Not everyone can afford to buy a brand new dinghy with state of the art sails. What if you made allowances for older boats with an adjusted handicap?
Imagine being able to race a 40-year-old Fireball dinghy and actually have a chance of winning. That’s where we’re looking to take the Selden Sailjuice Winter Series six months from now. The Series has become a focal point for bringing together the most committed competitors to race on a winter traveller’s circuit. And thanks to the hard work of the Great Lakes Handicap Group, the PY numbers are operating really nicely. The best sailors in the best boats have a good chance of winning, or at least doing well.
What about those of us who can’t afford new, and can’t afford the best of the best? This winter my co-organiser Simon Lovesey and I are encouraging all-comers in all kinds of boat, even if the boat is old and knackered.
I’ve got a 36-year-old 470 at my home club, Stokes Bay, which I bought a few years back for £300. It’s not much to look at now, but it won the World Championship in 1988 in the hands of Nigel Buckley and Pete Newlands. You wouldn’t bother taking it to a 470 World Championship today; you couldn’t even buy half of a brand new jib for the entire cost of the boat. But it’s still a perfectly serviceable 470 capable of getting around a race course.
So what if it were to get a more favourable handicap number which takes into account that it’s not new and far from state-of-the-art? This won’t appeal to a lot of people who enjoy buying new and sailing with the best kit available. That’s fine, but there are also sailors out there, mostly young, who can’t afford the best yet still want to be competitive.
This past winter for example we saw teenagers Edward Clifford and Alex Standley in a 65-year-old Norfolk Punt, twin-trapezing their way around some of the events in the Selden Sailjuice Winter Series. We also saw a couple of Laser 3000s and some of the kids from the Greig City Academy racing Lasers that they had repaired and refurbished themselves. They had a great time, even if they didn’t stand a cat-in-hell’s chance of troubling the top 10. So what about giving them a more favourable handicap number?
We hope that encouraging people to turn up and race in any old boat will increase participation and open up new opportunities for sailors who aren’t made of money. Of course, it’s not lost on me and Simon that even if someone buys a boat for a few hundred quid, it’s still an expensive exercise to race
