October 2025 Club Racing Changes

From Sunday 5th October, we will be racing with a new series of race starts. Both the morning and afternoon race will see three starts – Fast Handicap (faster than PY 1053), Medium Handicap (1053-1104 PY) and Slow handicap (Slower than 1104 PY) fleets.  

We are making this change to better balance our three starts more evenly across the range of boats on the water each Sunday, and should achieve three similar size fleets on the start line. It is hoped that a smaller range of classes in each fleet will reduce the likelihood of a fleet finishing on different laps, producing fairer racing results for everyone. This will also give some of our sailors a different set of sailors to race against, notably putting our RS Aero 7 and ILCA 7 fleets onto the same start line for the first time. We will initially trail this format for six months until the end of the Icicle/Frostbite series.

The sailing committee has also agreed to reduce the number of races required to qualify in a fleet to one third of races sailed, which we hope will increase the number of qualifiers in each series.

Sailors can see the full split of fleets here: https://bowmoor.com/documents/BSC_3_fleet_py.pdf 

Guidance for Race Officers including the required flags can be found here: https://bowmoor.com/documents/Sunday_flags_Oct25.pdf