Ahoy mates!
You can enjoy the wind in your face and the waters of Lake Simcoe with the help of the Barrie Yacht Club.
The club, located at the bottom of Johnson Street, was registered in 1952 as a not-for-profit social club and has members with varying degrees of experience working a tiller. (For you non-nautical types, that’s the thingy that steers the boat.)
But even if you don’t own a sailboat, or even have any experience, you can still enjoy the wind and the occasional spray of Kempenfelt Bay in your face.
Longtime sailor John Osborne has been a Barrie Yacht Club member since 1983 after moving here from Montreal.
“I’ve always sailed and it’s a natural thing for me to belong to the yacht club,” he says before taking part in a recent competition. “I’ve had a variety of boats (over the years) and I don’t actually own one right now, so I’ve taken to crewing with other people in sort of a coach/mentor role.
“It’s about giving something back to the sport.”
Osborne is definitely no stranger to sailing.
He won a gold medal for Britain in 1976 in the Tornado/Catamaran class, when the Olympics were in Canada, on a 20-foot, two-man catamaran.
Osborne says the Barrie Yacht Club has a great race program.
“They are an enthusiastic bunch of people. They have a wonderful turnout Wednesday night for racing,” he says. “It’s close to home and a fantastic setting here in Barrie.”
He basically only races, but will occasionally take people out for a cruise.
“I’ve been racing since I was five or six years old, so that’s in my blood,” Osborne says, adding he’s raced all sorts of boats in many places around the world — Australia, New Zealand, Honolulu, Californina, Germany, France, Italy — as well as a couple of trans-Atlantic runs on big 80-foot racing boats.
Now the 74-year old is happy to call Barrie his home port.
“It’s a good place to sail and a good place to race,” Osborne says of Kempenfelt Bay. “It’s a challenging piece of water, but it’s the winds you get here in as much as they are quite variable. They come from different directions all the time.
“So that’s what makes it interesting; that’s what makes all racing interesting.”
He’s also keen on sharing his nearly seven decades of knowledge.
“What I pass on is everything about racing,” Osborne says. “How to start; how to plot your course; how to read the wind; how to trim the sails; boat handling; weight position in the boat: multiple things.”
Fellow Barrie Yacht Club member Marc Hill hasn’t been at it for as long as Osborne, but has a similar zeal for the sport.
“It was the excitement of being on the water,” Hill says, prior to heading out on his boat Afternoon Delight. “And it’s doing something for us that was a new hobby and pastime.”
Members with sailing experience gave him the confidence to head out onto the water.
“We went out on a few races with different boats and one of our friends who was a member here suggested we might want to buy a boat,” Hill says. “At first we thought it was going to be impossible: the cost, the maintenance and so many challenges. But then we realized that it was actually quite affordable.”
He says sailing isn’t necessarily easy to learn, but easy enough when you put your mind to it to understand the wind and understand the sails.
“The club is really welcoming and members help each other out,” Hill says. “Everyone here, at some point in their life, has started in the same place and they are willing to help you get to the next level.”
The club offers adult lessons as well as sessions for kids from eight to 16 years old with the possibility of joining a race team.
“There are so many opportunities for different kinds of memberships,” he says. “It’s accessible; you don’t necessarily have to become a full-time member. You can also come out and crew and become part of the (club) community.
“It’s a great way to spend some time on the water,” he adds. “It’s a great sport if you’re a person with an active mind. It helps you focus on just one thing and it’s a great stress reliever.”
Osborne says sailors are a pretty active bunch.
“We ski, curl and do stuff like that and when I lived in England, of course, we sailed year round. It’s what I was born to do basically.”
