Team racing is a fun, fast-paced and exciting type of sailing! Unlike fleet racing, it’s done in teams of 3 boats in intense, short and exciting races. It involves use of the rules to get your team into a winning combination, making it much more interesting than a one hour fleet race!
Our team racing is one of the most active areas of the club – with weekly training, fitness and theory and the opportunity to go to around 10 events a year. Events are always tons of fun involving a night out on Friday, sailing all of Saturday, a fancy dress night out on Saturday and sailing for most of Sunday. To some of you this may sound like a lot of time to commit but you won’t be able to find anything else nearly as fun or crazy to do with your weekends!
We have a fleet of six firefly dinghies we sail out of Loch Ore on Saturdays (plus some informal training on Wednesdays). For the 23/24 season we aim to have four teams plus reserves, competing in the Scottish and National university leagues.
Dinghy teams are one of the biggest parts of EUSC, it’s like a family and we love to have as many people part of it as possible.
For more information on how to get involved, contact Teams Captain Julia Barnes: dinghyteams@eusc.org.uk
Trials
We invite all new sailors with any form of racing experience as well as previous team members to try out for teams in September each year. No team racing experience required! We have a diversity in sailing backgrounds, with most people only doing fleet racing before university. This year trials will be on the 16/17th of September at Port Edgar and Loch Ore. All infos can be found on the Facebook event, click ‘going’ to stay up to date with details and don’t forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook for see all of our club activities!
How trials will run
The day will start out at Port Edgar yacht club with everyone getting to know each other and the boats, we’ll run through how to tune the rigs and the basics of racing. The rest of the day will be spent sailing with different people so that we can gain an understanding of your sailing/racing ability, mainly doing fleet racing. Finally at the end of the day there will be a debrief where you shall be told whether you have made it through to the Sunday of trials, held at Loch Ore. The weekend is led by the Teams Captain and Teams Secretary who are in charge of all the runnings of dinghy racing during the year, as well as 3-4 outside judges who have the ability to select who makes what team and who sails with who, so that the decisions are completely unbiased – Team Captain/Secretaries are normally trialling for teams too!
Sunday will be the real test, where it will be more focused on deciding who you’ll sail with and which team you’ll be part of 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4ths, you will be doing a mix of drills as well as fleet racing and some team racing. Everything will be announced at the end of the day.
Even if you don’t make teams you will be put onto the reserve list so that you’ll have the chance to compete in an event during the year in our 4th team (specially made for members who are still learning a lot about racing or can’t commit too much) as well as join us in any training, theory and fitness sessions so you’ll still be a key part of EUSC and teams.
We hope to see all of you very soon on a boat or at one of our socials!
