8th – 15th July 2018
When I was a child I would very often sit in the car with my Mum and Sister. It was ether at Draycote Waters or Weymouth beach. We would sit there for hours while my Dad and Brother would go windsurfing.
When I got a bit older my Dad then taught me. I remember I loved it. Once he even took me away to Sardinia for a week of windsurfing. If I think of my favourite childhood memory of my Dad that holiday would be it. It was a real father-daughter bonding time.
The only bad thing was that we had to share a room and he snores. His bed was over the other side of the room and I could still hear him! Every night I grabbed a pile of socks and placed them by my bed. I would throw them at him every time he kept me awake. I always ran out!
On that holiday my windsurfing really progressed and I have to say that I even got quite good.
That was about 25 years ago. Since then I haven’t got on a board. It hasn’t even been a desire of mine to try it again.
When We recently arrived in Greece I noticed they do refresher windsurfing lessons and I thought I would sign up and see how I would get on. This shocked me more than it did Matt – I don’t know what possessed me to do it.
So this week I have had 2 lessons . I knew my biggest challenge would be getting on the board itself. My upper body strength is basically non existent and worse since I had my op. I have never been able to get on a boat even when it has a ladder.
To my surprise I got on the board several times. I not only got on, I also stood up and on a couple of occasions I was even sailing. I was in the water more than I was on the board though!
I definitely wasn’t as graceful as my drawing either. It should have been a drawing of me falling in rather than sailing with style but that would have been a boring drawing.
However I learnt something with these lessons. It took so much effort to get on the board, standup, get the sail up, make sure you are balanced correctly and then get in the right sailing position. You start to think if all that effort worth it. But then you have that brief moment (for me it really was very brief) when you are doing everything correct and you are actually sailing – that makes all that effort worth it.
Sometimes I look back and remember all the hard work I put in to lose weight and to be more active. These lessons and opportunity to windsurf again have made all that hard work worth it.
