Ten year old Sarah would be very proud of me for going on a Real Life adventure holiday. I may have come a long way from flicking through Christian water sports holiday brochures and browsing for wetsuits on our chunky family computer, but yet I am, at heart and ability, just ten years old.
Choosing to learn a new skill at twenty one in circles where everyone has been sailing or windsurfing since before they remember was terrifying. I was the only one from our club to sign up to beginner sailing, the only one who didn't know the difference between up and down wind, port or starboard, broad or beam reach. Until Vassiliki, I had never been in a single handed boat before, I had only crewed boats with confident sailors who told me what to do and where I could enjoy being on the sea without the stress of making decisions.
I wanted to be good already. I wanted the year I've spent at Whitstable sporadically sailing to mean that I would pick it up easily, for my instructor to tell me that I was naturally gifted and talented. But of course I haven't really sailed before so I struggled just as much as everyone else.
And that's fine. Or should be fine. Or would be fine if I was anyone else.
But I'm not good at sticking at things that I'm not automatically good at.
So it became a double struggle, one with the boat for not doing what I wanted when I wanted it to do it and one with myself.
As Thursday was a day off, our group decided to do a race, a basic but pretty big course way out to sea, just for fun. As I have been sailing with them all year and look like a twenty one year old, they encouraged me to take part. However, what they failed to realise was that when it came to it, standing in the sea, my sail going wild in the rapidly increasing wind, I really was just a ten year old girl with big dreams of sailing holidays in the sunshine. I had no idea what I was doing. I got in, put my daggerboard down, sheeted in my sail, and held on for dear life. Vassiliki is one of the top places in the world for windsurfing due to the strong winds that come mid afternoon. Our race was at 3pm, and those winds had come.
I put my feet in the straps and leant out of my tiny Pico as far as humanly possible to keep my boat as steady as I could, following one of the boys from our sailing club who would surely know what he was doing. I came to the area where everyone was attempting to congregate, struggling to stay still in the wind, tacked round and found myself struggling once more to keep the boat afloat, the wind pounding my sail. I could feel myself capsizing before I actually capsized, watched in slow motion as the boat tipped further and further until I was flung out. I could have attempted a dry capsize, but I couldn't move quick enough, couldn't make my body work how I wanted it to. So there I was, in the Mediterranean, a tiny figure in an enormous sea, trying to breathe and keep myself calm. I could fix this, I knew how to right a dinghy, I'd done it before on numerous occasions. I swam round, keeping a hand on the boat, knowing how quickly the wind could take it from me, and found the daggerboard. I pushed down on it with all my weight, watching as the mast came out of the water until it was almost upright. I let go of it slightly, hoping the momentum would pull it all the way up and I could grab the side and hoist myself in, but it didn't. I tried again, and again, and again. By the time the safety boat came to see how I was doing, I was exhausted and frustrated and trying not to cry. He directed me gently, stay close to the boat, use your feet on the hull, but nothing he tried worked. Whereas before I had managed to move the boat almost completely upright, now I couldn't move it at all despite putting all my weight on the daggerboard. In the end I had to get in the safety boat and he had to right it himself. I felt completely defeated, like a child I had had to be rescued. He asked me if I wanted to get back in and start the race but I knew I couldn't do it, I couldn't even work out where the start line was. So he towed my dinghy back to shore and I got out, thanking him and trying even harder not to cry.
How was I ever going to be able to sail? It was so frustrating to be so far behind everyone else, to be learning things that they picked up without even realising it. Ten year old Sarah stood in the sea and felt so small and so lost. Why had I even come? I wanted to curl up in my bed in humiliation, so I pulled off my buoyancy aid, grabbed my key, drew a plastic smile on my face for the windsurfers in my group and went to my room to cry.
I was an awful sailor, everyone thought I was useless. I couldn't take a boat out on my own, I couldn't remember sailing terms or knots, I couldn't even work out which way the wind was blowing. I had failed my boldly proclaimed goal at the start of the year to learn to sail. I wanted to phone Adam, but I had no signal. I wanted to give up and go home.
I don't do things I'm not good at and clearly sailing came under that category.
A little while later Laura came into our room with a worried look on her face. I am so glad you're here, she said, we thought you were still out on the sea, you forgot to sign out! I laughed weakly and assured her that I was fine, that I had to be towed in and that I had had to give up on the race. We didn't do it, she told me, it was too windy, everyone was capsizing. And just like that, I realised that I hadn't, in fact, failed. It was just too windy. I struggled like everyone else did and had capsized like everyone else did. I wasn't weak or useless, just a beginner.
I got my level 1 sailing certificate when I finished the week, the start of my sailing journey. At the moment I don't really know what I'm doing, things haven't become instinctive, I don't know how to use a dinghy to its full potential. But I did learn to sail, just as I said I would.
It's hard starting something new, starting from the very beginning. It's hard to be where you would have been 11 years ago in a different life. It's hard to see everyone else sailing with ease and taking out boats on their own. It's hard to have to beg people to go out with you even though you don't know what you are doing, even though they will have to explain everything to you.
But it wont always be hard and I wont always be a beginner. I hope to get my level 2, to sail every weekend in my final year, to learn how to sail the catamaran at our club which I love so much. I don't know if I'll ever own a boat, or race, or crew as I would love to one day do, but I will learn to sail properly. It may take me a long time, a long, frustrating, difficult time of getting to grips with everything, but I will get there.
Ten year old Sarah would be proud of me for going to Greece, for finally going on that adventure holiday. Her eyes would be wide in awe at the beautiful place I got to learn to sail in, at the way I got up time and time again as I tried to windsurf, at the sight of me standing for the first time on a paddleboard. It was my dream ever since we went sailing on a little lake with no wind eleven years ago. It was worth the wait, it was worth the smack on the head that I got from thinking I didn't need to wear a helmet because the advanced sailors weren't, it was worth getting up early, hungover and tired each morning to go to the lessons, it was worth the freezing cold weekends in Whitstable in November. Because I love being on the water, I love sailing.
I am not ten years old anymore, I do not give up when things are hard, and one day you won't know the difference between me and those who've sailed their whole lives. One day I'll just sail. And it will be beautiful.
