Short course short races?

Today's race took me 1 hour 50 minutes.  It was a great race, and many thanks to John and his team.

But - anyone else interested in doing some short course, short races as part of the mix?  Personally I find nearly 2 hours too long for a race: there's no-one near me as the race goes on, and it just gets dull.  If you have a bad start, or for juniors crewing, or for people at the back of the race - it's a long time to be demoralised and frustrated at the back. 

Classes up and down the land have found that the way to attract and engage more sailors is to run their championships with more, shorter (40-45 minute) races.  

Would anyone else be interested in more of this kind of racing in the Starcross programme?

I'd be up for it. Today was long enough in the Merlin (ask Moira) but I know there were a lot of very tired legs further back. A few years ago we used to have days when there were three short races across the tide...obviously needs to be timed right during the day. Not sure why they ended.

Hi, yes, I think some of the Gull fleet could be interested in short courses giving more close combat. I have sometimes followed a race but got fed up on the long windless runs or too tired on the windward legs and given up. short triangular course would be more exciting and improve close quarters boat handling skill. Cheers.

They stopped because turnouts for those "sprint" days began to fall away and a small number of members who didn't like them were quite vocal.

As it was my idea originally as a way to get the people who were doing my "start to race" saturday sessions into racing - I'd certainly like to see something like it return - thought not necessarily exactly the same.

The thing is though - it is quite hard to fit in everything we have traditionally done in a season - so any proposal for resurrecting a different format event on 1 or 2 days a year needs to be clear about what events it would replace.  We struggle to fit in reasonable length series now and so it isn't a case of just replacing a couple of series races.  You might also have noticed that one or two of the less well attended trophy races have not been scheduled  this year.  Inevitably we try and shoehorn events into days with poor tides to try and get everything in and it doesn't always work out well.  So the Sailing Committee need feedback not only on what you want to add - but what you are willing to give up to enable that to happen.  

Now is the time to do it as the SC will be starting the annual programming in the next few weeks.

Mark

Personally I prefer short races like we have in our open and Exe regatta. However  when they have happened there's been a huge amount of waiting around between them. especially when there's multiple fleets

What is listed as the target length for first on the water in the race box instructions?

I thought our normal length was about 50mins to an hour for first on the water which always seems to work well. 

The last trophy race a few weeks ago was also a monster length and given the increased size of the slow handicap turnout, there's too many people out there for too long.