Where are all the sailors

D

Daydream believer

Well-Known Member
Joined
6 Oct 2012
Messages
23,576
Location
Southminster, essex
Visit site
Our club has fantastic sailing waters, accessible from all states of tides & fairly good facilities.
Years ago the dingy park was packed with every type from GP's to Graduates, Ospreys , Hornets etc the list goes on
A weekend would always see 30 plus boats out, Even Thursday night series had 20 boats for a while
But now the dinghy park has 50% of the dinghies just laying unused & uncared for & there are often more people running the event than actually taking part.
Even with 500 members (& falling) Class racing is no more & has become a hash of handicap racing in the slow or fast fleets
Our club has to survive on open meetings for cash & they are gradually falling in numbers
There are more cruisers but even these seem to sit on the moorings all year doing nothing

The story i am told can be repeated all round our coast

So is dinghy sailing a dying sport, has cruiser sailing overtaken it for participants, or is that slowly dying as well?
Are people sailing less or more even if they do actually own a boat?
Is it because they cannot get crews?
Is it because work pressure is greater - I find that hard to believe
Is it because there are more things to do- if so why are organisations such as Round Table dying?
Or is it that, as a nation, we are not so interested in the sport any more
 
As far as I know, the membership at my little club in Wales has remained at about the same level since I first joined about ten years ago. The racing scene has always been poorly supported.
 
People are buying bigger and bigger boats forgetting that big yachts require crews which is not always convenient to arrange for, therefore, yachts are staying in the marinas most of the time. Club moorings, in the main, are not suitable for boats more than 30 ~ 32 ft therefore are laying partly empty.

Dinghy sailing, unfortunately, is going out of fashion with youngsters; most sailing clubs are strangling to get and to retain young people, the average age of club members is going up and up. Overall, the trend of purchasing bigger boats is killing the average sailing club.
 
From my own experience, the long, long recession has left many sailors with no cash to afford to go sailing - and in this climate you can't even sell the boat. My own isn't getting the attention she deserves as I can't afford the petrol to drive down to the coast!

Rob.
 
I think it could be something more general and not specific to sailing, possibly clubs are becoming a thing of the past. In the insular, purchasing society do people just want less involvement and just get on and do whatever it is they want to do without all the "complications" of being in a club?
 
Part of post-modernism is an emphasis on the individual and membership of fluid groups that change in make up frequently. Great book on this based on ten pin bowling in the USA where participating numbers have remained fairly constant but membership of bowling clubs and leagues has plummeted. Young people don't have the same desire to join one club and for that to be their main interest; so they drift in and out of various things, treating life like a smorgasbord. Sailing clubs could plug into this mindset by running frequent experience days so that lots of young people have a small amount of experience rather than a much smaller number become very experienced; but we have a 1950's model and most clubs stick to it.
 
I can identify with the OP's comments about his club. Note that all the dinghies he mentioned are/were 2-man boats. I think it all started going wrong when the current fashion started for more and more single-handers. I learnt to sail back in the 1960's by crewing for boat-owners in club racing. The competition was intense and huge fun. Some people became really excellent crews and stuck at it, and were sought after. It was totally the natural thing to do to go back every week for more of the same. But with single-handers, there's no other person egging on the boat owner or the crew to go sailing, so if something else comes up, the boat sits in the boat park.
I've often thought about this long term change and I'm sure the single-handed trend has a lot to do with it.
 
I think my sailing club is not a million miles away from the OP's. Through hard work we are keeping our numbers static. We have focused on children and young people in recent years as clearly they are the future. The turnout at training weekends and Cadet week has been encouraging but the key is keeping them sailing after they have gone off to uni etc. To help in this we have introduced a young adult membership class at a reasonable rate.
I think we have had a slight decline in the number of people taking part in dinghy racing but where we are noticing the difference is the number of vacant drying moorings for small cruisers. The deep water moorings are in demand ( being much cheaper than a marina) but drying moorings less so. As these would probably be for smaller, cheaper, entry level (for some) boats it seems to point to a declining interest or hard financial times.
 
I think that a lot of people are virtually connected by forums, Facebook and so on so clubs don't feel important. I've never felt any desire to join a club (apart from the CA which is closer to a virtual one) as I can find far more like minded people remotely than those who happen to live or sail locally to me. My couple of attempts have repelled me as they seem very "clubby", all "we take turns manning the bar rota", and "Wednesday night is social night" etc.

My sailing has always been about doing my own thing with friends and family and if we happen to end up chatting to fellow sailors moored next to us then great, but the next morning we will be off somewhere else.

If you are under 30 (the time when I might have joined a club) then what would the appeal be of joining a load of middle aged people with fixed routines? Fast exciting sailing for the last few decades is much more accessible and fits a younger image if carried out wind or kite surfing. Boards on old cars gathering at a beach, not classic dinghies going up and down a muddy river, watched by dads and grandads.
 
I was shocked when I went to my local sailing club at the average age! I feel positively young at 46.

Its mainly a racing club and I think the cruiser racing will gradually die as there aren't enough new skippers coming in. I started last year but its quite an effort to get your boat ready, get crew and try to figure out what to do!

The dinghy side seems to have a life.

Where I could see growth is the sports boat area. We have a thriving 707 section and I could see a newer class gaining traction over a number of years.
 
I was shocked when I went to my local sailing club at the average age! I feel positively young at 46.

Its mainly a racing club and I think the cruiser racing will gradually die as there aren't enough new skippers coming in. I started last year but its quite an effort to get your boat ready, get crew and try to figure out what to do!

The dinghy side seems to have a life.

Where I could see growth is the sports boat area. We have a thriving 707 section and I could see a newer class gaining traction over a number of years.
 
once these youngsters have got a mortgage, if they can get one, theres not much left in the pot for hobbies like sailing, the ones who discover it, love it, but its a dying sport, most youngsters are trying to get a decent job which pays them some real money. so sailing just doesn't get them interested...joining a club just doesn't cut it for most, more money to fork out , and so many rules, etc etc...they have their ipad and iphone to keep them interested....and the daily grind of paying for rent or mortgage..

we use our boat for weekends and holidays, we don't go abroad, unless you wish to call Ireland a foreign country....but enjoy all the hours and pleasure it gives us being away from the congestion of everyday life.
mortgage finished, so pennies in the pot...
 
No longer as seafaring nation

Britain was a seafaring nation , But successive governments have killed that.Towns had Warships named after them ,all gone . Most people knew sombody who worked on or for companies that had sea connections. They have all gone . They had hols by the sea in uk ,no longer just day/weekend outs to paddle, so its not surprising boat related hobbies are dying,in fact hobbies in general are dying, few tinker with cars, boats they get a business to do it for them if they can afford it while the rest network, drink watch tv etc
Clubs are dying because in times past they were smothered with persons tryng to join, and too many members made clubs too noisy. Cub members wanted a place to relax without having to fight to get a chair in the club house.Clubs put conservative membership barriers up to keep the clubs comfortable for members ,those barriers are still there. but the potential hobbyist seafarers have gone,as they no long work in sea related jobs .Sport sections are excluded from that, but the cruising types want lazy expensive comfort so they work for the plane to spain ,turkey holiday.... blah de blah de bla. we are where we are ,small harbours dying, silting up we will lose a lot bar the ones that will be saved by the enthusiastic few the same as the canals and steam railways . It maybe the few will grow to larger numbers when harbour trusts and clubs expand to include the few hoipaloi that want to become involved.Fifty years time it will change


Edit the conservative moderators are in control of the harbours clubs etc. and the world outside there rule has moved on apace
 
Last edited:
It's a fact that dinghy sailing in particular has been fading out, maybe not susprising when one considers the cost of a competetive dingy - requiring one leaving SWMBO on shore or her being keen to get cold and wet - compared to a secondhand cruiser.

While I'm not into global warming talk, I do think the weather is a lot less inviting nowadays for dinghy sailing; might be a case of ' nostalgia ain't what it used to be ' but I think we're having a bad phase at the moment.

A lot of clubs in Chichester Harbour have realised all this and banded together with activities like dinghy camping trips with safety boats carrying the tents, cross - Solent dinghy and cruiser trips with the dinghy crews staying on the cruisers overnight and gig rowing.

There are also ' Try A Boat ' experience days, I'm sure being pro-active like this is the only way clubs can survive, at my club this approach has worked remarkably well.
 
roblpm said:
I was shocked when I went to my local sailing club at the average age! I feel positively young at 46.

Its mainly a racing club and I think the cruiser racing will gradually die as there aren't enough new skippers coming in. I started last year but its quite an effort to get your boat ready, get crew and try to figure out what to do!

The dinghy side seems to have a life.

Where I could see growth is the sports boat area. We have a thriving 707 section and I could see a newer class gaining traction over a number of years.
Click to expand...

This made me smile because when we joined our lovely club the induction was done by an elderly chap and none of the other new members was under seventy (we're mid thirties). These folk happily admitted they knew nothing about sailing but that's OK, it's a club so the more the merrier and the dinners are excellent.

The club does a very good job of training kids at dinghy sailing in a friendly and accessible way and our choice of club reflects that this is what we wanted for our son. None of the other parents at the lessons have a cruiser though and everybody we meet in the place is astonished to find we have one (and didn't join the man cruiser club in our area which, let's say, has different objectives).

The club has no moorings which is one reason why the cruiser fleet is small.

But it's a grand, friendly, Victorian institution with great food good beer and lovely views on a summers evening. As long as it keeps itself together and provides the kids with great tuition and us with the odd crew member I've no complaints. This just isn't the seventies where you could buy a modest boat new and ready to go. It's not that people necessarily had more money then, but starter cruisers are wildly expensive 35 footers and that prices out 'alarm clock Britain' who are stuck with being able to afford modest boats from an earlier era but not find the time to do them up. This I reckon is strangling cruiser sailing in the UK and it's made worse by cheap air travel and thus understandably attractive charters....
 
Last edited:
It's the same with golf clubs. Lots of people playing golf but just paying green fees rather than joining a club. Many smaller clubs struggle to attract new younger members which in part is because the current members tend to be "mature" with rather "traditional" ideas about how a club should be run.
 
Hello, thought you might like some insight from someone new to sailing.....We have both taken early retirement 2 years ago. After going through the RYA Day Skipper stuff, we then chartered in the Solent every month to build experience, and now regularly cruise to Weymouth.

We agonised on whether to buy a 34'. We decided to continue regular last minute Solent chartering, combined with last minute Med chartering in June and September. It tends to work out to about £7000 budget. We have noticed a lot more opportunity to last minute charter in the Med, and coupled with increasing good value flights, means that chartering is the best option for us. Plus it's good fun trying out different boats.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top