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Recent surveys published by the RYA have shown potentially the biggest threat to dinghy sailing in the UK for some time.
The average member of a Sailing Club in Britain is over 50 and male, and the number of sailors under 30 appears to be declining. Many voices have been heard in the press as to the reasons behind this situation, but I would like to add my thoughts on what must surely be one of the major contributing factors to this current state of affairs.

The belief in society today is that winning is important, you must enter the race, be it business, sport or life in general, knowing that you have an opportunity to succeed; starting, knowing that all you can aspire to is being an average performer is for most an unacceptable situation.
So how does this relate to sailing?
For most the first taste of watersports comes on holidays or with friends already involved in the sport, a lucky few get the oppertunity via their school or college. Assuming that the new recruit finds him or herself hooked, then the next step is to join a club, and here the problems start.

Membership fees are just the beginning, and they can be enough to put off many with huge JOINING FEES, on top of annual membership, I have yet to hear a satisfactory excuse for charging joining fees!! Next comes the boat, a somewhat essential piece of equipment. Few clubs can offer club boats and where they are available they are usually elderly and prone to breakages. For most buying the first boat is a bit hit and miss, and the lack of indepth knowledge makes people easy pray to the sharks. Now I grant you buying from a major established boat builder ie: one of the New Classes! will be more secure, but then again the price is high in capital outlay, and this surely is one of the major excuses given by people as to why they will not take up dinghy sailing.
If we are to attract youngsters into the sport, which surely we must, than we must emphasise the suitability of classes with a long pedigree and cheap available secondhand boats which are competitive. Perhaps every club should ensure it has at least one class that offers low cost entry, Mirror, Graduate, GP, Enterprise, Fireball etc all of which I know you can purchase for £500 or so and have a boat which will at least give good fleet racing at club level.

Now this brings me to the question of Youth Classes. Current thinking appears to say that to be a successful youth sailor you must be in a 420, Laser or Laser2, with all potential new classes offering little more other than an assymetric.
Why dont we promote harder the Cadet, Mirror and Topper, all of which could be purchased for much less, this may well encourage more parents to buy boats and give this country a rich source of young talent to move into higher performance boats later in life; when the basic skills of boat handling, tactics and fleet racing have been learnt (you learn and use more tactical skills in slower boats!)

Perhaps you might think some of these views are old fashioned? I assure you they are not, they are practical. I hope our sport will thrive in the years to come, but the club situation must change, we must get more youths and young adults into sailing, and as always the best advocates are you the current sailors, talk to your friends, take them for a sail, and if one out of ten takes up the sport we will see constantly increasing numbers, bigger club fleets, cheaper membership and better sailing.

Please send your comments.

Dave Barker - Senior Instructor , Banbury Sailing Club talks about his club 2.12.99

We need to do what we can to encourage youngsters into our sport. Today we have to compete with many easily accessible popular pastimes that attract the attentions of our youth, many of which (computer games, mountain biking etc ) have more street cred than our sport.
Those youngster that are involved in sailing are well aware of the attraction and excitement of the modern assymetric style dinghies, but most of these are too expensive for parents to purchase, nor are they suitable as club boats due to their complication, most are also inappropriate for many of the small inland clubs that form a large part of the UK sailing scene.

We have been working hard in our club (Banbury Sailing Club Northants) to attract and maintain a junior membership. This year we have had 40 juniors sailing with us between the ages of 6 to 14. We have six aging club Toppers and two Oppies, and parents are gradually being persuaded to add to these with private Toppers and Mirrors. We are also in the process of applying for grants to purchase race standard Toppers so that our juniors can compete in interclub meeteings. This has been a wonderful start and shows promise for future junior sailing development, however there are difficulties in where we go from here.

Although our Toppers have provided an excellent start and will continue to provide the foundation of our junior sail training, most of our juniors now have no real experience of 2 man dinghies. Although Mirrors are economical, safe and provide superb introductory racing, many of our juniors are not interested in them as they perceive them to be too slow. Our club 2 man racing classes are GP?s and Merlin?s, neiter of which are suitable for juniors. We would like to follow the RYA youth training programme and apply for champion club status etc, but the choices of classes of craft for the next development stages are prohibitive of entry, Laser radials are just about feasible, but again are only single handers, 420?s, 405?s and 29?rs may be great boats but they require an enormous capital commitment to build up sufficient numbers to make a fleet.

We are currently in danger of loosing the interest of our teenagers if we cannot maintain their enthusiasm through our current training / racing programmes or through the introduction of more exciting boats We?d be interested to hear if there are any other clubs in this situation, or who have found a way forward ?

There is no easy answer to this debate. I wholeheartedly agree with Roger

Regards,
Dave Barker
Senior Instructor , Banbury Sailing Club

Tony Hunt recounts some of his experiences 6.9.99

Brian Twiddy's note sums up what is best about the present UK sailing scene. Club racing offers us a chance to sail with others regularly with the minimum of formality and effort, to enjoy our sailing with friends who provide a yardstick of our performance, and then to enjoy discussing it afterwards over a pint or whatever, perhaps learning where we went wrong in the process. For many of us it forms the focus of our social lives, which it can do more satisfactorily than an open meeting circuit, in that the friends we make tend to live locally and are not scattered all over the country. It's a bit difficult to drop in on a mate in Aberdeen when you live in Poole...

My appreciation of the UK scene stems from 17 years spent in Germany and Holland, where sailboat racing has a different character. In effect, these countries have elite and open-meeting sailors just as we do, and then at the other extreme a lot of casual sailors who simply potter about on their own, but Germany and Holland seem to have no sizeable equivalent of the vast majority of UK dinghy sailors who mostly club-race, so that in effect it is like the UK scene with the middle removed. Emphasis in these countries is on training the young to international level: those that make it equit themselves well at the Olympics, the rest give up dinghies for cruisers and the bar, or else trail their boats every week to another open. So there's not much on offer for the German or Dutchman who likes to race dinghies but can only spare a few hours each Sunday.

To judge from Yachts and Yachting and the RYA, the pressure from them in UK is in the direction of the continental model. Children have to be 'trained' to race, the best are selected and the rest left to their own devices. It's vital that 'our team' does well internationally and at the Olympics, and training has this end in mind. Why? Isn't it more important that kids and the rest of us just enjoy our sailing? If one were to judge from international results, Germany and Holland are comparably successful with UK - but this is using the wrong measure. Surely what counts is the number of people in the country who enjoy regular sailing, and in this respect UK is probably a clear world leader.

OK, the theme under discussion is club membership, and while I have no instant cures to offer, I thought it might be good to give an appreciation of what we still have, and what we don't want to lose.

One idea though. In Holland my particular club did club-race (it consists mostly of ex-pats), but suffered the same recruitment problems as most UK clubs. An open-day helped, of course, but the new members seemed to be mostly employees of a couple of large local organisations, and this suggests a possible avenue for UK clubs to exploit.

Most companies have notice-boards, and if members were encouraged to post anouncements about club open days and events on their company notice-boards, we'd probably reach a wider public. This approach is likely to be particularly successful if the member gives his own name and extension number as a contact on the announcement, so that the prospective new members can find out what to expect/bring/wear when they come to the club. The thought of turning up at a strange place, knowing nobody, must put off a lot of potential sailors.

And another idea from my Dutch days: I used to give a short series of evening classes in Spring entitled 'An Introduction to Sailing'. These dealt with how sailing boats work, their rigging and parts, and how they are raced (basic rules etc). Their appetites thus whetted, it was a simple matter at the end of the course to invite my class to the club for 'a go' or the open day. As a result of this, the club gained some very keen members and I made some good friends. Other advantages of this are that the organisers of the evening classes reached a wide public with their advertising, and the participants could 'dip their toes in' gradually, coming to the club in a group and not on their own.

I feel it's ideal if the new recruits can be paired up with new or existing crew-less boat owners. Although I've taken and given sailing courses, I still think the best way to learn one's sailing is racing at the sharp end of a boat driven by someone who knows more than you, and who hopefully lets you have a helm after the race. Organising that's another story of course, but that's more than enough from me for now!

Brian Twiddy tells us about his club atmosphere 19.7.99

I have recently taken up sailing, at least my partner and I have. I am over 45 and she is 35. We bought a smal 12 ft dinghy knowing that the local sailing club has a length limit of 14ft. The boat that we bought was £150 and beautiful, complete with trailer, cover etc. We are able to join in the racing very happily as the club has a menagerie fleet, involving quite informal racing of an evening and weekend. People taking part in these races age from 12 to 79. Getting round the course for me is (so far anyway) an acheivement! One day soon I AM going to pass somebody.

Our club has connections with the local scout groups and holds regular traing and fun sessions ( how many people CAN you get on a Pico) we also have 4 club boats, one GP14 and three Picos.

When the sailings over we tend to have a drink and a barbecue, or decide to go home. I have now invested a little more money (£700) and bought a secondhand Comet to extend my sailing skills. In short we are a CLUB. Not a lot of individuals desperate to win all the time. yes we have winners but there are NO losers.

Brian,
Nantwich

Howard Massie adds his comments 22.5.99

Just to add to your comments, sailing has probably never been more expensive than it is today and yet nor has it ever been cheaper.

I know it sounds daft but whilst you might pay many thousands for one of the new assymetric designs (and perhaps even more for some of the classes that were once aimed at the home build market e.g. Fireballs) you can still pick up very competitive Lasers for around £500 and fully race equipped Mirrors for £350, sometimes less.

I regularly race a laser that must be nearly 25 years old and honestly feel that my boat is every bit as fast as anyone elses. In fact I think that other sailors get frustrated when they see an old boat passing them and it gives me a few boatlengths at the end of each race!

Although I haven't done open meetings for a few years I have never felt at a disadvantage and would happily enter it in championships with the expectation of finishing in the top third. It is fitness that lets down Laser sailors (including me), not the age of their boat.

Similarly in the last 2 years, I have bought a 20 year old Mirror to sail with my kids. It's in lovely condition and came complete with launching trolley, cover and a complete set of racing sails for £300. I think somehow the message has to get across that you can compete successfully on a very low budget, the only thing that holds me back is time!

To add to Howards comments...27.5.99

The cost of new boats is really a very fair price when you look at the expected lifespan of modern materials, like wise the quality of sails, launching trailers, combis etc is far greater now than it has ever been. Don't forget that the several thousand pounds you pay for a new boat is usually for a full (top quality) package.

Traditional boats such as the Fireball, which Howard mentions, are still predominantly cheaper than the manufacturers one designs, plus the fact that highly competitive 'balls can bought for just a couple of grand - infact so far this year the UKFA has sent out over 1000 boats for sale lists. Unlike some other trad classes you can still home build a ball, but like other types of boats the only real drawback to home building nowdays is lack of skill and perhaps more importantly a lack of time...

We mustn't lose sight of the fact though that sailing isn't a cheap sport, if you've got a young child it is still far cheaper (and easier) to get them a dreaded playstation.....

What clubs and boat builders tend to forget is the real level of competition they face. How many clubs force the parent to join or take out a family membership if their child wants to join? the new performance assymetrics have a great media image but lets face it they aren't suitable for teaching in. There are only two real classic youth boats to my mind, and these have done more for sailing than any 29er or Buzz will ever do, these boats are of course the Oppy and the Topper.

To really encourage youth membership we need to drop the outdated club joining fee and actually aim the sport at younger would be sailors (next time you're in a news agent compare Mountain Biking UK with Y&Y, totally different styles and aimed at different age groups).

Anyway that's my two pennorth!
Ian.

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