RYA Junior Sailing Courses

We offer the following courses from the RYA Youth Sailing Schemes

• Stage 1 & 2 combined
  By the end of the first two days course young sailors will have a basic understanding of how a boat sails, and some experience of steering and handling the boat. During the final two days they will learn a range of sailing skills and background knowledge enabling the participants to become confident small boat sailors.
• Stage 3:
  A further 2 days will enable skills to sail in any direction and rig and launch unassisted.  They will also learn more advanced skills and capsize techniques for single and double-handed dinghies. The young person can now be regarded as a sailor, not a beginner.
• Stage 4:
  This day course covers the skills required for sailing double-handed dinghies as crew or helm, whilst solving a variety of problems afloat.
  
  Passing this course is the natural entry point for the advanced courses of Seamanship Skills and Sailing with Spinnakers.

As a Volvo Champion Club we are able to offer a variety of opportunities for the aspiring future ‘Olympic’ sailor. On occasions during the year we have the services of an RYA racing coach to run race training sessions at the lake for our young sailors. The club also has a number of its own RYA Level 2 Race Coaches who help out at Saturday Clubs, Cobnor Weekends and vaiours other race training opportunities.

We offer RYA racing courses: Start Racing and Intermediate. Plus guidance and help on where to acquire even greater racing skills through the RYA racing scheme.

The two day Start Racing course is run most years, to enable those with Stage 2 to acquire the basic knowledge to join in club racing. This is a predominantly practical course.

During the year we run Team Racing days in Toppers and, in recent years, a special RS Feva Team raacing inter-club event. This type of racing is excellent practice for boat handling skills, teamwork and racing rules – it is fast and very exciting!

We run a series of four evening coaching sessions in Toppers and those attending often take part in either the National Schools or West Sussex Regattas, or both..

Subject to demand we run spinnaker training and dedicated Topper days.

Each year quite a number of our young sailors enter, as part of the West Sussex team, the National Schools Sailing Regatta. Around 350 young sailors from all over the United Kingdom take part, and this year the event is being held at the end of July at Bassenthwaite SC in Cumbria. The West Sussex Regatta is another event which we enjoy. We sail against the other clubs in and around the Chichester Harbour area. (We have finished second several times in this event. Around 90 sailors from seven clubs enter this event. Last year our sailors had some excellent top ten results in all fleets. We send an adult and junior team to represent the club at the WKSSA events held at two venues (one large and one small lake) during each year. We have won the junior event on the small lake on several occasions, but last year, for the first time for fifteen years we won the large lake event.

We also hold a SE Area Topper Open Meeting at our club each year. It is quite usual for around twenty to thirty visiting boats to come and join our own Topper sailors for this event.