So, which do you prefer?

432zero just wondering were The Nead is ? I sail at L.S.S.C and I didn’t realise anyone sailed on anything any smaller than that .

A lot of my sea sailing is still on enclosed waters (Weymouth, Chichester harbour, solent). I would say these venues are typically a little less shifty than the larger inland lakes, but in the right direction there is some over lap. 

The sand certainly does get annoying on the sea, but my kit doesn't stink like pond / goose sh*t. 

The thing I miss most about sailing inland is launching doesn't require hefting the boat up a long beach at low tide. I also liked that you always knew you would race, pretty much whatever the wind. I can't really remember a race being cancelled, except maybe for ice. 

On the sea, even within the harbour you do lose far more races as with tide there is a decent chance it just isn't possible to get a boat around a course. And being more exposed those 20 knot days inland tend to be 25-35 on the sea. 

One thing I do love about the sea is sea breezes. There is pretty much always a decent hiking breeze in the afternoon throughout the summer. Whereas inland sometimes it would feel as if I hadn't used a toe strap between April and September. 

Steady on , coming on here giving balanced views on stuff  . What has happened to this forum 

No,Stokes Bay, in a few months. I do love the extra dimension of waves, my only issue with the sea is they feel they have to use all of it. Long stable beats in a Radial are just a test of fitness, something I do need to improve. See you and the soon Musto soon

Are we talking about 'sailing' or 'dinghy racing'?

If you've got a good group of people to sail against in the right boats,then racing inland can be great and is often more reliable than on the sea. But aside from racing, sailing on flat inland water is a shallow two dimensional thing compared to the sea where you have waves and open space.

The racing at my inland club is pretty high standard and very competitive, the costal club ,much less so and most of the sailing is blasting or cruising in company with just half a dozen 'regatta days' a year.

Is one better than the other? No, they are just different.

Coastal clubs only have about a 180 degree catchment area (the water gets in the way), not 360 like inland. I've always thought this spreads things over-thin for many coastal clubs. And the percentage of sailors is far from being sufficiently higher near the coast to compensate for either of those things.

I learned to sail on an estuary and it took me a while to adapt to inland; I always got lifted hugely just as I reached the reeds. Now, I prefer inland, but like a bit of sea sailing as long as tide does not make it a one-way, tactics-free drag race to the favoured corner. I'm better nowadays at sneaky than one-way hike-fests. 

So, POSH this weekend, where Torbay scrambles the magnets in my brain. The sea on the south coast should face south and a bit west, not bloody east

Originally posted by Mark Aged 42 The skill set is so different. Some of our top Solo sailors (Essex Yacht Club/Leigh-on-Sea Sailing Club) went to an inland Open meeting last autumn. Got destroyed! Chatting with one of our lads, he could not believe how good the local sailors were in picking the right place to be on the course, and boat tuning.

Some places only have two wind directions (up the valley, down the valley) and no variables like tide or swell. Often fixed marks. So the same race gets replayed many times a season.

 Good sea venues can have a different environment every week.

  Does it make 'good' racing if the locals spend a few years learning their pond, river or bay? Or does it just exclude people by favoring the local pecking order?

The good circuit sailors will become adept at learning new ponds, rivers and bays quickly.

 Fair point about boat tuning, on the sea sometimes too many variables and boats too far apart make small differences in pace much harder to see. (and easier to compensate for!)

All the inland clubs I have ever sailed at have had 2,3,4 sometimes 5 or 6 wind directions in the same race 

Soz - I forgot I was on the interweb - I'll have a strong coffee and come back all fired up for some keyboard battling

rudyard lake, beat up to top mark, tack and beat back 

You're right, I should have said 'two sets of wind directions'. :-)

Point is the locals learn this rubbish over a couple (or more)  seasons and become experts at their little pond where they're the bigger fish. Happens in some bays on the sea too. Not very encouraging for newcomers who lose interest before joining the clique.

That's a bit harsh - perhaps you need to join a friendlier club.

Our club handbook actually contains advice on how to sail on the pond and our 'experts' are far more likely to share their knowledge and help people than keep it to themselves.

Some bloke actually wrote a book as a follow on from helping/coaching on how to get grips with the place

We're all entitled to our preferences but some of the jaundiced views suggest to me what people are saying is they prefer racing over sailing, which is also cool if that's your thing. 

I quickly noticed how boat handling skills were important inland, sail smooth and keep the boat moving. On the sea you can just wait for the next following wave. Can't beat reaching down wind with a following sea, surfing down waves, so I guess its the sea for me.

I grew up on an estuary and for years only raced at sea, but over the last few years I've been mainly an inland sailor and it's been good for my sailing. IMHO you can hit the sea for a weekend and get lots of good training in, but learning to handle inland conditions seems to normally just take week after week of racing.

I do get what Eric said about the inland venues that create some sailors who are only good in one set of conditions, but the same thing can apply to ocean venues. 

One major thing could be that a country that values inland sailing (the UK in particular but perhaps also Germany) will almost always have a bigger and better sailing scene than those that downgrade it and therefore make the sport less accessible to most people.

Sailing inland on a lake/reservoir can be so much more convenient/safer than sailing on the sea.  Launching your boat down a nice concrete slipway within 10 metres of where the cover was removed, not worrying about the tide taking your trolley away while you’re sailing is so convenient.

My old club in the midlands was a decent sized reservoir, the racing area would be probably twice the size of the racing area used by my coastal club.  

Inland the marks were permanently positioned and the course would be set according to the wind direction, you’d normally get at least two upwind legs and a variety of reaches and runs downwind.  

The coastal club would have to send a rib out with 3 buoys and set a triangle, which could end up being a one-sided beat and two dodgy downwind legs.  

Inland you could turn up and launch and use the marks to set a course to practice, if you had a serious breakage it would result in a long walk back rather than a trip on a lifeboat. Also I’d sail in much stronger wind strengths inland than I would on the sea, probably because of my perception of the risks, the inland club would also run races in higher wind strengths than the coastal club.  

Certain wind directions on the coast can build a large swell where you intend to launch from which results in no sailing, even relatively low wind strengths can cause this.  I think you can really improve at racing sailing quite rapidly at an inland club whereas it would take years to reach a similar level sailing at one coastal club, that said some areas have a variety of coastal clubs that sail on different days, so you could sail at 3 or 4 to get more racing.

I would say that sailing at a coastal club can give you a day of sailing that you’ll always remember as one of your best sailing experiences, when the sun’s out, force 4, nice waves its perfect, you just can’t get that inland.  Also sailing along the coastline to another beach for a beer is a great experience, especially for someone who grew up in the midlands. 

At the coastal club, the safety boat has to be set-up, engine warmed thru’, marks loaded on, etc. then collectively everyone has to muck in to get the rib down to and across the beach, and get the rib launched.  The folk on the rib then get the marks dropped and set a start line.  

Then everyone else launches and sailing out to the start, with a variety of classes there’s a range of time its takes for some boats to make it to the start.  If a boat gets into difficulties, then the rib up- anchors and goes to assist which then can delay the start.

At our coastal club it would be handicap racing from a mass start, the race would be roughly 50 mins for the first boat but this could be 1.5hours for the last boat.  Then the marks would need to be retrieved and the rib recovered, hose down, engine flushed thru’, etc..

An evening race of about an hour would mean you’d be gone for 4 hours, I struggle to justify being away for that length of time so find myself jumping on a mountain bike for an hour or so instead these days.

If you have a breakage though and the rescue boats are elsewhere on the course of the river, you just paddle to the side of the river and another competitor will tell the nearest rescue boat as they pass.

Fixed marks can be dodgy too, I've sailed at clubs where they always use the same marks, always trying to set up a sausage samoza, from the same start line, so you get strange angles to the wind and when it's the normal south westerly it can get very boring. A variety of courses makes life more interesting. It's one of the reasons I've stayed at Horning Sailing club, we do on the river at the club, up at the Broad doing a variety of courses, and the most of civilised races Down river to a pub, have lunch and then race back.. 

That's another side of coastal clubs, relatively few are pure 'dinghy racing' clubs.

Which means often the main aim of the club is accommodating yachts ashore in the winter and dinghy racing is a sideline or 'for the kids'. There is a whole spectrum of this and each club is unique (?)

The positive side of that is that you can have opportunities to race bigger boats, hitch a ride to France, meet a wider range of watersports people etc.

Good point but not sure about "relatively few". The vast majority of coastal clubs I visit for open meetings are pure dinghy clubs. Perhaps that's a cause-effect inversion. ut back to my River Itchen to Portsmouth club-count, most of those are dinghy/cat-only, no floating caravans.

But go to the IoW and it seems they're virtually all floating-caravan clubs. Yachts need some form of harbour for weather protection. Dinghies don't.

Please don't. 

Two laws of internet discussion, Godwin's Law and iGRF's Law. Please can we not go down that accursed rabbit whole again - it's all been said, ad infinitum.

Plus I live in Brighton, so it doesn't really make much sense to head inland to go sailing!

not a sliver as much as fuel prices, how inflation is hitting people's pockets and, having got out of the habit (covid innit), getting back into it, would be my guess

But upsetting the midget-goblin sounds like a good marketing angle to get numbers back up

Lots of clubs in that area are more diverse than you might think.

I have friends who were members at one of those dinghy/cat only clubs, but also owned a yacht in Gosport. It's quite common for people on the coast to be members of more than one club, to cover their interests. My coastal club is 'dinghy only' but I think more than half our Laser fleet either own a yacht of some sort or regularly sail on one. A lot of members of Stokes and Weston seem to live miles away, if you did  live in that Netley to Gosport area, you'd probably keep a yacht in Portsmouth Harbour or up Southampton way, or even on the IoW. It's an exposed coast with only a small harbour at Titchfield Haven? Some would say it's also a fair distance from the actual Sea, which starts at Hurst or the Forts, but that's another conversation.

Conversely, I think some of the 'Floating Caravan' Clubs are reasonably active in dinghies for kids and/or Dayboat racing? I suspect that those which don't offer anything other than yachts or keelboats (squadron, Royal London, Royal Corinthian)....?  aren't really locals' clubs, but some 'owners' will have a third home nearby. The Solent area is a bit different from many coastal areas.

Best thing he ever did for the D-zero class was NOT pick up his boat on the day he was was due to pick it up .