Throughout Semester 1, I did an outdoor education elective called Wind Waves Water. The activities which I participated in were sailing, stand-up paddle boarding, synchronised swimming, and diving. Many of these activities involved teamwork and communication with people that I didn’t know too well.

My first activity that I participated in was sailing. This was a great experience as I have never done it before. We learnt all the parts of the boat, how to steer it, control it, and use the wind to move. At points there were times where we didn’t have much movement because there was no wind and times where we were moving at quite a bit of speed. The times where we weren’t moving much provided an opportunity to teamwork and find ways to solve the problem. On each boat, there were two or three people. One person would be the skipper, another person would be controlling the ropes, and the third person would be the lookout. If you were the skipper of the boat, you would basically be controlling it. It gave me a great opportunity to improve my communication skills and improve my overall sailing skills. The lookout would have to be clear and always attentive. We took turns rotating through the roles and this enabled me to improve lots of different skills, including communication, awareness, and knowledge of how to read wind patterns. Overall, I feel sailing helped me in not only just boat skills, but also everyday skills like communication.

The second activity I did was stand-up paddle boarding. Though this was a lot more independent, it still required a lot of communication and teamwork. We worked in pairs, however predominately only one person was on the water at a time. We learnt multiple paddle strokes which allowed us to move forwards and turn. I didn’t realise how much technique was involved in just standing properly in stand-up paddle boarding. When I was on the board individually, I still had to communicate with other people to make sure that we didn’t run into each other. On a few sessions towards the end of the lesson, we went on the board in pairs. One person would be standing and paddling at the back and the other would be sitting at the front. This was actually a real challenge as balancing was a lot harder. Teamwork and communication were both key concepts when we were doing this, the person at the back would have to tell the person at the front whether they needed to move to balance the board correctly and the person at the front would be looking for other boards to make sure that we didn’t run into them. I thought stand-up paddle boarding was really fun and I learnt lots of different techniques which I didn’t know I would need.

The last two activities were synchronised swimming and diving. Diving was very much individual but was a very fun experience as I have never done it before and we were able to jump of springboards and different heights of platforms. Synchronised swimming definitely required teamwork as we worked in groups of 3 or 4 when first learning the different positions used. Throughout the sessions, we would learn little routines and practice and perform them. Towards the end in groups of 4 or 5, we choreographed a routine with everything we had learnt and chose music to go along with it. Teamwork was heavily required for this as we had to decide what we would do in the routine and would need to count at first to synchronise our moves. I found it really fun as I had never done synchronised swimming before and learnt a lot of new things about it.

I feel that all activities which I participated in throughout the Wind Waves Water elective where great experiences as I have never done many of them before. Also, they allowed me to work with people I haven’t previously worked with and improve my communication and teamwork skills.