailboats are balanced by human weight, with heavy wind, or heavy sails as they’re called (you will grow to enjoy sailing language, it’s an old and well-loved part of the English language!) you have to “hike” out and balance your boat to get the most speed from it.

So racing in heavy winds is exciting and also difficult because you have to be precise with your timing and coordination to keep your boat balanced. And so sailors are tested on their physical endurance, coordination, team work and instinct for hours. It’s an incredible, indelible experience.

The entire trip will be five days, two spent training and recovering your sea legs, and arranging for you to join a more experienced crew (there will be three people to a boat, an experienced helmsman, and two crew members). Once you’re in a crew, you’ll be racing in monsoon weather for three days!

This will be by far the most difficult, technical, and intense part of the sailing course, so not for the faint of heart! Racing is extremely intense, in the monsoons it’ll be gruelling (you’ll spend hours a day doing various versions of planks, and moving very fast at intervals on a heaving boat), and you’ll probably end up getting shouted at a lot! So all in all, super fun.

Once again, the cost of travel and acco is born by you, and in addition the fees for YCH, paid to Delhi Rock, will be Rs 13,500 per person. This is inclusive of your entry fee, boat rental, etc.

We will ask the YCH crew to let us know who they think will be ready to participate in the regatta, because fitness, teamwork, coordination will all count, so we want to be fair to the others taking part and ensure that we send people from Delhi who are absolutely prepped for what this will entail.

We’ll likely do a month-long physical intensive at the gym leading up to the trip, so you get some fitness basics sorted out and are mentally prepped for how gruelling it will be! This will be with the same person we’ll have training you during the primer. We want you to defend Delhi Rock’s honour!

PARTICIPATE

Please email your interest in the trips and training program to team@delhirock.com. We’ll add you to our Facebook group for the program, and let you know about payment and registration!