Link to a review by Carol Standish of Nick’s book Saving Sailing – Main Harbors
Saving Sailing available at Amazon
Back in 2010, at about the same time that Nicholas Hayes published his book Saving Sailing I returned to active sailing after an 18 year absence from the sport. As I looked around at the familiar harbor where I had spent much of my youth, I realized that the sailboats were gone. In a conversation with my brother, Darren, he suggested we both buy Nick’s book because it addressed the same concerns we were having about the future of the sport in our area.
Come to find out, after reading just an excerpt from Saving Sailing, we found that sailing wasn’t just drying up in our area, but throughout the country. Our own children would soon be old enough to try sailing and we wanted to be proactive, but we had never been taught sailing in any official way. We came into sailing because it was available, it was fun – it was a small boat we could rig and dump in the water. Could our kids learn the same way? Fast forward to 2013 and we are now to a point that we need to make sailing available to our kids. We’ve decided to go both routes: make small boats available to them and enroll them in our local youth sailing classes.
Once again, as I reflect on our children sailing, I defer to some of the tenants espoused by Nick Hayes:
– It’s about nostalgia; creating a connection between events and people in our lives.
– Sailing is better than soccer; a sport were an eight-year-old can compete with her seventy-year-old grandmother.
– Be a mentor for sailing; create contagious enthusiasm for the sport.
Videos below, taken inside the Detroit Yacht Club, are of Nick’s own recounting of his experiences with sailing and research for his books:
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