The 2023 season — a year the weather fought back

Drawn from the AB Class report by Becky Steele in The Golden Dolphin 2024, Parkstone Yacht Club’s annual magazine. The full report, and the rest of the club’s year, is in that issue.

An early start that the wind ignored

The fleet went afloat in April, earlier than usual, on the reasoning that more weeks on the water before Youth Week could only help. The weather took a different view. It was a season of either not enough wind or far too much, and on several Sundays only the Gold Fleet got out at all — alongside the CAP parents determined enough to introduce a child to sailing in conditions that mostly resulted in the bow going under.

The Brownsea Island picnic race, normally a fixture of any AB season, was lost entirely. Every alternative date was tried and none of them held.

What happened anyway

Almost seventy ABs raced at Youth Week — which, in a year like that one, says more about the fleet than a results sheet would. Pirate Camp landed in genuine sunshine. There was a fish and chip supper, a pizza night, the themed Friday Funs, and an Intergalactic Championship.

The ladder, described from the inside

The report is also the clearest account we have found of how a child moves through the fleet.

CAP is where a child steers a reaching course while a parent is folded into the front of the boat — a crew whose job is to watch everything at once, bend like a gymnast, and keep their own competitive instincts to themselves.

Bronze is where the parent gets out. That is the moment of watching your child sail away without you from the deck of a rescue boat, able to do nothing about any of it.

Silver is where learning to sail upwind begins, and it is usually the biggest fleet — still a training fleet rather than a racing one.

Gold is the sharp end.