Coop's Corner

  Editor’s note: This month’s Corner first appeared in Sail1Design.com. © Catherine Roche With summer not far off, sailing programs around the country are gearing up for their lesson sessions. There will be high school sailors teaching and coaching Opti sailors, college sailors teaching and coaching high school sailors, and adult coaches coaching college sailors. The interaction between instructor and student is an important one. I am in my fifteenth season of coaching The Prout School Sailing team…

Editor’s note: This is the second installment of “Coop’s Prout Sailing essay,” part 1of which you’ll find at windcheckmagazine.com/article/coop-on-mindset-in-sailboat-racing-part-one/. “These are two parts of the same idea,” explains Coach Coop, who emails this wisdom to The Prout School Sailing Team before the start of each season. “It’s the same philosophy of sailing and by extension, at least in my view, life.” © Rick Bannerot, Ontheflyphoto.net The very first thing you need to settle on in your mind…

Editor’s note: This month’s missive precedes another in our next edition entitled ‘Get Used to Being in Front.’ “These essays are two parts of the same idea,” explains Coach Coop, who shared this wisdom with The Prout School Sailing Team years ago and continues to do so before the start of each season. “It’s the same philosophy of sailing and by extension, at least in my view, life.” Why this essay? As you will read, and (continue…

Much rum has been spilled, I suggest, over discussions pertaining to “The Perfect Boat.” Most likely The Perfect Boat is the one that suits your purposes, closely followed by the one you have…The boats for folks who like racing, gunkholing, entertaining their mates or ocean voyaging are all vastly different, yet each owner might argue theirs is the perfect boat. Few of us are in a position to create a craft we view as the perfect boat….

By Joe Cooper I have read that the teenager’s brain is only half-cooked, versus a Mature brain. Human brains apparently do not cure until say 25 or so. I think about this in the sense of how we record and process information. And then act on the information processed. Imagine your Christmas shopping date, on Fifth Avenue, Christmas week. The streets are jam-packed with people shopping, armfuls of shopping bags extending out to the sides like an…

By Joe Cooper What was it like when you learned to sail? This is a question put to me by one of The Prout School Sailing team kids a few years ago. I had to stop and think about the answer for a moment. There was nothing like “sailing camp” or instruction for kids in Australia, in the late 1950s through most of the 1960s. It was very much “stick ‘em in the boat and push ’em…

I don’t go to church. Or rather, I do not attend church on a regular basis, as a parishioner. In fact, while thinking about this column, I tried to count the number of times I had been into a church, as distinct from going to church. I got to about ten times. This count does not include four months in Italy after the 1982 Sardinia Cup, but that’s Italy; more like ten a week. My parents were…

Thirteen-year-old Wilson Meunier Mott is a rising eighth grader at Monsignor Clark School in Wakefield, RI. For his class service project, he had a corker of an idea: Sailing from New London to Stonington, CT in his Opti, solo, to raise funds for the New England Science & Sailing Foundation’s Fund a Student Scholarship Challenge, so that New London school kids can get time at NESS. I spoke with Wilson not long after he arrived at the…

I spend a decent amount of time working at the Cruising Club of America’s Safety at Sea Seminars. If you have done one, a hands-on one, you will know there is an awful lot of “stuff” thrown at you in eight hours. In the wider sense, it’s unrealistic for folks to hoist everything aboard. Like I tell the new kids joining the Prout Sailing team, after I’ve been pontificating for an hour early in the season, “If…

I have not told anyone about the theme of this month’s essay, nor have I asked if it’s OK to write on the subject. I have thought about one or the other or both for about a week. All the while, each afternoon we gather to sail, watching, mostly, the smiles and good cheer returning. For most, not all, for some still show the pain they carry. I’m fortunate in that I have a lifetime of hiding…