Greig City Academy and Scaramouche Sailing Project - Mini Tonner Season 2024
by Scaramouche Sailing Trust 18 Nov 2024 11:20 UTC
Scaramouche Sailing Trust receive their trophies at the Island Sailing Club prizegiving © Grieg City Academy
This season saw a very pleasing evolution of the Scaramouche Sailing project for many new up and coming sailors. As has often been the case with our project, much of the learning's biggest successes can be traced back to our mini tonner Riot and IF - with safety equipment so generously supplied by Spinlock.
IF is a Limbo 7.7, modified to improve performance and lower the rating with a sugar scoop stern removed an bulb keel added. Throughout our programme the girls' teams have had a stop start progression. An initial participation in sail training saw the excellent Rona Sailing Project and Ocean Youth Trust provide expeditions and for 2024 a Feeling 286 provided a cruiser/racer for the team, lead primarily by Samiya Miah take on the Island Sailing Club Inshore series.
As has been the case for many years, Samiya was often developing newer crews so progression was slow - by the time sufficient experience was gained to fly spinnakers, the team would leave and progress to university and the development would start again. A breakthrough was needed.
A very successful year of students' gaining amazing careers in sailing was the dominant success of 2023. With Jaydon Owusu graduating from UKSA's cadetship, now a fully qualified offshore yachtmaster he is now a permanent crew on Superyacht Sea Wolf. His team mate Christopher-Joel is following this same route and with Montel now a marine recruitment consultant, it was left to Kai to gain the most prestigious position of all - an apprentice with INEOS Team UK and SailGP Britannia. Incredible!
But the unsung hero was Jessye-Kai's team mate in the Flying 15. While the others came and went on their life changing opportunities, Jessye kept things going - ensuring their Etchells and Quarter Tonner fulfilled all competitions. He stepped up to coaching the younger dinghy sailors and towing their dinghies to and from venues.
But it was while delivering a talk at the National Outdoor Education Conference, where he was promoting youth sailing, that Jessye had to idea to use his considerable skills to facilitate Samiya making the jump to higher level racing, this time on their mini-tonner IF. They entered the double handed Royal Southampton Double handed West Princessa Race and there would be no half measures.
They chose IF because of its 0.808 rating due to its asymmetric spinnaker set up. Conditions all week looked great for a 'reachy' course... until the wind swung around in the worst possible direction - straight from the North West - but with the odd against them on the smallest boat in the fleet, they finishes a very respectable top half finish, despite a broken tiller extension towards the end in a building breeze.
The season started, however, with the Island Sailing Club's Inshore series of three races. The incredible welcome of Ben Ferris and his team makes it so straight forward for all teams to join this series and the Scaramouche teams have always enjoyed this magnificent example of inclusion in the sport. Scaramouche, Cote and Zahara all competed at some stage but it was the iconic Intro 22 Riot which stole the show in the ISCRC category. Riot is the boat in Greig City Academy's fleet closest to our hearts.
With the massive assistance of North Sail's Sam Richmond, Riot was THE boat which developed our most successful and competent sailors. It fostered the clear need to balance sailing skill with intellect, as the original crew cried every possible combination of sail sizes, configurations and materials to make this 1972 boat fast and with a low rating. It was the older crew's performance in Riot which lead to the incredible donation of Cote by Peter Morton to the fleet.
However with so much time and effort spent on our older sailors, the juniors needed to gain their competency and ability on keel boats, so it was to Riot that we turned again, but this time with onboard coaching from the original Riot crew. Youngsters Joseph, Shyne and John-Matthew, coached by Christopher-Joel and Jessye took part in every race. The Christchurch bay race saw the forecast of a light northerly of 9 knots replaced by 26 knots passing Hurst narrows and a hard earned win.
Young Shyne, in his first experience on a keelboat must have wondered what it was all about - after 4 hours on the rail of Riot, but with the experience of asymmetric kites and reefs being put in and shaken, certainly learned a lot. Their performance would have put them second in the IRC category.
The second race saw the Inshore Race was a race off between Zahara and Riot, with Riot overtaking several IRC boats but mistakes were made with their Etchells spinnaker - but a second win was secured. The final race was the Nab Tower Race, shortened due to the very light winds, but a third win and perfect kite flying and tactics from the young team.
So it was last weekend that a team with an average age of 16 collected their four trophies from the Island Sailing Club.
The main success of these two boats, however has been the acceleration of learning. With such a wide variety of conditions, the lessons learned vary from sail choice, tactical decisions with the strong Solent tides and boat work. Converting IF to suit double handed sailing showed our programme the benefits of such sailing, while the youngsters of ours learning from the older (now Yachtmasters) has refined the delivery of their programme, as the mistakes we made with them are overcome.
The biggest lesson for us, was a reminder of the incredible support of the sailing community - something we have highlighted before. This includes sailing clubs such as the Royal Southampton Yacht Club, Island Sailing Club, marinas such as Cowes Yacht Haven and the Cowes Waterfront Trust, companies such as Spinlock and North Sails and of course the incredible sailing community and fellow competitors.
Many thanks go to the M7 group for their continued support of Riot in all competitions!
In addition we often struggle to look after Scaramouche in the winter - but in stepped the winner of the Round the Island Race (Peter Morton of Notorious) who has agreed to facilitate the Wight Shipyard to refit and store Scaramouche over the winter, given their renowned expertise in aluminium!
And in breaking news as I write this: 16 Year old Corneille has just won an ILCA Open Regatta- a complete first for our youngsters!
scaramouchesailing.org.uk