Chris Higham combined a villa holiday and a sailing course for novices and found untroubled waters...

It used to be so easy. You found a sandy beach, got out the buckets and spades, applied the factor 15 and played happy families.

That was before the children hit that "difficult age". Now they still want to come on holiday but everything you suggest to your tricky teens is all so boring.

But we scored a perfect hit, combining a villa holiday in picture-perfect north-east Corfu with a three-day dinghy sailing course, run by the world's most patient man.

Don't get the wrong idea. On a week's holiday, three days on the water leaves plenty of time to enjoy the Greek atmosphere, see the sights and bask in the sun. We chose to do the latter in a smart new villa set high in the hills with an improbably perfect outlook across to the blue-grey Albanian mountains beyond the Ionian Sea.

Villa Emily looked a bit like a castle, complete with turrets, and for a week it was our hideaway, splendidly private with a nice, big infinity pool, but in reality just a stone's throw from Aghios Stefanos, our pick of the many pretty north-eastern bays. Sometimes called San Stephano, this unspoiled fishing harbour is a honey pot for British families. Sleepy by day, Aghios Stefanos comes alive at night when the waiters start to ply their trade in earnest, competing for your business with sometimes charming, sometimes cheeky comments. But it's all done in such a typically Greek laissez-faire way that it's hard not to smile.

World's away in atmosphere but just around the headland is the long, curving bay of Avlaki, peaceful and scarcely spoiled by any development. Avlaki does have a couple of tavernas, good ones set in the trees - but it's main claim to fame is that it's the home base of Greek Sailing Holidays, set up ten years ago by Jan, an amiable Englishman, from Manchester.

Meeting him at a refreshingly cool time of the morning on the first day of our initiation into the joys of sailing, Jan told us: "Listen hard to what I say and in three days you can each be a better sailor than people with three or four years' experience who didn't listen to their teacher and now make the same fundamental mistakes time after time."

So we listened hard. It worked better for the more practicallyinclined amongst us (the boys) who quickly mastered the basic theory - understanding the wind and your location, where to position yourself, how to move the boat forward and how to turn it around - and less well for non-sporty types (me) who managed to get knocked half unconscious by the boom not once but twice.

But in no time at all we were zipping up and down the millpond that is Avlaki Bay in the mornings, executing figures of eight in our two man Toppers.

Day one is all about putting a foot in the water - body too, if you're unlucky - and getting used to the feel of the boat. Jan likes to teach the basics in the mornings when the winds are low and the water calm.

Day two started just like day one, calm and with little wind. Jan encouraged us to repeat the exercises we'd already learnt - tacking to change direction, boat handling, steering and (all importantly) capsizing safely - to gain confidence, not to mention to have some fun.

Later in the day waves began to develop in the bay and we experienced what fun sailing can be, racing against one another with the wind behind you.

Our final day involved a rather more adventurous trip around the headland towards Kerasia and what one fellow Brit called "the best taverna on Corfu".

It was deceptively easy on the outbound trip because the wind was behind us, helpfully pushing us along in the direction we wanted to go. On the return, after lunching on local delicacies at the waterfront taverna in Kerasia, we found out that sailing into the wind is rather more of a challenge. But we lived to tell the tale - and to enjoy it too.

The good thing about this course is the small number of participants and the wonderfully calming influence of Jan. We may not have come away as budding Ellen McArthurs but we had a great time - and that was, after all, the object of the exercise.

We also learned why the roads of Corfu are so quiet. It's because everyone's out on the water.