“The Desire to Sail Well…”

There are a couple of things I like to remember before I go sailing.

The first is to remember a dry towel. I’m about 95% successful at this, which makes me sound like a towel-remembering genius. But let me tell you, the 5% of the time I forget can be pretty costly.

I almost always remember to pack one of these

The other thing I always think about before I go sailing is this: Continue reading

One Coach, Two Capsizes and Three Lessons Learned

A while back I took part in my first Frostbite event after getting back into sailing. It’s always hard to know what is going to count as a good result when you’re racing against people that you’ve never sailed with before, but out of a fleet of 30+ I was hoping to be somewhere around the top 10.

For the day of the first races it was blowing a solid force 4, with a decent if not huge swell. I love sailing in these conditions, but I get better results in lighter breezes. So when I rounded the windward mark in seventh I was pretty happy, and when I gained a spot on the downwind I was even happier. Sixth place and gaining – this frostbiting thing was easy. Continue reading

Know Your Customer

As I’ve said before, sailing clubs are not businesses – certainly not in the normal sense. But we can learn quite a lot from business. One such lesson is knowing who our “customer” is, and who we want our customers to be.

There’s been a fair amount of comment about how sailing has an ageing demographic, which would suggest that our current customer is in the 40+ age range. These are great members to have – they’re experienced, have decided that sailing is their core interest, and, of course, they tend to have disposable income. We’re lucky to have strong membership in this age range.

However, most of the talk around this subject focuses on kids, and particularly on how to keep kids in sailing. The drop off at around the mid-teens is dramatic, and if we can stem the flow then our demographic would look a lot more balanced.

And so a lot of the discussion is around how we can make sailing more fun for kids (I’ve written a little about this in a previous post).

But are these our real “customer”? Continue reading

Stopwatch Nationals

I recently updated my page on sailing watches, and it reminded me of something we used to do on those long drives to Optimist open meetings and regattas.

You would think that these long drives were a lot of fun.

Especially for the adult or adults driving us.

Two or three hours in a car (each way) with bored teenagers is a barrel of laughs for all concerned, and I’m sure, if you were asked to guess, you’d predict that my parents (or my friend’s parents) looked forward to these journeys with great anticipation.

Surprisingly, this wasn’t the case. Arguments over music, elbow room, noisy breathing, whether Craig Johnson was better than Paul Walsh, who got the biggest banana, and so on, seemed to annoy them.

And even though we very regularly interspersed these arguments with queries about how much longer the journey was going to last, the adults in the car still did not seem to be enjoying themselves.

Then, one magical day, all this changed. Continue reading