UKLA Chair Blog # 74

Jan 22

Several pieces of information to share this week….

ILCA Open Club training

Today we are opening access to ILCA Open Club training to allow clubs to promote ILCA training in their clubs that is open to ILCA sailors from other clubs. This training is organised and managed locally by the club who set their own pricing and conditions. So long as the training is open to non-club members, we will promote in our UKLA calendar. Later in the year, as UKLA develops a coach register, this can be used to help club organisers. Beyond the calendar and register, UKLA is not involved in any way. This replaces the UKLA program of supported club training that become too time complex to run from the centre. You will see some examples of this in our Calendar.

So if you want your ILCA Open Club training in our calendar, simply send the date and club website (anything else you want to add) to the address in the email and we will get it live within one week.

RYA Dinghy Show

Show and see us at the RYA Dinghy Show on 24th/25th Feb at Farnborough!

UKLA Youth Event at Queen Mary for ILCA4s and ILCA6s

There are 40 entries for this with entry still open for another 8 days.

Master volunteer

Since Alison retired in July, we have a masters sub-committee of Alan Davis, Guy Noble, Peter Young, Keith Videlo, Ellie and myself sharing the workload but many of us are already doing other UKLA work and we need some additional help. It is not a matter of taking on a big role, just helping out. In particular there are no ILCA6 volunteers! Please help us.

UKLA Grand Prix Series

Some of you will recall that we had an open forum late year to discuss the GP series with the aim of improving co-ordination and building on the successful platform that we already have. As a result, John Ling has stepped forward to co-ordinate this. The UKLA’s objective is the encourage and increase participation in club racing and open meetings to the extent we can influence this. In particular, we would like to see more youth activity, more racing in ILCA4s and ILCA6s and more women. There are 10 regions and we would like each of these to have a strong GP series and John has prepared updated guidelines to help support this.

We would like all ILCA sailors to be UKLA members and would certainly encourage that as the membership, at just over £3 per month, is a small part of each sailor’s annual budget. While we are working to increase the tangible benefits for UKLA members, we all benefit indirectly by ensuring the class remains strictly one-design. With nine builders across the globe the measurement differences between boats is negligible but the effort is sustaining this is not free and membership fees help fund this, both here in the UK and in the international class. Of course, individual open meetings are run by local clubs and while membership is a class rule, UKLA don’t enforce this at these open meetings as our primary focus is the encourage participation.

As similar argument can be applied to class legal equipment where there is a strict rule at National events. For club racing and open meetings, there tends to be a more relaxed approach, driven by improving participation, but most clubs seem to operate an informal approach where those at the front or in the top half of the fleet are expected to sail with class legal equipment. Winning with replica kits underlines the whole ethos of the ILCA class!

We want to improve the promotion of the GP series’ this year and John would like to get a full list of GPs by the end of the month – details to the address in the email.

Snippets

UKLA Events