your responsibilities as a sailor

If you wish your club to prosper and be a bright vibrant place to be, you need to support it with your patronage even if that is just rocking up and going sailing.
If you wish the class of boat that you sail to prosper and give nice big fleets with high quality racing, you also need to support it with your patronage, again even if that just means turning up and racing.
This isn't a symbiotic relationship between club and class, so there is an element of only enough patronage to go round.
Equally begind every vibrant class and club ther are energetic and enthusiastic volunteers who give freely of their time and energy. People that just turn up are never enough, it just helps with critical mass.
Maybe I have a bit of a frank skinner approach, but personally I like the smaller more intimate sailing clubs where everyone knows each other, and the wives and mums bake cakes etc, to the large impersonal professionally run outfits with lots of down for the weekend members.
Beer Sc is high up my list despite the steepness of the beach. Netley sc where I am currently a member is really good too. In my humble opinion.

Same views as Mr Holman...also a Netley SC member

Originally posted by pondmonkey When you get a sailor moaning that an open entry fee is over a tenner, you do start to realise dinghy sailors do seem to have rather unrealistic ideas set about the cost of running sh*t.

Yes, agree with that. I guess many of our clubs (well the volunteer led/DIY ethos ones) have run on the concept of "passing it on"/"doing ones bit" for many years. I grew up in that tradition, and have done the volunteer/committee member bit for more years than I really want to admit to. And yet...   so we've managed to keep our subs/open entry fees/training course fees etc low on the back of all that volunteer effort - has it really been worth it?    Perhaps I'm getting cynical in my old age, but I see turnouts falling to a fraction of what we saw in the 70s/80s, and members who display an increasingly "consumerist" attitude to the sport.  I was at Rutland the other day on a sunny Sunday, and noticed that the "pay and play" guys at Whitwell were packed, in terms of a stacked car park/cafe/people on the shore/boats and canoes on the water,  which I suspect was 3 or 4 times the turnout at RSC on the other side of the lake. Oldies like me perhaps can't help but see the sport through the prism of all the years we've spent at our clubs, but I'm getting more and more convinced that the future of the sport will be less and less club based and more around sailing "leisure centres".

Originally posted by Late starter  I'm getting more and more convinced that the future of the sport will be less and less club based and more around sailing "leisure centres".

Originally posted by RS400atC     I think dinghies are mostly about racing though, at least performance dinghies.