Transition Year  Sailing Course

Transition year is broken up into three classes. Each class does different activities and classes which we rotate every ten weeks. This allows each class to experience all that Transition Year has to offer.

On Tuesdays TY2 go to Dun Laoghaire. Here we do a sailing course. We meet outside the building at ten and sail till around a quarter to one.

In our first class we learned about the different parts of the boats we would be using before our instructor, Niall, took us outside and showed us how to rig the boats. We broke into pairs and prepared our boats for the water. The wind was behind us so it was easy going. We were shown the tack turn so we practiced it until we were confident enough to go farther out.

On our second week we were shown how to do the jive turn which is much faster than the tack turn. To do the tack turn you push the rudder towards the sail while to perform the jive turn you pull it away from the sail. We were also shown how to right the boat if we get stuck head to wind and how to right it if we capsize.

We were also taught the three points of sailing. Running is when you are sailing with the wind behind you. You let your sail go out all the way to take full advantage of the wind and sit in the middle of the boat to keep it balanced. Reaching is when you sail across the wind. You let the sail out half way and sit on the opposite side of the boat from the sail.

The last point of sailing is beating. This is when you are sailing head to the wind.(Evan Heritage)

Self Defence

This year the transition year students are doing self defence in the school gym. Their coach is called Joe who teaches a class in the school gym every week. It gives the students a chance to learn how to protect themselves from other people if a situation arises. The students practice different types of boxing and wrestling so they can handle any dangerous situation. As well as learning how to defend ourselves, we played fun games with the other Transition Year students and had a few competitions as well. Joe, the instructor, also showed them how to be aware of their surroundings as most victims of assault were not aware of their surroundings at the time of their attack which is quite a worrying statistic. People should always be aware of their surroundings.(David Kearns)

Mondello

Mondello driving park was lots of fun I enjoyed it a lot it was good craic.

First we got to go into a classroom and learn about road safety I thought this was very informative and I enjoyed it a lot. Next we did a brake reaction test. How this Is done is they sit you in a car and there are two lights in front of you. The instructor sits beside you in the passenger seat of the car. She had a control for the lights and when she hit the lights you had to press the brake and a machine timed how long it took for you to press the brake. It was fun. Afterwards she told us that most people get between .4 and .5 seconds. Most of my class got between .5 and .2. One person even got .13 which was the best in the year. This was a good day out and I learned a lot. (Daniel Fox)