UKLA Chair blog #55

As many readers of this blog know, ILCA sailing in the UK is a broad church and one that I support wholeheartedly. I try to write things that appeal to many sailors so last week when I wrote about my exploits at the Nationals, it was not to report on that event (see Y&Y and FB for the event reports) but to relate to sailors across the country doing club racing and Grands Prix.

There’s a back to school feeling around sailing at this time of year where we have a couple of months before the winter closes in. It is a time of year to reconnect with club racing with the summer holidays over and our Nationals finished.  Our calendar also shows many open meetings in that period – so why not re-energise your racing by going along to one of them? I can see Grands Prix in six regions in Sept and Oct and these provide the perfect opportunity for club sailors to head further afield. If you look back at previous blogs I have tried to provide a template for improving your ILCA sailing, in particular blog#37 and some follow-up ones.

I know many of you are Masters – so why not build up to the Masters Inlands at the end of Oct in Grafham? We welcome competent club sailors and of course it is an inland venue so a bit easier on the body than sea sailing! That event will feature ILCA4s again so we encourage lighter sailors to come along in that rig.

We will also be shortly publishing our open training schedule. We also have three Qualifiers (basically high quality open meetings) in the autumn and the Inlands in Draycote. I see most of the British Sailing Team have entered the Sept event in Paignton – why not come and sail against them?

We also have an exciting trial in the final Qualifier at WPNSA. The following feedback from the Female Participation survey (blogs #26 and #35), we plan separate starts for boys and girls in the ILCA4 fleet. So we want to encourage as many girls /women to come a race, remembering that the ILCA4 is an open age class in the UK. Even if you are over 18 come and join us or if you race an ILCA6, why not drop down for the weekend?

Finally following success of Super Sunday in June, what about a Super Sunday at the start of the frostbite season in November?