I teach sailing to youngsters aged 10 to 16 (ish) and am looking for some new ideas for games we can play at this end of the season now they are all reasonably competent sailors. Any ideas?

DM

How about letterboxing! The clues could say something like...Sail at 286 degrees until you come to a small island, then sail at 90 degrees untill you get to the floating Canadian Goose (there at time of planting)...Then capsize boat, box should be tethered 6 ft under the surface...etc.

Seriously, you could do a compass course on the water, with some sort of prize at the end of the course in a floating bouy.

When I learned to sail, the squirt guns were always the best part, so I would suggest a capture the flag game. If you get hit (with a squirt gun!) that would be equivalent to being tagged, and you'd have to go to jail (practice the safety position!) and to be rescued, have the rescuers do a man-overboard drill, and then tow the prisoner back. Or have anyone not following proper right of way be a prisoner. Or both. =) I'm not sure how you have things set up, but if you have the staff out on the water, maybe have them carry the flag (just a pool noodle or something), or have it on a buoy somewhere.

Have fun sailing--everyone's back in school where I live!

I just finished up a seasonal sailing program and we did a 'pirate hunt' with the kids dress in pirate garb and the clues cryptically written and taped either on buoys or on items that we left 'ashore' at different points leading to a treasure (filled with cookies and candy) water guns and balers were allowed to 'repel boarders' ...

the other was a scavenger hunt requiring them to finds items.... creativity was encouraged ie "a fresh fish from the sea" (a jelly'fish', shell'fish' or a fish 'fish' were all accepted), signature of the harbor patrol on duty, a compass ... etc

depending on the boats (we used Club 420's) you can do a 'kinetic' race, (which needs 'searoom' to ensure a safe race)... complete 10 - '360's' sailing to the windward mark, remove rudder and sail to a reach (offset) mark, sail backwards (the kids loved to do this trick!) to the leeward mark and sing a sea chanty to the finish blowing their own whistle crossing the line....

Have fun! the summer went too fast for me...

~C~

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I can certainly use and adapt some of your ideas for our mob. One of the main drawbacks we have is that we a fairly small lake (35 acres) and except for one area near our slipway we are not allowed to land on the bank because that is reserved for fishermen - and the land makes more money from them than the sailors.

One game we have played which went down well was half filling with water a number of plastic milk bottles and scattering them up the lake. The sailors are divided into teams and then have to collect the bottles and return them to their team base ashore. The team collecting the most wins. By restricting each boat to only carrying one bottle at a time and having two or three times as many bottles as boats everyone gets involved no matter what their standard.

DM