Mid-Week Winter Racing at Broadwater Sailing Club

Rigging up for winter racing at Broadwater Sailing Club © Peter Joseph

Last winter a small group of the members of Broadwater Sailing Club decided to start a new winter racing series to run from October through to March which was to take place on Wednesday mornings.

The fact that a number of the club members are of an age where they have a considerable amount of leisure time gave rise to the thought that there might be some interest in racing mid-week all year round. Wednesday evening racing throughout the summer has been part of the Club's programme for many years, but evening racing becomes impractical later in the year but some people were still keen to have a mid-week sail.

Several members turned up for the first race of this new series and since then things have snowballed to the point where in our second year of holding this series we regularly see the numbers in double figures and twenty two boats turned out for the race on the first Wednesday in November of this year. The racing is organised on a somewhat informal basis which does not require a race officer, though we do have safety boat cover.

A pursuit race is run and competitors synchronise their watches before the start and then everyone is trusted to start at their correct time and note their position at the finishing time as there are no flags of sound signals, and we all know when our fellow participants should be starting and where we finish, so any cheating would not go down well. As Paul Elvstrom said "If in the process of winning, you have lost the respect of your competitors, you have won nothing".