University Sailing

you usually buy a flight of boats, not six separate boats.

And as far as I can recall it depends on where you are in the country as how hard is it to get to BUSA from your qualifying region.  Having the playoffs in Scotland this year should make things interesting! (how many flights are going to be run?) 

There is also the reputation that unis hold (rightly or wrongly), with regard to sailing (and that varies depending on what type of sailing you do, be it yachting/team/match/fleet/casual)!

Travel costs do make up a huge percentage of our clubs costs.

Unfortunately, I think it will be very difficult for any uni sailing club to get many none sailors into sailing. This isn't down to lack of boats, money or anything else, it's simply because people don't really want to learn to sail in the winter! The weather is usually ok for the bit of September that you're there, and maybe early October in the south. Then, once the weather's finally sorted itself out in late April / early May everyone's got exams and then people start going home from mid June onwards.
When I was at uni, one year we managed to get absolutely loads of people signing up wanting to learn, but even with plenty of people willing to teach, within a few weeks pretty much all the novices had lost interest in the sailing as the weather was really unpleasant!
The lack of any link (at the time) between my student union and the NUS meant that the union finance committee was not so heavily influenced by the "sailing is elitist and for the rich" general viewpoint, and it was possible (with effort) to get hold of a flight of new dinghies out of them on about a 5 year cycle.
I think things may have changed since I was there though, as I've heard rumours that the union finance people had far more money to splash around than in other places due to clever techniques used to extract much more money from the university itself, which I think have now been stopped!

Originally posted by foaminatthedeck The YC its self dose not have a great deal of funding, posisbly more than some of the above but then we do have over 200 members. (The large number of members is as much to do with sailing as an active socal calander)

Out of interest, how many of your 200 members actively sail with the uni?

Originally posted by Ian99 Unfortunately, I think it will be very difficult for any uni sailing club to get many none sailors into sailing. This isn't down to lack of boats, money or anything else, it's simply because people don't really want to learn to sail in the winter! The weather is usually ok for the bit of September that you're there, and maybe early October in the south. Then, once the weather's finally sorted itself out in late April / early May everyone's got exams and then people start going home from mid June onwards.

Just the point I was about to make, the xmas holidays and the winter kills any enthusiasm and interest.

Many people at uni who are into sailing have their own boat and often sail outside of any uni sailing clubs. This avoids problems of knackered boats, safety cover and the inevitable drama that comes with university clubs. Local clubs often offer very discounted student rates for compound and membership.

It is very interesting to see how many university owned boats were raced at the student nats. Very few, the vast majority were privately owned.

The state of student sailing is a shame, as has been previously mentioned, it is a great time to get people into the sport. Many serious sailors student age are dinghy instructors so teaching could be done quite cheap. Unfortunately sailing is expensive and very weather dependant - uni windsurfing clubs have a hard time too.

Originally posted by turnturtle In Scotland, my old Uni have just bought Edinburgh's 'old' boats from fundraising and alumni donation (the boats were hardly sh*t and I assume edinburgh have a new flight from Rondar as a result) And whilst I acknowledge things are different now, Strathclyde had a fleet of RS200s when joe public couldn't get them for love nor money- I don't know the indepth funding behind the 200s, but probably some uni money matched by a sport aid/lottery pro-scotland cash cow. From rumours on the grapevine Stathclyde uni sailing had lost some of its momentum (they were clearly a very strong team in Scotland when I was at Uni) and some of it's sailors swopped allegience to Glasgow- cliqueyness and various social phenomena would do this to a club, not a lack of funding. From the banter on this forum it sounds like their uni sc is back in the hands of some good guys again- I hope they can do as well the stratchclyde team I used to race against.

Yes Edinburgh have a relatively new set of boats but they are in one of these positions where they have like 300 members and about 40 active dinghy sailors and im not really sure on the yachting side.

As for the rest of the Scottish clubs Glasgow have a brand new set of Firefly's which have been bought through continual fundrasing and buying crappy boats and putting up with them whilst they raised the money. They also have the old set of Larks which are totally wrecked but still useable for begginers so they dont break there new Firefly's.

Aberdeen also havea set of brand spanking new Firefly's this is totally down to he ineptness of there sports union who made such a mess of budgeting they were poor for a year b ut ended up with £80000 in the bank not quite sure how they'd done it or what to spend it on. There was some sailing influence in there SU so they were able to blag the money for boats.

St. Andrews (stole our potential flight right from our grasp) bought a second hand flight of boats from Sevenoaks or West Kirby I cant remember. They put the deposit down on them and then realised that they couldnt affoard them. We (Stathclyde) were then going to buy them through St. Andrews meaning we got boats at the same price and St. Andrews didnt loose their deposit but then all of a sudden St. A's pulled £14,000 from no where. Well parents loaned money and are being paid back by the Sports Union.

Heriot Watt have 3 new boats but never actually come to any of the League Weekends.

We at Strathclyde have the money to buy a 2nd flight of Fireflys we are just waiting on a set comming up. When we had the 200's they were bought because there was talk of them becoming the new team racing boat. This all went to pot when they realised that people were just going to Capsize them all the time and not actually be able to team race them. Strathclydes set were going to cost a fortune to get back to even floating after one really bad season so they were sold off for little money.

The team is largely built up of Naval Arch's and this means that alot of people have the option of which Uni to sail for as we are members of both add to that we havnt had a large influx of Dinghy Sailors for quite a long time (untill this year).

This has meant that in recent years we have a yaching team who are very succesful, our Match racing has been ok due to one exceedingly tallented Helm and now a few more who can do it a bit to and the team racing has been a little less serious. We have been not training picking teams purely on the basis of previous experiance and then hoping it doent go to badly. It has been surprisingly succesful with the A team qualifying for BUSA and the B team managing to get up to the silver league right at the end.

The team is back into good hands, then again it has been in good hands for a few years its just been lacking the mebership and a little bit of a lets get of our ass and do something attitude which a certain group of freshers seems to have broght.

As for your point about having lots of members paying membership and many not actually sailing we dont have that Luxuary due to the way our sports union works. At Strath you pay £20 to join the sports union and then you can join as many or as few clubs as you wish. This money is then split up into pots. Each club gets som and then we have a Fund for Scottish Events which is tuff to get alot of money out of and really only pays some entry fees and a few other things. Then we have a BUSA fund which is there to help fund purely BUSA events and means that you are able to claim for a little more money to aid attending events. This BUSA find wont fund events like the Yachting Worlds. This means that the sailing club only has a small amount of its own money and the moeny we have for boats has been saved up. Well bar £6000 pounds which came from the Alumni fund but we loose this at the end of the year and this took alot of work to get.