SAILOR Kylie Forth has a passion for the water and a quiet determination to succeed but she needs a hand to achieve her next goal.
Kylie, 32, is the skipper of the world champion Australian Blind Match Race sailing crew, but she says the team is struggling for funding to get to the world championships in Scotland in September. Her team won the world championship four years ago.
The Perth woman lost her sight to cancer at the age of three, and the disease also claimed her right leg at nine, but right now she’s fixed on raising money to get to Scotland.
“I’m flat out in fundraising mode and organising sailing trips to raise money. That’s keeping me busy, and also I’m trying to get more people into sailing so that I have more people to choose from when I’m sailing,” she says.
Caption: Kylie Forth (second from the right) sails on a calm sea with three companions, all dressed in red spray jackets. Picture: Supplied.
But Kylie’s world champion team from 2014 has been gutted by rule changes. Back then, she and her two crew members were totally blind but now the category requires a sailor from each of the B1, B2 and B3 classes.
Adding to the pressure in Scotland, Kylie says she and teammate Erin McGlew will need to rely on a sailor from another country to make up the third slot.
“In Australia the only people I know that sail are totally blind, so that’s why we need an international crew member, otherwise we would have a ready-made team right here, she says.
Blind sailing can be a tough sport, Kylie says.
The crew zips across the water in an 8m Sonar three-person keeled boat – the same class used by our Paralympians before blind sailing was dropped from the Paralympics.
“We will have teams of three people with varying levels of vision impairment on the boat and no sighted people at all. We have audio signals on the buoys and on the boat so that we can hear where everything is. We can feel where the wind is and we can sail around the course unaided,” Kylie says.
“If anything goes wrong during the race, we have to problem-solve it and work out why we’ve stopped. We can’t just ask a sighted person what’s happened. If something has twisted or is tangled or fallen off, we have to look for it and sort out what’s happened. It’s a very empowering sport.”
Still Kylie has lofty goals despite the challenges her team, dubbed Lost At See, will face in Scotland.
“When we went in 2014, we won it. My team won the world blind match racing championship. It’s something I’d been working towards for 12 years and finally got there,” she says.
“Now, I’m not quite as good as all that and I’m going back to try and medal at least with a hybrid team, so it’s going to be a challenge.”
Kylie has confronted other hurdles, too. She has being diagnosed with cancer twice as an adult.
In 2014, she learned she had cancer two weeks after the 2014 championships. In 2016, a month before the world championships, she was told the cancer had returned and missed the titles to have surgery that removed half of one of her lungs.
For now, she’s focused on Scotland but she’s looking forward to building a stronger sailing contingent for the next big international blind sailing event in Canada next year, and for the future.
“I want to get the word around the place that sailing is a thing, and blind people do it. I’d love to get more people into it,” she says.
“At the moment, I am the only skipper, a person who can steer a boat, who is actively competing in the whole of the country. We have most of the sailors here in WA. We have three or four people that can sail as blind sailors, but I’d love to get more people hearing about it, knowing about it and doing it.
“Next year, when we go to Canada, we could take three Australian teams as opposed to a hybrid Australian international team. That would be good.”
Sailing is “one of the most active sports” for people who are blind or have low vision, Kylie says, and “a very independent sport for the blind and low vision community”.
Kylie says the team is seeking an injection of $15,000 to get to Scotland. To donate, or to keep in touch with the team, visit the Lost At See Facebook page here.