Abington Park MYC fleet of Choppa’s

How the project came about.

Back in 2017 along with the assistance of Northampton Borough Council Museums we arranged for 20 children to take part in a free sailing exercise, where the club produced some cheap boats called Windpipe yachts, these are based roughly upon a stick boat of 500mm long and are free sailing yachts so were very cheap to make, at about £5.00 each and we gave them to the children at the end of the event.

We repeated the exercise in 2018 this time running a small free sailing competition reaching out into our community to give our local residents an experience with Model Yachts. All those who took part appeared to enjoy themselves, adults and children alike.

In the meantime Peter Jackson and I took a trip to Southwold Model Yacht Regatta’s and with the help of the good folks there had a go at Free Sailing with them.  The Southwold’s regatta’s take place throughout the summer holidays and are family-oriented events.

We came away determined that we would try to mirror a similar type of event at Abington Park where we sail, and to this end to get the ball rolling we determined to make 20 Free Sailing yachts of a more robust nature that we could hire out for a small fee and reach more people.

As luck would have it our good friend Roger Stollery had moulds for the Choppa, a design of his made for Peter Stollery when he was nothing but a small boy.

The Abington club applied for some partial financial assistance from the MYA Midlands District to get the project off the ground and they were happy to fund the project to the value of 50%, so now the construction stage is complete we have 20 Choppa’s ready to sail awaiting the 23rd April 2019 test event. Peter Shepherd.

The MYA MD was pleased to support this project as it is aimed at getting the next generation of Model Yacht skippers involved in the fun of building and racing at a very low cost, and the fact that the yachts are robust enough to be used many times is a good investment in the future of sailing at Abington Park MYC.

So many thanks to Peter Shepherd, Peter Jackson & the club members for their efforts in this project, the boats look really nice. Gordon Sears, MYA MD webmaster.

Free Sailing Footy’s

In the meantime a number of our Abington Park skippers and Footy skippers around the Footy clubs have been converting Footy’s to fit with the Footy Free Sailing Rules ready for the inaugural Footy Free Sailing Championship Saturday 24th August 2019, from what I have seen so far these little yachts lend themselves very well to conversion although I have yet to see if anyone will use the freedom of the Free Sailing rules to design and build something specifically for Free sailing. Peter Shepherd.