Sailing Lessons

By Heather M Wood

James is bored. Friends, school and home have all turned sour and now he's stuck on a quiet lakeside holiday with Mum while Dad is away on business. Enter Izzy, a sailing-mad girl who offers to teach James to sail too. Things are just starting to look up when Dad is involved in a serious accident abroad and Mum must fly to his bedside. Luckily, Izzy's grandparents offer to let James stay so that he can continue sailing. Despite his worries about his father to add to his troubles, James enjoys getting to grips with tacking, hiking, capsizing and through his sailing lessons with Izzy learns to come to terms with life back home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heather M Wood
• Release date: Mar 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476145549

Heather M Wood

Heather Wood lives in the heart of West Yorkshire in the north of England, UK, with her husband; an Airedale Terrier and a small flock of hens. She has adorable nieces, hence, Auntie Heather.

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SAILING LESSONS

by

Heather M. Wood

Copyright 2012 Heather M Wood

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For A and E and J and T.

Chapter One

JD was bored. Bored. Bored: Angrily he chucked a stone into the water at his feet. He should have been at home right now hanging out with his mates or at the theme park with his cousins, or anywhere but here being bored in this boring bore hole.

‘Go and explore the lake for an hour or so, darling, you can tell me all about it when you get back’, he muttered a passable imitation of his mother’s voice as she’d sent him out of the cottage whilst she unpacked and settled in.

It was all stupid Josh’s fault. If he hadn’t got caught nicking that stuff from that girlie store in town Mum would never have decided to come here for the holidays. Not just a week or two, but the whole six weeks. Six weeks! JD’d told her it wasn’t nuffin’ to do wiv him; he’d just been standing outside the shop while Josh’d done it for a dare to impress this girl he fancied, but Mum just told him to speak properly and that some peace and quiet and fresh air in a place away from the likes of Josh would do them all good. Then Dad had agreed with Mum and that was the end of the argument. It might not be so bad if Dad were here; he’d said he’d take JD fishing on the lake, not that he’d seen a single stupid fish yet, and they’d hire mountain bikes and go exploring the trails through the nearby forest, but then Dad’s work had needed him to go abroad to sort out some thing or other and now Dad wasn’t going to be here for a couple of weeks yet: Boring.

JD sat down cross-legged on the end of a sort of wooden platform built out from the land into the water; his cupped his chin in his hand; his elbow supported by his knee. The platform was attached to the bank at the end nearest the land, but this end floated free somehow and had bobbed gently as he had walked along it; a bit like a raft, but then not. Someone had fixed old car tyres half in and half out of the water all around the sides of the platform. JD wondered briefly if these were to help the platform float, then he dismissed the thought; it was too boring, like the rest of this dump. He made sure the hood of his sweatshirt was pulled well forward, his face shielded from the sun, and peered out across the boring old lake. I bet Josh hasn’t been banished to some outback hole, he thought, it’s not fair; it wasn’t like I stole anything.

A small boat came in to view and JD watched as it zigged and then zagged across the sparkling water. It had one red, white and blue striped sail and there appeared to be only one person sailing it: Boring. Suddenly the small, zig-zagging boat turned and headed directly at JD, or at least directly at the platform on which he sat. Whoever was guiding the boat was now hidden behind the sail and JD wondered if they could see where they were going. Did they know that they were on a collision course? The small boat drew nearer: JD jumped up in alarm, his hood falling back from his head, should he call out? At what seemed like the very last moment the small boat turned sharply and stopped right alongside the platform, its sail flapping loosely in the wind.

‘Hi! Can you catch this?’ A voice called and the end of a rope landed at JD’s feet. He bent and picked it up; the other end was attached to the front of the small boat.

‘Er… got it’, he called back.

‘Thanks, I won’t be a minute.’ Noises came from the small boat and then a figure, its face half hidden beneath the peak of an old, sun-bleached baseball cap, appeared around the front of the sail and climbed off the small boat on to the platform.

‘Would you mind giving me a hand to get the boat out of the water?’ A girl’s face grinned up at JD; her hazel eyes twinkling.

‘Umm… No, what do I do?’ asked JD, taken aback, he hadn’t thought that the sailor might be a girl, but why shouldn’t it be?

‘Just walk her round to the slipway for me, while I get her trolley, OK?’

‘Er… slipway?’ JD asked, hesitantly, feeling stupid for having to ask.

‘Oh! Sorry! You see there at the side of the pontoon where the ground slopes down into the water? That’s the slipway. Just let her float out to the end of her painter,’ the girl indicated the rope he was holding, ‘then you’ll be able to step off the pontoon and round on to the slipway without getting your feet wet.’ She grinned at him again and went ahead to the slipway.

Painter, thought JD; that’s this rope I’m holding and this platform’s really a pontoon. Why do sailors call everything by such daft names?

JD set off after the girl, gently pulling the small boat after him. It was very light and easier to pull along than it looked. Now, as he followed the girl, he could see that she had straight, light brown hair. She wore it tied back in a short ponytail and then pulled through the gap in the back of her baseball cap. She was small and skinny; smaller than JD, who was tall for his age. ‘Tall, blue-eyed and blonde; a killer combination’, his Mum often said, much to his embarrassment. So much for that, it was being tall and blonde that had got him into trouble along with Josh.

At the end of the pontoon, just as the girl had said, there was enough rope between the small boat and JD to let him stay on dry land, but still allow the boat to float. The girl had pulled a long, low, oblong trolley out of the bushes by the slipway; it was no more than a frame, really, with two wheels at the corners of one of the shorter ends. She manoeuvred the trolley in to the water using the end furthest from the wheels as a handle.

‘Right, we need to get the trolley under her hull, so if you float her this way, then pull her forward towards me when I say…’ Together JD and the girl lined up the small boat with its trolley and suddenly they were dragging both boat and trolley up the slipway together.

‘Stop!’ called the girl, when the boat was halfway up the slipway and all but its back end was out of the water. ‘Let me tie her painter round the trolley handle and then you won’t have to hold it.’ Once the small boat was securely tied to