Dear All,
“For many years now this evening event on the last Wednesday of June has been on the GMYC calendar and takes place at the Crawley Mariners Yacht Club at Hedgecourt Lake near East Grinstead. This is a beautiful spot on the edge of a deep wood through which you gain access along a 1/2 a mile long track. I can’t remember when we first made contact with Crawley Mariners, but it must have been in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when GMYC were invited to a pub near Crawley to give a wintertime talk to their members about model yachting. We were invited there again recently at the start of the Footy era.
This led to us being invited for this summertime evening at Hedgecourt Lake by the then Commodore, Dr Donal Roche. In order to create interest in competitive radio sailing, we use the Footy Internet Course, a standard 50 foot windward leeward course, recorded the times for doing 3 laps and Donal has always provided the prizes for seniors and juniors at the end of the competition. Although I have been the contact as GMYC, I have tried to involved other sailing clubs and there have been participants from Southwater Dabblers, Clapham and more recently Frensham Pond, with the intention of demonstrating how good radio sailing is and trying to get Crawley Mariners to do their own radio sailing events. They did join the MYA briefly in 2013, but despite various members having the odd radio boat nothing has flourished.
In order to increase their interest, this year I was joined by Keith and Graham from Frensham Pond and we took a total of 10 boats and we all travelled together in my Focus estate! You can see the extent of this in the photograph preparing to load up for the journey home. As well as 4 Footys, my Marblehead UP, a BOTTLE boat, we took 4 Dragon DF65s, with the objective of showing them what could be purchased for £200. Keith Parrott did a grand job of promoting this class, which has been very successful at Frensham Pond, with big fleets making the IOM appear not to be the starter boat any more. Several members were certainly very interested and with an invitation to visit the Dragons racing at Frensham, we may well have succeeded in our long association with Crawley Mariners in creating some regular radio racing there.
Evening sailing is usually a problem with light winds, but this year there was a cracking breeze from the north-east blowing more or less straight down the lake towards the control area. All the boats were out sailing to start with just to enjoy these B rig conditions, with the unusual sight of boats planing on this lake! Once the Footy Internet Course was set up, several juniors and senior Crawley sailors enjoyed the challenge of sailing Footys round the course. The photograph shows one of the keenest members receiving his prize from Donal. The FIC results are posted on the www.sailfootyuk.com website.”
