play platform, and not just a vehicle for racing. The boats also relate more closely to the smaller skiff classes than an Oppi ever could. For several years Bic have been successfully promoting their Un-Regattas – designed to gather kids to have fun on the water with just the occasional modestly competitive component – rather than dragging them over the coals of formalities and technicalities about how ‘the game’ is played. There’s time enough for that… but only if we persuade them to stick around in the first place. Un-Regattas have been extremely popular – and great fun – where the setting is right and clubs have resources to source boats that have proved interesting enough to draw the young customers. Yet even without having O’pen Bics a junior programme can inspire fun by adopting more imaginative formats that use the best of what the local area has to offer in sailing; some of the alternative models include Adventure Sailing ‘events’, where any and all platforms the club has are used to teach skills and have fun. Others ideas may be completely different course types that inspire the kids to think outside the usual racing box. An example is the Dinghy Transpac, a 10-mile 1/200th-size replica of its larger cousin that Hawaii Kai YC and Hawaii YC have organised this year for kids of all ages to race downwind in O’pen Bics, RS Fevas and Hobies from Koko Head to Diamond Head, iconic landmarks on the south shore of Oahu. How cool is that?
Or, as described by Scott Dickson in the last issue, getting clubs motivated to purchase not fleets of new boats, but search out ageing fleets of old boats that still have some serviceable life for casual sailing; Scotty’s story about Long Beach YC’s successful programme of forming a club-owned fleet of renovated old Solings, which now give both kids and adults an opportunity to learn about sailing on something with a keel and not a centreboard. Tooling around for fun or evening team or even match racing, Long Beach YC’s new budget fleet, put together literally for cents on the dollar plus a bit of elbow grease, is today in near-constant use. In all these ideas and options those of us with grey hair some- times find it hard to relate to the problem for one primary reason: we were unlikely to be confronted with these issues at this age because they simply did not exist 20-30-40 years ago. Our early years were spent on boats with family and friends, or even by our- selves exploring our local waters. Racing was something adults did and maybe we stumbled into it after being invited. If we were big kids we may have jumped on bigger boats where our strength and agility were valued as crew… others found niches in the local dinghy or keelboat fleets. In either case we probably had to work for the privilege of being on the team by sanding bottoms, varnishing or doing other maintenance jobs, through which we gained a more intimate understanding of how things work on boats. Fortunately there are some in the US who are taking that same organic approach through programmes of junior training on big boats. The Storm Trysail Club, for example, have established a foundation to support their Junior Safety at Sea educational courses, where teenagers can learn the skills both in the classroom and onboard to at least introduce them to the topic. The courses are often followed by a juniors-only big boat overnight race where they put their new skills to work under the guidance of an onboard mentor. From there the networking opportunities open up and progress to more races and deliveries to get offshore experience, culminating in a specific goal: Peter Becker’s group of young sailors on High Noon demonstrated this in dramatic fashion in 2016 by being the second monohull to finish the Newport-Bermuda Race. Peter has continued to develop his vision of junior big boat racing in the Long Island Sound area into an impressive programme that any region could pick up and get started.
At the forum when Peter’s ideas were presented one point that was made was particularly telling: unlike in the super-competitive world of junior dinghy classes where the right body size and type are a distinct advantage (if you’re over 70kg and want to go to the Olympic Games then today it’s the Finn and Men’s Laser for you, buddy), big boat sailing has no such bias, and kids of all ages and sizes are welcome. No wonder us old farts still enjoy it… and would love our kids to too. Dobbs Davis
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