Take 25 young sailors from 5 local clubs, 8 Picos, involve their parents, a sunny day on the Tarn and introduce them all to Team Racing
Results :- Lots of sailing activity, loads of smiling faces and great interaction between everybody
This is the third year that the Club, with the help of Otley, have run a Junior Team Racing Development Day. This year the sailors from Yeadon and Otley were joined by sailors from Ripon, Beaver and Yorkshire Dales Sailing Clubs
The aim of the day is to introduce young people with a mixture of racing experiences to a different form of dinghy racing and as they come from a different clubs to each other as well and to a different place to sail, as well as having some fun!
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| Preparing the Picos in the morning |
Heather had the unenviable job of putting the sailors into ‘equal’ish teams, each team having a more experienced junior sailor as Team Captain with then a balance of experienced and less confident or experienced sailors. This immediately mixes everybody from the difference clubs and sailing circuits and very soon everybody was chattering away and early nerves quickly vanished.
After bacon sandwiches and lots of boat sorting the day started with a short briefing to make sure that everyone understood the format of the day (including the Organising Team!), the short races, the differences between team racing and the more normal fleet racing and a recap of the basic sailing rules that were likely to be evoked. Some of the accompanying parents from other Clubs were co-opted to assist with the various organisation tasks to get them involved in the whole day too
The racing was held in Picos which are a great leveller for all the sailors, but rewards good utilisation of basic techniques. In the morning every team raced each other in a mini league and within the first couple of races people seemed to get the idea and were starting to race as a team together. Once everybody had raced each other we then had a quick lunch stop for pizza and chips, wonderfully prepared by Head Chef Gerard, with Sharon and Louise keeping him in check. We used the league positions to determine the knock out stages to determine the overall winning team. At this point it started to get a little more serious, after all chocolate was at stake !!!!
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| Close racing occurred throughout the day |
The racing for the final stages was very close which kept the spectators, and by this time the club sailors turning up for the afternoon’s club racing, enthralled. All the races had tight finishes, none more so than the Final between Callum’s team and Matt’s team in which the last three boats finished within a boat length giving overall victory, and the chocolate, to Callum’s team.
Once ashore everybody mucked in and got all the boats packed up and the Otley boats on to their trailers before the Prizegiving. As well as for the winning team sweets and chocolate was distributed throughout the competitors. Callum completed his final role as the winning Team Captain and thanked everyone on behalf of the competitors for organising and running the event, before everyone departed off for home tired but smiling, after meeting lots of new people and having a very good day.
This year as the Tarn wasn’t frozen we could have the annual Commodore’s Bottle Race and there was a good turnout of competitors with a good mix of boats. The wind gusts were quite strong and at first the rain held off but then it just poured down! However as you can see from the smiling faces it didn’t dampen the sailors spirits too much (more photographs are available via the Notice Board on this website).
Bill brought in the New Year with his bagpipe playing once again. He certainly brought in a good year for us last year, let us hope this year will be as good. Thank you Bill please don’t ever stop.
The Commodore presented ‘The Bottle’ to the race winners who were Jo and Dennis Beard sailing in their Heron. 
