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celebrating R Y A training


T


here’s a gusty Force 6 slamming into South Cerney Sailing Club near Swindon, screaming in the shrouds of dinghies, thrashing the trees like blown spinnakers. Our photographer wants Lucy Hodges to take a GP14 dinghy out for a


spin. She’s not keen. ‘We’ll probably capsize,’ she says. ‘This wind may be a mast-breaker.’ She turns, feels the wind on her face, decides: ‘Okay, let’s give it a go.’ Lucy has always given it a go. In everything, despite being born with photophobia nystagmus (a condition that renders eyes unusually sensitive to light and subject to involuntarily movements), and despite being registered blind since 1997. There are swimming records. An MBE. A charity. More than anything there are six consecutive gold medals in the Blind Match Racing World Championships and World Blind Fleet Racing Championships, making Lucy one of our most successful disabled sailors ever. For context, you should know she’s only 44.


It seems entirely in character that her earliest ambition was to be a racing-car driver. Why would visual impairment slow her down? Of her childhood near Southend, Essex, she says: ‘My parents were so supportive. It was very much normal life, get on with it.’ Lucy’s first sporting success was


to join the Blind National Championships. ‘I’d only been sailing triangular courses; now, a week later, I’m on the helm.’ Lucy recalls. ‘I had to learn how to start a race, how to hike out. It was zero to hero.’ She returned to Southend to enrol in an RYA Dinghy Level 2 course immediately afterwards. Think about that. Imagine adjusting sails or steering a course while barely able to see. (Lucy’s in the B2 category of visual impairment, able to recognise a hand up to two metres away (normal sight averages 60 metres), with a field of vision of less than five degrees.) It may sound impossible. Actually, Lucy believes sailing is the ideal sport for the visually impaired (VI). It helps that everything on board has its place – cleats don’t move – but that’s not it. People often talk about feel in sailing. Few mean it as literally as VI sailors.


“rya training means knowing that no matter what happens


in swimming. She set two British records and trialled for the Beijing Olympics team. Then, aged 17, her uncle, a commercial ship’s captain, took her sailing. It was love at first sail. ‘Because of my sight, you could quite easily stay inside because things are too difficult,’ Lucy says. ‘There are things to avoid on shore, like bins on pavements, or people. Sailing feels like freedom. You fold up the white cane and you’re stepping out. It’s a great sense of achievement, a massive buzz.’


getting started with sailability


She bought a neighbour’s five-metre yacht with her father. He was listening to Radio 4’s In Touch when it mentioned the introductory RYA Sailability course. ‘Everything started from there,’ she says. On day one of that weekend she sailed around the


cans with an instructor. ‘Fantastic fun! I remember thinking, “I’ve just steered my dad around the course!”.’ On day two she was on board a yacht, learning how to hank on sails and trim them. At the end of the weekend the instructors asked her


On the helm, Lucy gauges wind angles from the sensation of the breeze on her face and hair. Without sight, she is acutely sensitive to changes in heel, to the sounds of sails luffing and flapping, to the vibration through a hull as a boat accelerates. Lucy is probably more in tune with her boat than sighted sailors.


that you can cope, that you’re in control”


the Competitive spirit


In competitive racing, VI sailors combine with sighted crews – a VI helm and mainsheet trimmer with a sighted crew and tactician – for fleet events. (Lucy’s sighted crew say the only difference with VI


crews is better communication. Indeed, tactician Ben Hazeldine believes the GBR blind sailing team benefits his skillset by forcing him to think further ahead.) During two-boat match racing, when a sighted sailor disembarks at the seven-minute gun, VI sailors steer to audio buoys and track their competitor’s position by sounds the boats emit according to port or starboard tack. If that sounds tricky wait until you learn they also have to take into account how sound reflects off water. After securing gold in the Blind Sailing World Championships in Japan 2013, Lucy was awarded an MBE. A huge surprise, she admits. When she met Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace in January 2014 there were tears. ‘I was so proud for the team,’ she says. ‘I knew the work that had gone in. Everything I do is for everyone in the team. It’s so that everyone can have the same opportunities I did as a 17-year-old.’ While Lucy had the skill and ambition to be the best, she is quick to acknowledge the formative role


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