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UK Sports Boats Unite In New Class Association Just Like Dublin Bay Sailing Club

12th January 2016

Just as Dublin Bay Sailing Club announce a new initiative to combine sportsboats in a new class in April UK Sports Boats have united to form a new class association.

After the success of earlier mixed Sports Boat events, like in Plymouth Race Week & Cowes week, owners and supporters have united their interest in a new class. The newly formed UK Sports Boat Association will be working hard to rally these fun and fast boats together.

It maybe that work completed on the formation of the new class in the UK maybe beneficial to DBSC class and vice versa. One such example of this is coming up with a rule to determine what exactly is a sportsboat?

One of the class initiators, Jochem Visser, said "Many new owners are attracted by their fun & speedy character coupled with the smaller crew and easier logistics. Even though many of them have One Design racing it is becoming ever more apparent that on a local level there is a urgent need for a rating platform which provides fair racing and rewards the better sailors".

The class has simple objectives;

- Promote & support a fair rating system for mixed fleet racing which rewards the better sailors.
- Respect & promote the One-design character within the fleet.
- Represent the class interest to, and affiliate with, local clubs and National sailing authorities.
- Organise an annual Sports Boats Nationals, Season Point Series and local events.

The class is aimed at any Sports Boat with a LOA between 5 and 9.15 meters with aim to include successful boats like the Seascape 18 at the lower end and the Farr 280 at the top end of the class.

The Sports Boat class definitions:

- Ballasted keel boat which caries an asymmetric kite on centreline based pole
- Maximum length overall of 30'(9.15 m)
- Maximum displacement of 2000kg
- Maximum DLR of 100 in which DLR=27.87x(Boat Weight)/Length Waterline^3
- A minimum limit of positive stability of 60 degrees

Information and registration for membership here

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Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.