Roll Tacks - August 2003, #1

Mark Jardine, the editor of yachtsandyachting.com, has been compiling a list of the number of entries to championships this year, and it looks like ‘so far so good' for the state of British dinghy racing in 2003. The Optimist continues to rule the roost, topping the charts with 300 entries, which is staggering. The Topper is also riding high with 229 competitors, almost a hundred more than three years ago. Bear in mind that the table below is a snapshot of the story so far this season, with many more nationals to be completed before the end of the summer, so don't be offended if your class is missing from the top ten listed below.

The figures certainly seem to contradict the general view that dinghy sailing is in decline, but perhaps it also has something to do with the heat wave we have been enjoying - or some might say enduring. The great thing about sailing is that at least you have a breeze to cool you down. Well, some of the time, anyway. Cowes Week and the start of the Fastnet Race both suffered as the wind evaporated from the Solent during early August. But generally speaking, it is probably safe to assume that the hot weather has contributed to, rather than detracted from, the high attendances at national championships this year.

As with Cowes, the Fireball Nationals also suffered at Paignton for lack of breeze, although just a few miles down the coast at Plymouth, the joint 29er/49er/59er Nationals had too much wind at times. Racing in Plymouth Sound in winds that felt as though they had just blown off the Sahara was an unbelievable experience, and probably one that we won't get to enjoy too often in our sailing careers.

A sound venue

It was the first time I had raced in Plymouth for about 15 years, and I had forgotten just what a great piece of sailing water they have there. Finding the right trade-off between the wind and complex currents in the Sound is not easy, but tactically very challenging. Even the 49er Olympic Champion from Finland, Thomas Johansson, found it tough to win races in the domestic fleet in such a tricky venue.

It makes a nice change to go to a fresh venue, as the 49er Nationals have taken place at Weymouth for the past two years and are due to go back there again in 2004. The great thing about the place is that with Phil and Sandra Gollop and their team at the Weymouth and Portland Sailing Association you are pretty much guaranteed for the event to run like clockwork. And the geography of Portland Harbour often means that you will get a sea breeze on a sunny day even when there is no wind anywhere else on the south coast.

But the Nationals should be about visiting new places and getting to grips with a new venue. It is part of the fun and part of the challenge. Top-level dinghy racing has become more and more south coast-centred. Classes tend to be much less adventurous in their choice of venues than they were. Last year the RS fleets went to Weymouth, this year to Hayling Island, the two mainstays of dinghy racing in this country right now.

The dilemma for class associations is the trade-off of travelling long distances to attractive venues, at the expense of losing fleet numbers. It seems the further you venture from London with your nationals venue, the fewer competitors you get. It is probably just a sign of the times that we just aren't prepared to travel the distances that we were 20 or 30 years ago. Despite cars being faster and roads being wider, traffic congestion continues to grow and leisure time becomes ever more pressured in our busy lives.

The female of the species

But one national class that continues to maintain its status in the 50+ class is the Scorpion. With 66 boats at this year's Championships, this represents the best turnout for the Scorpion in many years. Former class secretary William Jeffcoate has an interesting theory on the current health of the class.

"A recent survey of top companies comprising the FTSE index drew attention to
how few women occupied senior executive positions in UK. Perhaps this is why
the economy has stagnated. And male dominance is a feature of sailing, too:
look at the number of women involved in RYA committees.

"It is against this background that the National Scorpion Association -­ never an organisation to shrink from taking the lead -­ has forged ahead with a new committee dominated by women sailors. Since the AGM held at the end of July, women now occupy the positions of President, Chair(wo)man, Secretary, Treasurer, Membership Secretary and IT Consultant, Merchandise and Strategy, and Championship Coordinator.

"This is a complete change from the situation just seven years ago ­when the
committee was all male. It is surely no coincidence that these seven years
have also witnessed a remarkable recovery in the fortunes of this classic
class, with membership, revenue, attendance at Nationals and Opens all
increasing year on year. Hopefully, FTSE companies will learn the lesson,
too."

Take someone sailing this year

You may remember a call to action I made at the beginning of the year, a new year's resolution to go sailing with one friend who has no prior experience of the sport. I must admit this is one resolution I have yet to fulfil myself, but while the weather is here this is the ideal time. I have introduced a young 29er sailor, Ben Redwood, to 49er sailing, and it is always a pleasure to take someone out who's new to the thrills of the 49er. Even quite experienced sailors can't hide their excitement when they go skiff sailing for the first time. But I don't think this fulfils the resolution. I'm talking about taking someone out with no knowledge of sailing whatsoever. You know, one of those people who, when you get into work on Monday morning with that sunburned hue from the weekend, asks how the rowing went.

One of the fun aspects about going sailing with sailing virgins is being reminded of the things that we take for granted after we've been sailing for a few years. I seem to remember my own daft preconceptions of sailing before I got involved in my early teens, was that it was a bit like Pooh Sticks, where you just launch the boats from the windward shore and the wind wafts them downwind until they land somewhere on the lee shore. I had no idea that boats could sail into the wind. Yes, I know that sounds stupid now, but every so often someone asks me, "Sailing's all luck isn't it, just getting blown along by the wind?" And it reminds me that sailing remains a grossly misunderstood sport, and perhaps always will do. No amount of sailing coverage on TV can really get across the thrill of the sport; it's only when you take someone out to experience it for themselves that they really ‘get it'.

It was gratifying to read what David Coulthard had to say about his experience on board the Maxi yacht Hugo Boss during his day out at Cowes Week recently. "It was unbelievable. At the start you're jockeying for position, you're virtually brushing up against other boats and there was never a dull moment. It's a lot more involved than I ever imagined. I actually think there's more for a skipper to have to deal with than I have as a grand prix driver. The fact I was doing eight knots didn't even occur to me, you're so involved in trying to avoid other boats and the strategy of trying to follow the currents and find the wind that I was amazed how quickly the time flew by." And that was in a big boat. We should put him in a dinghy some time and give him a real thrill.

You never quite know if celebrities like Coulthard are just being nice about the sport and wanting to keep their sponsors happy or if they really genuinely do get a kick out of it. Hopefully it's the latter, and certainly I have heard a story about a professional racing driver who had no problems hurtling around the track at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, but he could never overcome his abject fear of sailing his dinghy in anything more than a Force 3. Try telling that man that sailing's like playing Pooh Sticks.

Who is the fairest of them all?

On the subject of getting people into boats, few dinghies can take more credit for bringing sailing to the people than the Mirror, which has just celebrated its 40^th anniversary Nationals at Abersoch. Dan and James Ellis from Plymouth beat the 82-boat fleet with an impressive scoreline that included four race wins in the seven race series. Not only that, aged 14 and 12, Dan and James are believed to be the youngest ever National Champions.

But the Mirror isn't just a racing class, it was designed primarily as a family boat. The boat was the brainchild of Barry Bucknell, the BBC's DIY expert of the 60s, who wanted to build something for his son. He decided to employ a construction technique first used to build canoes, by joining adjacent panels with resin and fibreglass ribbon.

Most fascinating of all is how the boat came to get its name, from the tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror. When a Mirror journalist Paul Boyle came across the prototype design, this kicked off a discussion within the Mirror Group that resulted in Jack Holt being taken on as a consultant to the project and the newspaper's publicity department making some suggestions of their own. In fact it was the publicity department that suggested the famous class insignia, and that the sails be coloured Viking red in the fashion of the red-top newspaper.

It's hard to imagine the Daily Mirror or any other newspaper getting involved in a project like that in these celebrity-obsessed times, but perhaps they could be persuaded to put their name and publicity department behind a similar venture in another ten years' time, when the Mirror dinghy is 50?