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The Number-One Priority

As a personal friend and great admirer of the late Paul Risseeuw, the Pettipaug Yacht Club’s long serving creator and director of the Pettipaug Sailing Academy, this is to wish Ann Courcy every success as Paul’s successor. To say that Ms. Courcy has large shoes to fill in replacing Paul, is an understatement.

As noted in Rita Christopher’s “Person of the Week” profile of Jan. 28 “Ann Courcy: In Her Nature”], Ann Courcy has already brought something new to the Sailing Academy with her introduction of STEM workshops. Under these new programs, Sailing Academy sailors learn about the buoyancy of objects in the water and their displacement.

All this is well and good, but the number-one priority for a student learning to sail at the Sailing Academy must be to knowing what to do, when her or his sailboat capsizes, as academy sailboats frequently do. Here the crucial decision for the student sailor, now in the water, is to choose between hanging on to the swamped but still floating sailboat, or to try to swim to shore. In most cases, as Courcy’s students will undoubtedly learn, the preferred choice by far is to hang on to the swamped sailboat, rather than trying to swim to shore. The shoreline from the water always looks closer than it actually is.

With this lesson learned, and so much more, I wish Ann Courcy great success, as she takes the helm of the Pettipaug Sailing Academy, from her much admired predecessor, Paul Risseeuw.

Jerome L. Wilson

Essex