Job description draft

 Sailing instructor 

What is a sailing instructor ? Most of you would know already and if you don't I’m sure you can figure it out. For those of you who can't, a sailing instructor is a person who teaches sailing ; sounds fair enough ? Well that’s typically how we are thought of anyways just showing up teaching and then going home or going out for ceaseless partying until the next round of classes. That isn’t entirely untrue, there is a fair amount of accuracy behind that assessment but there's much more to it I swear. Our whole lifestyle, during the summer at least, is quite literally waking up with a massive headache, going to work, and then going out again to wake up the following morning with an equally massive headache as the morning before. Weekends are too short to really break the cycle so this is really how our life is for 2 months out of every year. 

But that's not why we do it. At least that’s not why I do it, I can’t speak for others, they seem to enjoy it a bit too much. Don’t get me wrong, as far as vacations go it's a pretty amazing lifestyle if you don’t require all that much sleep. And there is a lot more behind it than just teaching kids to sail. If anything we’re the ones that learn the most from this experience. Teaching a sport, and I think ultimately teaching anything, makes you really think about why and how something works or why it doesn't. 

For example, you’re taught early in your last years of training that the little cloth pieces tied to the back of your sail are supposed to fly straight like a flag, and you don’t really question it. Turns out, it’s extremely difficult to explain why especially if you’re teaching adults or young kids. The adults are the ones that’ll question your authority the most because you’re 17 and they’re 40 so they must be better sailors than you, while the kids just question everything. So I had to go out and learn why these pieces of cloth need to fly straight. It turns out it has to do with the wind flowing by the sail in a laminar fashion, not that complex an explanation but the next day you would return to the kid and explain why and that seemed to fuel their interest in the sport, even if they only got to do it for a week each year. 

Had I not had to explain it, chances are I would’ve never learned this, and turns out when you’re forced to research such details daily you become a much better sailor, and really fast too. So I could’ve done it for experience, but frankly I wasn’t expecting it to occur to such an extent, so no that’s not what I did it for. 

We would wake up every day in order to be there by 7. Sometimes this meant we were running on 4 hours of sleep or less but nevertheless we were happy and all this despite not getting paid. Well to be fair, we got “paid in experience” but most importantly we got paid in free stuff ; free material, free classes, free late night sailing sessions and much much more. Since most of us were under 18 we really didn’t need the money at all and this was more than sufficient. So did we do it for free stuff ? Well once again maybe some did but I definitely didn’t. Why would I have ? My parents didn’t mind paying for the classes anyways. 

Although most of our day consisted of teaching, a good part of the job was also what I would call shenanigans. Not in the fun childlike way, more in the we were the handymen way. Whatever the actual older teachers didn’t want to do ; this meant fixing engines, running inventory, patching up boats (or just setting new ones up), etc… By no means an uninteresting part of the job but not really what I was expecting when signing up. I did learn a lot, maybe even the most from these shenanigans but they really weren't what I was interested in. 

Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I wanted to teach. I can’t explain it really, I didn't consider myself a particularly altruistic person at the time but I desperately wanted to pass on what I knew. Sailing is one of my lifelong passions, no doubt there. Still, why would I want to teach it instead of practicing it myself ? Well I have no idea but clearly, it was motivating enough to get me to work from 7 to 9 each day for the better part of my summer. 

Here’s exactly what my day was like. In the morning we had to prep all the boats. Although this was summer the temperature was sometimes as low as 43-44 degrees and often you were in the water and wind. You of course couldn’t wear pants because they would have gotten drenched. So most of the time we wore swimming shorts and a hoodie, and that's it. As you can imagine, on cold mornings it got very chilly indeed. 

When our fingers were frozen solid and we were either soaked or covered in sand (or both), now was time to pull out our smiles to greet the clients. Sometimes that was the most difficult part of our day, not because of the cold or the water, just because of the clients. But we were also there because of them, those who wanted to learn, those who were curious, those people really were our motivation. For the next 8 hours we were teaching, apart from lunch but even then most of that break was spent fixing some mess no one else wanted to deal with, which meant ultimately we ended up eating a sandwich occasionally not even coming back to land. 

When we did eventually finish the last course we had to pack everything up, which is never fun knowing you’re going to have to wake up much earlier the next morning just to prep it all over again. Sometimes the students would help us pack up, sometimes not. When they didn't, which was quite often we would take a solid hour to put everything away, then another hour to put the sails away and do some more maintenance and then finally another hour to clean and close up. All in all we were done by 8 or 9 pm. 

These seem like hellish conditions ? exploitation maybe ? sure I can't really argue with that on paper but we all really enjoyed it. We were part of a team, part of a community which ensured we all had phenomenal summers. We could have gotten a paying job anywhere else but we chose not to, and we chose not to because we all loved it more than anything else.