Ian Walker has just overseen a massive overhaul of the RYA's Youth system, making it more regionally focused and responding to complaints that the old system was taking parents and kids - two generations of sailors - away from their sailing clubs...
It’s less than two years to the next Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Speaking to Olympic manager at the RYA, Stephen ‘Sparky’ Park, it’s going to be a challenging regatta for many different reasons.
Before you got into sailing - if you can remember back that far - what did you think was meant by the term ‘dinghy’? I didn’t take up sailing until I was 13, and so to me a dinghy was a blow-up piece of plastic that you bought from a shop at the seaside and inflated on the beach while wearing your Speedos. Speedos weren’t a joke term back in the day, by the way.
I’ve been a distant fan of Eastbourne’s PRATT Racing for some time, and so it was great to catch up with Gary and find out more about it. The concept is not so different from the way amateur golf is played, except that PRATT Racing doesn’t take itself quite so seriously. “It’s a personal handicap system with a few twists in it, so depending on how good a sailor you are you get awarded a PRATT rating, which is just a guesstimate, to be honest. That rating is either a plus or a minus number which takes minutes off your corrected handicap time. So you can join in any club race that’s being run, or any handicap race that has a set of corrected time results. At the end of it then you can just add the PRATT rating to that.”
The technical boys at the RYA, Bas Edmonds and Andy Wibroe, have used the 60th anniversary of the Portsmouth Yardstick system to do a relaunch and rebranding of the handicapping system.