UKLA Chair blog #27
We are opening entry for the upcoming three Spring Qualifiers on Tuesday 7th Feb at 7pm. There is a message below from Brett Lewis, our Safety Officer and some comments from me on the entry fees. Please remember the term Qualifier is a bit of a hangover - they are high quality open meetings!
Brett says:
“If you have ever wanted to make a difference, now is the time to consider how you can support our amazing sailors and our amazing class.
UKLA has a unique position, we are a class not a club, we do not have a club house or have or any tangible assets. But as a class we are bigger than most of the UK clubs. Our major events attract more sailors than even the biggest UK clubs and our training events successfully attract hundreds of sailors monthly.
None of this would happen without the amazing teamwork, skill, and determination of volunteers. Sailing, like many sports is a volunteer run, volunteer organised and volunteer governed sport.
None of this would happen without volunteers.
For us to provide safe racing at each of our major events, every day we require a team of at least 60 volunteers. We require everything from the beach and tally team, the race management team, the safety team, the prize giving team and the event admin team. Very few other classes or clubs require this amount of event resource to safely run our racing events.
Our on-water safety team operates on a policy of 12:1, that is for every 12 sailors on the water, they require at least one crewed safety rib. For the Stokes bay Qualifier, we will need at least 10 ribs and crews, and for the WPNSA Qualifiers we will require 16 ribs and crews.
The on-water team that supports the racing is made up of the Race Committee, the Mark Layers, the Safety team and the Jury team. On the shoreside we have the Tally, Beach, Bridge, Results, Prize and Admin team.
Below we are asking for the volunteer support for our three Spring Qualifiers series, so if you are new to the class or have considered how you can offer support and would like to talk to us, please get in touch with Brett for on water support or Keith for Race Committee. We are particularly keen to speak to members who feel they want to offer support but do think they may yet not have the necessary experience.
If you're passionate about sailing and wish to contribute to the success of our UKLA sailors and want to give back to your community, then volunteering is the perfect opportunity for you. We can offer training, advice, mentoring and support for Mark Layers, the Safety team and the Race Committee.”
I wanted to add some comments on entry fees. In 2022 UKLA subsidised entry fees for the Qualifiers with those fees around 5% lower than the costs of running the events. UKLA was able to do this because of the support of our sponsors and good control over our operating costs. I believe this resulted in great value for our sailors.
Like most organisations we are seeing significant increases in our costs, particularly those charged by host venues and the costs of providing appropriate safety cover. In the past, the class relied on parents bringing RIBs without them being fully compensated for their costs, which we felt was unfair and unsustainable and could have resulted in us not having enough safety cover to run an event.
Although we will continue to subsidise entry fees (we plan to continue to set entry fees below the cost of running the events in 2023), these increases are too significant for us to absorb. We therefore agreed to increase our entry fees. We will be working to see if these increases can be reduced later in 2023. As a committee we fully understand the impact and also realise this is just one element of the cost of a weekend.
Snippets:
Session #2 Virtual winter education/training programme for ILCA club/master sailors – register here
Here is a reminder about the Female Participation survey
Featured podcast of week are Daisy Collingridge and Matilda Nicholls