Racing at Glasson is very informal and for the foreseeable future there seems no prospects that Glasson will become a national Dinghy Racing club. This is not a bad situation and we can make it into a good situation. One perceptive member has suggested that the situation is like unto pruning trees. The mature growth has been eliminated and now the new shoots are appearing.
At the moment we don’t have enough members to fully staff the organisational aspect of racing – OOD & Rescue Boat and perhaps more importantly we don’t have a leader
We already have a system to work the lights. At the moment it is the three white ‘security’ lights. We can adapt this to operate the traffic lights, making it so that we can operate them manually or automatically.
One of the problems is there is no sound signal which has confused people in the past. This may have been due to the white lights not being distinguishable from the other side of the river. (Flags/Lights are the correct indicator of the signals and have precedence over the sound signals)
A crew could have their boat on the apron ready to shoot off and one of them could sound the 5-minute hooter and then get into their boat?
Crews could then record their own time at the end of their race.
It may be possible to rig up a CCTV camera on the start/finish line, which would record the time. After the racing we could replay the recording, note when each crew crosses the line and work out their time.
Other things we can do are:
We can prepare a sealed A5 chartlet with all the racing marks indicated and on the reverse side a number of pre-designed courses. We just stick up a number flag and sail that course.
We’ve drawn up a programme of racing on Sundays with Social Sailing on Saturdays. The social sailing days can be anything depending on who turns up to sail. We will organise a Treasure Hunt on one of these days. Another day can be a capsize demonstration day.