The past two months has been busy for a group of our most promising junior club racers. A programme designed to further their racing abilities has been run on Tuesday evenings and Saturdays.

The idea was to run it along the lines of the RYA Start Racing course which initially covers all the various aspects of getting around a race course and then to concentrate on developing the basic skills. A core squad of 13 sailors took part; the majority attending 90% of the 13 sessions.

We initially looked at boat preparation, rigging and tuning, moving onto how to control the speed of the boat in readiness for, perhaps, the most important module - starting. This proved to be a real crowd pleaser with three, maybe four sessions eventually being dedicated to it. The improvement was quite dramatic with sailors thinking about bias, boat speed, timing, clear air etc and ultimately getting some quite brilliant starts showing the adults how to do it on Tuesday evening racing! Other areas covered included the first beat, mark rounding, off wind sailing, roll tacking and gybing and preparation for race days. We were also indebted to Nadina for giving us an extremely entertaining session on the racing rules.

This proved so popular with the parents that a request has been made for Nadina to bring her road show to a Tuesday evening. This being the first time such a course has been run, we were not sure if the format would work with a squad of sailors with quite a wide range of abilities. My observations tell me that this squad gelled together well resulting in a close camaraderie.

Whilst the novice sailors progressed enormously, perhaps the more experienced ones could have benefited from more individual coaching aimed at honing specific skills. However, it is clear that this squad holds the future to our club's racing prowess and we must continue to use our resources to provide them with continued coaching.

My congratulations to each and everyone of the squad for their determination and improvement. Many thanks to everyone who gave up their time to assist, particularly Rebecca Ogden who signed up as a squad member and ended up as a most valuable coach!

Tim Cripps

Helpers with the Squad were:- Rebecca Ogden, Richard Mason, Alison Goodall, George Stanton, Brian Robinson, Hilary Whittington thanks to all of them

James Logan's Report