AGM 2024 - Sailing Secretary's Report

The 2024 season has seen many members getting involved in club activities on a regular basis. We should never forget that the club functions by virtue of members undertaking safety cover and race management duties. We are continually striving to organise the duty obligations across the club membership so they're not disproportionate, and yet still enable the club to function as expected is a constant. Thank you to everyone for sharing the workload and to those of you who stepped in on occasions this year to cover duties where there has been a shortfall on the rota.

The racing scene at Scaling continues to be buoyant this year. At the beginning of the year several days of racing were cancelled due to fog or strong winds. The Annual Regatta was also blighted by extreme wind conditions - racing was only made possible by members pulling together to provide additional safety cover.

On the back of last year's successful Challenger open we hosted the Challenger English Open Championship. We were extremely grateful to those members who provided on and off the water support at this event. The event couldn't run without them. Feedback from competitors was fantastic, finding our club and membership friendly, welcoming and helpful.

Thank you to David Keep for his drive to encourage members to run and take part in social sailing by means of the 'Solstice Event' and 'Members Week'.

The 12 o'clock series continues to be popular.89 different boats have taken part and start line numbers are high. This year we've had significantly more youth members taking part on a regular basis, but Junior entries are low, barely existent.

Class racing format changed last year to separate starts for each class. This change has been welcomed particularly by the ILCA/Laser fleet who had seen a large number of boats on their fleet start line.

The Fast Handicap fleet has grown slightly and at times field a respectable starting number of up to 11 boats. The Fast fleet has the greatest proportion of 'regular' racers of all the fleets.

The ILCA/Laser fleet remains the largest fleet, with the number of boats taking part in racing rising from 31 to 41. The fleet has a core of 9-13 regular racers of all abilities. Of these about 9 raced regularly.

The Slow Handicap fleet, which used to attract Junior members racing Optimists, Topper etc no longer seems to; they now race regularly with 4 or less boats.

Lisa Metcalfe
Sailing Secretary