The search for an accessible boat

What boats are best suited for disabled sailors? Ian Cameron recounts Fife SailabilityÕs exciting journey from trimarans to powerboats

- Ian Cameron

I’m a member of Port Edgar Yacht Club, and like most clubs and recreational sailors, our default position regarding charities has always been to support the RNLI. Everyone loves the RNLI, and some of us have had the misfortune to be towed back by them. For me, nothing life-threatening, fortunately – just a rather embarrassing engine failure on a strong ebbing tide when there was no wind to enable us to sail to safety. It’s hardly surprising that proceeds from our jumble sales, raffles or donations of any kind went straight to this wonderful organisation.

So when one of our members suggested that the proceeds of the raffle go instead to Fife Sailability one year it came as a surprise. Most of us had neverheard of the organisation. So he raised awareness of the club and started a journey for me that began with a visit to see them in action, which ultimately led me to becoming a trustee of the charity and then its chairman.

Fife Sailability, based at Lochore Meadows, was founded in 2012 by Merrick Yates and Neil MacDougall with the purpose of teaching disabled people to sail. It attracts people from Edinburgh and the Lothians as well as Fife, Perthshire and beyond.

The area was home to several coal mines in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and after the last of these closed in 1966, restoration work to create the country park began. Today it’s a beautiful recreation area. The loch, with a surface area of about 110 hectares, is shared with many other users, from families to St Andrews University students, who row and match-race on the water. The prevailing westerly provides an onshore breeze at the pontoon. By inshore sailing standards it’s quite true, steady and well suited to sailing our Challenger trimarans.

Testing the trimaran