Ripon Sailing Club RC Yacht Racing
Ian Smith has sent in the following article about his club. Enjoy reading it, I did.
Ripon SC is a well known and respected dinghy sailing club located near Knaresborough in North Yorkshire, whilst the name implies it should be located near Ripon it is the clubs long history that gives rise to its name rather than its current home near Knaresborough.
The club had a brief relationship with the MYA ND in the early 90’s when a few members raced IOM’s at Claro Marine Modellers on Scargill Reservoir, a place that was not well suited to hosting an open event due to the absence of any facilities! RSC stepped in offered to host a round of the ND IOM winter series which it did for a couple of years.
The arrival of the Dragon Force 65 saw a revival of RC yachting at the club as a few members got together to form the DF65 fleet, initially just racing on Wednesday afternoons to pass the time between Wednesday afternoon and Wednesday evening dinghy racing. Little did we know how addictive these little yachts would become, the initial plans to keep ownership costs down by allowing only the A + B rigs worked for a while but eventually the A+ was also approved for racing as helms also raced at other clubs, its often very windy during the winter months but the C rig has never been required as we can always find a sheltered area to continue racing in.
As the summer ended and light evenings became a distant memory DF65 racing took place on Wednesday mornings through the winter to April when Wednesday afternoon racing starts again.
Along the way we have increased numbers to include both former dinghy helms and newcomers to the sport, adding support to the argument that the DF65 was an inspirational idea pulling new people into the sport.
We now have a very competitive but friendly fleet that sees 9 or 10 boats racing regularly throughout the year.
We held our first “Pop Up” open meeting on Good Friday (one of the only dates available in the very busy club calendar) in 2016, it was well attended by DF65 helms from around the area and we look forward to 2019 when we will once again welcome visitors to the club for this now annual event.
As the DF65 helms wanted more competition a number of them began to travel to Askern Lake for their winter series, a few have joined Askern MCY so that they can get more than one weekly fix of DF65 racing, of these helms a few have also taken the plunge and bought into IOM yachts to the point where we now have enough interest to form an IOM fleet at RSC in the near future, always assuming we can find a suitable space in the RSC calendar that doesn’t conflict with the Askern calendar.
For more information about RSC visit our website www.ripon-sc.org.uk or for specific DF65 information https://www.ripon-sc.org.uk/classes-and-fleets/dragon-force-65-1
