Anchors away, mates: sailing with autism
by Beth
Big news! After a horrendously long winter, we finally enjoyed a warm weekend in Chicago recently! To celebrate, my husband and I headed to Burnham Harbor on Lake Michigan for an open house — the Judd Goldman Adaptive Sailing Program was offering free sailboat rides and grilled food to get the word out about what exactly they do.
What they do, exactly, is teach people with disabilities how to sail. And turns out Chicago isn’t the only place offering courses like this. A newspaper story about David McGinnis, who has autism, highlights the Heart of Sailing program in Portland, Oregon.
“Feeling the water beneath him, looking out at the river and the sky, it put him in a different place than where he usually is,” Donilee McGinnis, who is 25 and a Portland State University student, said of her brother on the sailing trip. “He looked really, really relaxed.”
A program in San Juan archipelago in Northwestern Washington called Talisman provides a sailing program for teens with Asperger’s and High-functioning Autism.
But it sounds like if you really want to sail, you need to go to New Zealand. A post on the Autism New Zealand Inc. site asks, “Who wants to go sailing, then?” And as my co-worker Nigel, born and raised in Auckland, points out, “Everyone in New Zealand sails — having a disability is no excuse!”