Open Meetings, No Club Racing

This has the risk of sounding like I'm moaning... again. I'm not, but I am genuinely interested to get folks thoughts on this.

Three of the next four weekends at Chew are given over to the Firefly, RS200 and Fireball Inland Championships.   It is great that such large and prestigious classes want to come here, very flattering and presumably good for the club coffers. The Fireballs are sharing the water with club racing (different patch of water though), but the 200s and Fireflies have the lake to themselves, so no club racing. In the case of the 200s, we can expect a good high number of boats that would make it difficult to accomodate club racing too, but the Firefly Inlands were actually the weekend just gone and had 20 boats, which included one club member. The vast majority of the others were from local universities and schools, who I guess sail on the lake anyway but never for Sunday racing.

I am very happy for everyone to enjoy the delights of Chew (1200 acres of water in an AONB, what's not to like?), and I happily accept that sometimes opens are so big that club racing needs to put on hold, but in this case it seems unnecessary. Should the club not have arranged so many Inland champs so close together? Should the Firefly class have made more attempt to support the event?

Please come back, but next time bring enough of you so that I don't look out thinking I'm missing out on a weekends sailing for no good reason! Or do what the Fireballs do and share the water.

Edited by Peaky - 07 Oct 14 at 4:47pm

A consideration may be staffing events. It can be a struggle to put together two complete race/support teams to run club racing at one end of a lake and an open event at the other.

Open meetings are of course also advertising for the club. If you're moving area or just moving club for some reason then surely a club that's put on a good open for your class has got to be very high on the list of places to check out.

Edited by JimC - 07 Oct 14 at 5:06pm

Are you allowed to go free sailing? We sometimes have to cancel Club racing due to lack of volunteers but always allow free sailing.

Originally posted by Do Different Are you allowed to go free sailing? We sometimes have to cancel Club racing due to lack of volunteers but always allow free sailing.

Good point. You could even disappear to a quiet part of the lake and (gasp) do some training.


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Doing a quick search of the YY news pages suggests that although 20 to 30 seems typical for a Firefly Inlands, last time they were at Chew, in 2009, they got 44.

Edited by JimC - 07 Oct 14 at 6:06pm

Your Snipes must have cleaned up, then, Grumph.