Calendar 2020/2021 – RC Sail – John Gordon

The COVID-19 shut-down has significantly impacted our ability to lock in sailing and cruising events. However, we thought it important to publish this year’s calendar as currently planned so you can pencil in the events you would be keen to do when restrictions are lifted.

It’s worth noting that some events are already cancelled, and others are likely to be rescheduled. So far rescheduled events will be, “shake off the cobwebs” and the “Bay Clubs return to sailing” celebration sail day organised by our friends at the ORCV. We will communicate the new dates once we have clarity.

Your Sailing Committee has endeavoured to develop a calendar that has something for everybody, no matter if you are a social cruiser, day sailor, love the ocean, a power boat member, want to develop your skills or just love racing around the sticks.

In developing the calendar, we have partnered with our affiliate clubs at the ORCV and MYC and by adopting some of their events we can say our calendar is unique in terms of variety and options. Our MCYS fleet will benefit from our own results even when sailing in races managed by affiliate clubs with the added bonus of being “in the running” for full fleet recognition.

Our calendar has 59 on water events over 11 different series. These series include:

A welcome back to Friday Night Twilight racing for all Cat 5 and above boats. Twilights are a 2 series, pre and post-Christmas program during daylight savings;
Destination Races, again for Cat 5 and above and often are run in conjunction with an affiliate club;
Cruise Pursuit. These are open to power boats and yachts where we will plan to have staggered start times, so we all arrive reasonably close together. There will be a high focus on the social side of things with an overnight stay at a host club or marina;
Channels Series are medium to longer day events a great alternate to standard windward/ leeward courses or just around the sticks; Courses and distances will be designed to be completed between 3 and 6 hours, long enough to enjoy and not too long that they become a test of resilience and fortitude. We will shorten courses to ensure a timely finish;
Bay Races are interclub yacht races;
Regattas. A lot of our sailors enjoy the Regattas around the Bay. We have decided to include the major ones in our calendar and will have our own MCYS Boat results as well as overall Regatta results;
Winter racing is based around ORCV’s Winter Bay Races and include complimentary berthing at host clubs as required;
For those who have aspiration to cruise outside of the bay we have adopted ORCV’s Coastal Sprint and Go Coastal events which are day events designed to increase your knowledge and experience. An “on board mentor” can be arranged;
Ocean Series. For those who love the thrills or aspire to sail further afield we have again partnered with the ORCV. These are Cat 3 and Cat 2 races and we can help with getting your boats up to the level required, with equipment audits and arrange for “on board mentors”;
This calendar has our first Cruise in company to Refuge Cove, Wilson’s Prom. (We will keep an eye on the weather and will only go if safe to do so!). This is open to Cat 3 yachts and power boats;
We have also scheduled 4 other interclub events which do not contribute to a series but are interesting and individually unique.

Given the wide choice of events scoring for series winners will be based on your best results, thus allowing you to drop or not compete in some races in the series, but still having a chance to take home a trophy.

The ORCV provides exceptional training for power boaters and yachties, from navigation, understanding weather, learning how to enter and exit the heads, Rip tours and sea survival courses. We have included their training days in our calendar.

We will be using Top Yacht as the program of choice for entry to on water events and the control of important documentation, accreditations, crew details and equipment audits.

We have adopted TackTracker as our technology platform to manage and track races and on water events including those for power boats. Tack Tracker gives us the ability to know where every boat is in the fleet, all that is needed is a mobile phone, and a once-off $49.99 download of the program.

We have finalised our Sailing Instructions (available at https://mcys.com.au/sailing-information/ ) to cater for all the new events and also published the Notice of Races and cruise and other events for power and sail events. The NOR’s and NOE’s (Notice of Event) will be the primary way of communication of Key information and detail on all events to members.

Last year we had our inaugural Opening day and it was a huge success. This year we are planning to hold Opening Day Sail Past and the blessing of the fleet on the 4^th October 2020. We want it to be even bigger and so please pencil it in your diaries. There will be prizes for the best dressed boats (power & sail)!

I look forward to working with our newly appointed Sailing Captain Tim Pepperell, and our Commodore and Vice Commodore to make 20/21 a great success.

John Gordon
RC- Sail