Looks like Sutton in Ashfield SC have lost their battle with the local council and will be closing in September. It's been years since I sailed there but I remember it being quite unusual in being in an urban setting, friendly bunch though so it's very sad.

Looking at their fees they are quite reasonable too, their membership fee is over 50% more than ours, but their berth fees are much less.

The only good thing is when my club does go, it means more sailors for other small/medium clubs in the area like Banbury, Shustoke, Earlswood , Tamworth etc. None of us want the big club experience like Draycote . 

The local paper are saying that the council intend to kick Sutton in Ashfield SC off their site to allow a commercial water sports centre to be developed. Not for me, but perhaps it's the future.

Our club was failing, then about 15 years ago they set up a club sailing school. 

They now have up to 80 children signed on each year, for sail training. 

It took a while but it has revived the dinghy classes, and some of the adults have been learning to sail and are beginning to feed through to the keel boat classes (and a few with the dinghies).

Oh I intend to volunteer to help with the sailing School from next year when I've retired.

I must admit I think the medium/large clubs are more at risk in the midlands than the small ones, many of which I'm now in my 20th year of wondering how on earth they keep going?

The answer I think is that they are 5 minutes from home for most of their members, live largely off club camaraderie rather that the outright sailing experience and occupy water that no-one wants to use for anything else and land that no-one is allowed to use for anything else.

The larger clubs however are occupying premium sites with a more fickle membership who are much more inclined to travel and with the expansion of multi class traveller series maybe more likely to sod it and join the RYA. How ironic would it be if too many traveller events at premier clubs leads to their demise? Thats very much a 23:00 scenario at the moment, but for small clubs its 23:59 and clock stopped.

For the smaller clubs ageing membership is the biggest threat I think, and the shift in lifestyle leading to their being a lack of members they tick boxes for

The other, a 'small family pond club' has just exceeded it's previous record membership numbers (200) and shows no sign of this slowing in the coming momths.

The biggest difference? The 'Small' club used the covid downtime to look at what would be required once people were allowed out again. As a result we spent a LOT of money refurbing the club facilities and grounds, as well as plotting a 'return to the water' strategy that included paddle boarding.
Lets face it, we had 18 months to get it all sorted and, with the benefit of 'at home' time allowing for the chasing of a lot of grant money, have succeeded handsomely in attracting brand-new members that had been enquiring throughout the pandemic lockdowns. We kept in touch, communicated our plans, had progress pictures on websites and facebook pages etc - and it worked.
A small club absolutely bucking the membership trend and still retaining its 'family' feel and ethos.

 

They are businesses - there's a P&L to manage and there's only so much goodwill can be extracted to avoid overhead costs with paid employees.

Try explaining that to a non-sailing partner, it does sound rather ridiculous when compared to golf, fishing, cycling, 5 a side, cricket, bridge club....  

Are there any particular sporting activities where it is acceptable to receive grant aid, or is it just sailing clubs that should be singled out?  And why stop there, why should Art and Culture be supported?

It’s a little rich for you to use food banks as a reason why sailing clubs shouldn’t get grants when you fully support the all the policies over the last decade that made them necessary 

Post what you want as a retort, as a know you will.  I will not comment on this subject again . 

I used to think that “membership” of a club (any club, not just sailing) was an off putting thought - the commitment that that implies even if you aren’t clear exactly what that means.  Many people want a more casual relationship with an activity and don’t want to immerse themselves into the unknown. And I agree the term “duty” sounds unpleasant and like something from the time of rationing.  

However, I don’t know if it is me getting older and finally being prepared to accept that I have settled roots, or whether it is a new found camaraderie from the strange covid times, but I now really appreciate the societal impact of community clubs.  I now no longer view clubs and membership as an antiquated business model but as a desirable feature that really adds value to the community and most duties are actually quite fun and rewarding (perhaps there is a better, modern, term for these?  Well-being day? Kindness day? Civic pride day? Ideas on a postcard!).

I'm a diehard total believer in the 'members' club' model of sailing clubs, but I think maybe there comes a point where too many cubs in too small an area is not helpful.

Maybe a commercial operation on this water could get more than 5 boats x twice a week n the water, and that would actually be better for 'sailing' in the big picture? Or maybe we should look beyond Dinghy Sailing and be positive about a wider range of water sports!

Post covid it's likely to get tougher, people have thought about what's importat, you can WFH and if sailing is important to you, you don't have to live in some dump at the wrong end of the A38 and sail on puddles only any good for RC boats.

Sometimes , it  is good to stop fighting rearguard actions aganst the decline of the inland dinghy craze  it's not the 1980s any more let alone the 1960s.

Am a little surprised at you for this post, I might have read it incorrectly, but it sounds like a sniff of  snobbery in this post re the sea over inland sailing . 

I am more than happy inland sailing , with in 40 mins of my house there are about 10 clubs and if I increased that range to an hour the number would go up to over 20 . They range in size from tiny clubs like mine up to Grafham sc. I think that give me all variety I need. 

Why would I want to travel 2 hours + to sail less, because of the weather/sea conditions and the fact most sea clubs are only open 9 months of the year. 

I apologise in advance if I have read too much into your post 

Events would seem to suggest that many 10s of 1000s of people living near the club in question are not  exactly enthusiastic about sailing there.

I've done my share of racing on such water, and the only way it can be any good is class racing with a reasonable fleet of fairly matched boats. Maybe team racing.

Beyond racing, it may be a good place to learn to sail, but once you are competent, you can hardly 'cruise' very far.

Apologies in return, having reread my post I can easily see that it came across that way and that was quite the opposite of my intention  

For the record I enjoy sailing at my inland club every bit as much as I do sailing on the sea.

Just putting a question out there , taking out the large Scottish lochs and the the big lakes in the Lake District. Does anyone ever join a inland club to cruise ? 

Just putting a question out there , taking out the large Scottish lochs and the the big lakes in the Lake District. Does anyone ever join a inland club to cruise ? 

[/QUOTE

People used to. back when I was a kid in the late 60s ad 70s, I recall lots of people sailing and not racing.  Perhaps a bit like people paddle boards and sit-on kayaks now and have zero interest in competing? Did that die before windsurfing came along? Or did boards take that market?  Also of course a lot of people took their non-competitive sailing into yachts.

I agree with davidyacht's comment on the other thread that "the quality of the racing and the camaraderie of the club are IMO far more important than the salinity of the water"

My inland club has about 500 members of which probably not more than 100 or so do any racing. So I guess that’s 400 in it for the cruising. And that’s a very long way from Scotland!

Or several hundrd who don't do much sailing?

No - the 60 odd Wayfarers never race but are regularly out mid week.  The Quests, Ents, Topaz, Challengers, Oppies, Toppers, wineglass, Leaders, Miracles etc are out in force on a Saturday.  Believe it or not, most club members do not race but still enjoy sailing around a lake in an AONB and don’t find it “rubbish”.  

Even I have been known to take the D-Zero out for a spin on a Saturday afternoon blast occasionally and as we only sail on 8 acres it’s not like I don’t know every cm of the pond . But to be honest if that was my only sailing experience it would soon get very boring. It would  be different if I sailed at a larger water like Draycote or even Shustoke/Cotswold/South Cerney etc  type size. 

At the end of the day, sailing is a very big cake and we can all decide how big a slice of that cake we want to experience and enjoy .

When it comes to asking about levels of 'activity' at a club, starters in races is something you can measure, it's on most clubs' websites . Participation in organised training is less public, but again something that can be found out.  Boats out sailing casually are much harder to quantify, but I've often found  clubs to be pretty quiet when there's no racing or formal training going on. So many boats only afloat a dozen times a year or less.

Just because you can’t measure it or didn’t observe it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

This is the action as of 5 minutes ago.  No one racing or in organised training, just out for a good time.

Depends what you mean by 'cruising'.

Pottering about in F3 in a Wayfarer is pretty low risk.

Blasting around in a fragile high performance boat in F5 has a lot more potential for things to go wrong.

Conversely, in some places the biggest risk is ending up a long way from home if the wind dies.

People's attitude to requiring safety cover may be somewhat related to changes in boats and attitudes to how light a wind is worth going for a sail in, or what the upper end of 'enjoyable' is. As a kid, we had family beach holidays with a dinghy to cruise, but my Dad's ideas of 'cruising conditions' were more likely to need oars or an outboard than toestraps. these days, my idea of  cruising generally involves a boat with a built in cooker and a ballast keel. Many other people around here, if they're not going to race, they'd choose a board instead of a boat. Most board people are not expecting a safety boat.

My old board sailing club is still thriving, there is no organised club racing and the safety boat is only on the water during events. It's a bit of a walk back if you end up at the downwind end of the lake but it's perfectly doable.

I can imagine ending up on the wrong side of a private reservoir could be worse than eding up on the wrong public beach. But all these things are more nuisance than life-threatening generally.

Good to hear people are making a go of a board club on a non-racing model.

It’s just a shame that the club doesn’t have enough members to be able to cover the cost of this professional safety cover and their severn Trent rent .  We were talking about small clubs like mine going under but this large club hasn’t made a profit two years in a row for over a decade and has to dip into its reserves every other year to keep going . It has to pay @ 30,000 a year to severn Trent in rent  and pay for professional safety crew for 364 days a year . Which for most week days is not used . If it wasn’t for the bar/events and sail training profits this club would be dead in the water already . 

And before tt rubbish’s this post , this information is public knowledge on their own social media. 

Spread the members out at other clubs reinforces their membership and volunteer pool.

In fact they did such a good job that a lot of clubs ( including mine ) based their covid protocols on Draycotes .

Very true. If you you mean the committee, if you mean our friend Dave I have to say I’ve never taken to the man for many reasons . None of which I would ever mention on a forum . 

I really wish the best for the club ( even though on here it sometimes sounds as if I don’t ) . This area needs a big club . 

It would be interesting to see some statistics around what happens to the membership of a club when it closes. At my small club we've always had many members who live locally, and while I think some of the keener racers will move club and continue in the sport I think a lot of our members would leave the sport if the club closed. IMHO club closures are usually a big deal.  

When my first club closed 25 years ago , I think we were down to about 30 members and about 15 of them were were regular racers . I have less information on what happened to the 15 none racers but I do know of at least two or three of them that joined other clubs .

I do know more about happened to the 15 racers , 3 were over retiring age and I think just didn’t want to be bothered with the upheaval of joining a new club and stopped sailing, but the rest of us found new clubs straight away. 

To sum up, if this is replicated in other clubs that close, about 50% of a clubs membership will go on to get new clubs. 

I am not saying these are reliable statistics in anyway. 

I'd guess that mst actual active sailors will join another club if they actually enjoy racing.

Some might be ready to take a break from it or give it up.

The people who are involved with the sport running races, manning safety boats etc, if they don't race themselves, are perhaps more likely not to join another club? There are a lot of ex-sailors, parents of sailors etc etc who do a lot of work. Some of that will be missed by sailing as a whole. Some of the 'work' in running a a club which doesn't attract enough sailors is perhaps only of value to the people it's keeping amused on their committees?

This is true but the added cost of clubs with full time staff and rescue crew will also force people out of the sport too. 

Sailing is between a rock and a hard place . 
 

The clubs that I am aware of that have packed up have mainly been landlord related.

davidyacht Sure you are correct , re landlord problems causing most club closures .

Unless your a midlands river club. Clubs like Warwick ( my old club) and Evesham just ran out of members in the 90s due to changing tastes in sailing . People wanted more than sailing up and down on narrow bit of river fighting with canoeists, hire boats and in Eveshams case, canal boats . 

In general affluence breeds laziness. Yes an old fashioned view but hey ho there y'go not everyone will agree.

Pay and play with no commitment, how is that an answer for money stressed; it's not, it is an outdated legacy of living on tick.

Deliveroo, JustEat,,,,,,,,, get your act together and save money. 

 

From what I'm reading, the past offers a more healthy future than the rabbit hole I see from my perspective. 

1. the sky isn’t falling in

2. Pay and play equals easy come, easy go.  It is hard to plan anything even medium term when your customers can been gone in the morning.

3. Sailing is rare in being multi-generational, outdoors, green and doesn’t have many direct alternatives. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it appeals strongly to those it does appeal to.

4.  Today’s over 60s will be replaced by the next generation.  That’s how life works.  At any rate the average age of our committee is probably mid 40s. 

https://www.becclesasc.co.uk/about

 

One could say that much of the sailing industry and World Sailing are driving the sport in that direction anyway. When one reads the sailing press of late 1800s to 1930s it appears to be quite similar to the sailing press of the 2020s in its concentration on the most expensive and elitist part of the sailing scene, and in the way it largely ignores local or cheap classes. The sailing authority decisions also concentrated largely on the elite, just as they do today.

It's a vast contrast to the situation in the sport's later growth periods, when at least some parts of the industry promoted classes like Snipes, or the real boomtime with its concentration on classes like Holt designs and cruiser/racers, rather than boats that almost no one can afford.

It's a long way from dinghy sailing, but the fact that in the '60s boomtime the New York Yacht Club thought that the America's Cup was too elitist because a winning campaign cost $800,000 (about $7 million in today's values) says a lot about how enormously our standards have changed.

To me one of the weirdest things is that no one today seems to use data to see what is succeeding and what is failing in the promotion of our sport, so bull***t reigns.

I'm lucky, our local club is booming as is my main class, but the overall situation is pretty poor.

Thats a very young committee!

Beccles is a good club, I've sailed there a couple of times..

Up here on the northern Broads at Horning SC (originally formally founded 1910***), I think our current Commodore is in his 50's and the Commodore before that was in her early 30s.

Throughout  my 43 year membership of HSC, the majority of officers and workers at this entirely Amateur run and operated club has been mostly the retired. I retire at the end of the year and will be volunteering for many more duties.

We have all but run out of space in our Dinghy park, but we have lost a few out of the  keelboat classes (20-25ft no cabin) so have mooring spaces there..

*** there was racing / sailing at Horning many years before that there's a photo of 1895 racing  and there is film of the 1908 regatta here...  http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/57 The current club house is on the same corner of the river and our racing is mostly on the same stretch of river.

This is full of errors.

Most of the 'elitist' events are not, and ever have been, drien byWS or its previous incarnations. The really expensive events like the Americas Cup, Sail GP are driven by media interests and M/B -illionaires.  WS meanwhile promotes the international classes like the Laser. Who's fault is it that the GrandPrix type events get the media coverage? Could it be that's what media viewers and readers want? I think it's time people STFU about the 1960 dinghy boom, it's never going to be the 1960s again, get over it. Using 'data' to measure success requires deciding what 'success' actually is. 'Success' for one mud-puddle club in one year might not be contributing to 'success' for the wider view of UK sailing looking forwards  to the next couple of decades.  

Probably the best post in this entire thread !    Well said sir !

Wrong.

I didn't say that WS drove the "elitist" events like the AC. I used the AC as an example of "how enormously our standards have changed", not as an example of an event run or driven by WS.

In about 1969, for example, the NYYC had a committee consider the replacement of the 12s with a 62'-ish IOR boat because the 12s were seen as too separate from the "mainstream" of the sport, and too expensive in terms of lack of resale value. These days, it's accepted that an AC is at least five times as expensive (in inflation adjusted terms) and its accepted that an AC boat will be vastly different from the mainstream.

WS is not just promoting classes like the Laser, which is a member of one of the world's most popular types, the singlehanded hiking dinghy - rather, it has promoted far less popular foilers so much that they form majority of classes in the Olympics, the major event that WS controls. That is an example of the "elitist" (one may use other terms, perhaps) nature of WS' direction. They are NOT trying to reflect the sport's makeup as it actually is, like they did in earlier times.

The reports about adoption of earlier Olympic classes, like the Laser, 470, windsurfer etc make it clear that in those days, WS believed that the Olympics should represent the participant side of the sport to a large extent. These days, they basically ignore that in favour of promoting a bunch of classes that, with one or perhaps two exceptions, are very small niches compared to the "mainstream" types that are largely or entirely excluded.

When I left the industry it was apparent that a whole bunch of factors had caused a drift away from the sailing industry and media promoting the sailing that most sailors do and towards the sailing that very, very few of them do. I didn't say it was anyone's "fault" that events like the GP get the media coverage. However, given that last time anyone (AFAIK) tried to get data they found that potential sailors were turned off by the sport's image as elitist, expensive, difficult and dangerous it seems logical to note that the concentration on that sort of sailing would logically seem to be hurting the sport.

I have no idea why you apparently believe that I have only one vision of what "success" is. Don't claim I'm making errors merely because of conclusions you drew without evidence.

The point is that in the past, to use one example, people in the sailing media have regularly used and highlighted data to look at various indicators of "success". Even in the 1880s, Dixon Kemp would keep data on the number of active racing yachts from one year to the next, and he could therefore provide useful data on what types of boat were growing or fading and the general health of the racing side of the sport.

These days there is lots of that sort of data around but the sailing media and, from my conversations with some of them and their printed remarks, the sailing authorities ignore data such as the number of boats sailing in general, the types that are actually selling, etc.

I'm quite over the 60s but that doesn't mean I have to STFU about the reasons why clubs and classes are fading. I want to ensure that our sport remains strong enough that we can still get boats and races, and to do that I have studied lessons that I have used to grow my local club and to revive a class that I once ran and which is now the 2nd or 3rd top selling class in the world.

Sorry if actually trying to learn how to keep our sport vital annoys you for some reason, and for finding it intellectually interesting.

Since about 1960, if not before, the wealthy and/or professional sailors have had a significant role in getting ordinary people interested in sailing. Chichester, Rose, Blyth and all those people inspired others. More recently, Ellen Macarthur, and a few others?

I'm not sure looking acceptable to the maximum number of people is what matters, maybe it's more important to deliver some 'value' to enough people who are likely to be interested? It doesn't matter what football fans or cricketers think of us if they're busy doing football or cricket.  There maybe no point in chasing the mass market like in the 60s, because the world has changed. In a UK where 1.5 million people go skiing every year, just to pick one alterative way of spending cash on fun, 'sailing' might need to face the fact it will have a smaller market share. In my view it's more viable to provide a good quality offering to people who want it, than to go chasing people who are not really interested. These days there are a lot of alternatives to tacking around a small pond.Spread yourself thin, sell yourself short. It's inevitable that some clubs are unviable in a shrinking market and that people will shop around for clubs which offer them what they want, or question whether clubs serve them at all.

OTOH, some small clubs have had their ups and downs for 50 or 100 years, people come, people go, boats change a bit but sailing is still sailing.