Scottish Dinghy Sailing Development Group

Dinghy sailing at Chanonry SC © Chanonry Sailing Club

Throughout the world many words are being spoken written about what to do about the changing face of sailing demographics, falling participation and how sailing can meet the changing demands of modern life.

Following on from multiple online conversations in the Scottish Dinghy Sailing Group Facebook Group a cohort of Scottish sailors have come together to form a new working forum to discuss and help clubs in Scotland find new ways to reach their goals and act as a common resource for grass roots dinghy sailing in Scotland generally. An initial meeting of interested sailors was held on a wet and windy night in December and it was agreed to move forward in 2020 with the group coming back together to work through the aims and next steps for the project on yet another wet and windy winter's night.

The main outcomes of this second meeting were to agree the Group's name as being the Scottish Dinghy Sailing Development Group and set the following as the purpose of the group:

• To promote dinghy sailing at all levels in Scotland and to encourage regular participation in the sport at clubs;
• To be organised from, and to work for the benefit of, all Scottish dinghy sailing clubs;
• To act as a common resource, forum and coordination point for clubs;
• To encourage mutual support and facilitation between clubs for the common good;
• To liaise with external organisations and governing bodies and to lobby on behalf of Scottish dinghy clubs as required.

Jane Campbell-Morrison was nominated as Chair but the structure of the Group has been deliberately left open and fluid to encourage Clubs, Classes and individuals to get involved in the specific areas of interest to them. While there have been rumours that this group is in some way a break away from RYA Scotland or a rival to it, the truth is very different and while the Group has similar overall aims to RYA Scotland, it has a grassroots dinghy focus that should be seen more of an adjunct to RYA Scotland than a rival. Indeed many of its ambitions such as helping facilitate the organisation of the Scottish Dinghy calendar seek to replicate those once carried out now by the long defunct RYA Scotland Dinghy Committee.

Back in the day (as they say) one of the most important functions of the Dinghy Committee was the alignment of the Scottish Dinghy calendar between clubs and classes which was then published into a yearbook distributed by Yachting Life magazine, was. Unfortunately this has long since stopped being published but it has been resurrected recently by Sailingfast who have been publishing a paper version again. The Scottish Dinghy Sailing Group are now working with Sailingfast to create an online searchable calendar to allow sailors to find upcoming events, see all their classes' travellers series in one place and for clubs and classes to upload details of their events to. This calendar, which is still being populated, can be found at the new website being built by the Group along with other resources and links. Visit ScottishDinghy.com/events to see the new online calendar.

As the remit of the Group is so wide it has been agreed to arrange specific meetings focusing on specific areas and the outline programme of future meetings are outlined below:

• Instructors in clubs
• Class racing in Scotland - boats that Scotland sails
• Adult training in clubs
• Inter club activities
• Events and programmes - collaboration around calendars and resources

The first of these meetings focused on Instructors and Instructing at Clubs is planned for the middle of February and preferences in dates are being sought now via a Doodle Poll. All interested individuals and Clubs are welcome to attend and if this subject is close to your heart now is the time to get involved and help make whatever changes the sport needs. Given the large geographic spread of clubs in Scotland, online collaboration tools such as Skype or Zoom are being investigated. More details will follow.

Dates and venues are still to be confirmed for all of the meetings but the intention is to try and organise the Events and Programmes meeting in a central location towards the end of the 2020 season to bring Clubs and Classes together to collaborate to form a great dinghy calendar for the 2021 season. Whether this is teaming up with similar classes for combined events, creating new traveller series' by combining smaller similar classes such as hiking singlehanders or two person symmetric dinghies together into new groupings or simply to enable Clubs to work together to avoid unwanted event clashes we hope this meeting will become a key feature of future seasons' calendars.

A fledgling website has now been set up and apart from hosting the online events calendar, it aims to provide a common resource for all Scottish Clubs and Classes to share their news and results. Currently the Clubs section is being populated with a home page for each Club plus links to the Club's Facebook page etc. The same in intended for Scottish classes and the site is available to host homepages for active Scottish Classes if they do not have one already. To see more please visit scottishdinghy.com or email

We hope the group will flourish with time and if you want to get involved, now is the time to join this grass roots initiative.