RORC
Club page Flattening the curve
You may recall in my June article I introduced you to the London Corinthian Sailing Club (LCSC) and the programme they have under- taken to offer their members the opportunity to compete in next year’s 50th edition of the Rolex Fastnet Race. I thought that, with a year to go and with a couple of offshore races
under their belt from this year’s Season Points Championship, it would be good to let Ray Champion, LCSC Commodore, update you on their programme… One month after Fastnet 2021, while our offshore racing members
were still recounting stories of the blustery start and the champagne sailing run to Cherbourg, we started to seriously look at how to build a more structured path for members of all experience levels to get into offshore racing… and have a route to Fastnet 2023. Up until this point members had been left to find their own way
onto a boat, whether through commercial offerings run by our pro- fessional skipper members, or friends groups chartering a raceboat. The initial thinking was simple: find some boats, organise some training, drum up support within the club, and go racing. As with all well-hatched plans, the devil is in the detail.
start… the rest we were going to have to do on our own.
Practicalities The adage that offshore racing is like standing in a cold shower ripping up £50 notes is a worry for any sailor with startline aspirations. As an old-established London-based club, we have few members with offshore yachts of their own, so we are used to chartering for cruising and training, but racing is a different matter. Even the pros get it wrong, so insurance companies ramp up the
excess on any racing policy they issue. For the boats we charter for racing the excess on the policy is in the region of £2,500, and this doesn’t include sail damage. Any crew that gets told they could have to stump up for a new mainsail if they rip one in a race will be reluctant to put it up in the first place. And in a hurry to drop it when conditions deteriorate. We knew we’d never build a race programme without this issue being addressed. The route we found was to build a contingency fund for offshore
activity. Each time the club puts on a training event/race/offshore cruise we add on a percentage that goes into a fund to cater for any damage caused to the boats we rent. The crew then have a personal liability cap of £100 for damage caused in a non-racing event, and £200 per race crew member. The club picks up the bill for any sum in excess of
that up until the insurance kicks in. This made the risk element palatable for most crew, and has also so far worked well for the club… even taking into account one crew in a building force 6, at 2am, with a looming lee shore having to cut a badly wrapped spinnaker off the forestay.
Engagement From the early days of the programme, as members were signing up to the various lectures and training, it was clear there was a core who were really keen to develop, others who were very interested but had many clashing commitments, and then a third sizeable con- tingent who were looking to stick their toe in the prover- bial offshore racing pond to gauge the temperature. We trained on two Beneteau First 40s and one
The start of the 2021 Rolex Fastnet was the roughest for many years with several boats not making it out of the Solent past the Needles and many more dropping out on the second day. Better this way around than the 1979 race when, encouraged by a light race in 1977, a huge entry lined up two years later. Again light and very warm conditions prevailed for the opening 48 hours… until, tragically, they didn’t
Training First we tackled the training element. After a conversation with the RORC race team we were introduced to UK Olympic and offshore coach Hugh Styles. Hugh had the knowledge and experience of building structured training programmes capable of bringing on every level of offshore racer. He also had enough coaching connections to pull in to give our members as much practical experience as they needed. The key element to the first season of training was to estab- lish an offshore racing base within the club. A large contingent of our offshore sailors had never raced or, if they had, hadn’t had any formal training on how to do it well. Most were very curious about the programme the club was putting together Over the winter of 2021/22 Hugh ran a series of lectures at the
club on the elements of offshore racing, followed this spring by six weekends of on-the-water training to get our sailors ready for the season. Each of the sessions was oversubscribed, and we mixed the experience levels on each of the training boats to help spread the knowledge as those more experienced helped those newer to racing. It also mixed up the racers, and helped build the racing com- munity within the club… which we’d need to nurture to help it grow. Having RORC solve the first key element in our goal of entering three boats crewed by club members in Fastnet 2023 was a great
First 40.7, which are similar enough in performance and layout to allow us to develop a common playbook describing the sequence of events for each man - oeuvre. It also helped when moving crew around the boats as there was a common methodology to follow.
The similarity in performance also gave us the ability to match race, a great way of accelerating the learning process.
Expectations As with most elements of club life, there are as many opinions on new ideas as there are members. Finding the balance between opening up racing opportunities while minimising financial risk, and between giving members what they want and what the club needs, has been a fine line to walk. Turning up to a couple of training sessions and a few lectures
isn’t a segue to a race winner’s podium, but it’s a start. Fastnet 2023 is the race we want to compete in, so we’re treating each race we enter until then as a training exercise, practising starts, competing with the other club boats, then with boats of the same kind, and trying to solidify our learning. Replaying races to see where improve- ments can be made is useful, but when you have the ability to debrief a race with an Olympic sailor like Helena Lucas the step-jumps are noticeable. We’re going from a place of thinking we know what we know, to
now knowing what we don’t know, and this is creating the direction and excitement. Ray Champion, LCSC commodore
SEAHORSE 77 q
PAUL WYETH
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132
