Cadet Group

Goal:
To offer high quality sailing tuition to the local youth community in the supportive environment of Shanklin Sailing Club.
Also to enhance adult participation in sailing and develop their skills.

Where are we now ?
Shanklin Sailing Club was founded in 1931 and is a small happy family club, with a busy racing programme.
Our Dart15 fleet recently competed successfully in the 2009 National Championships in Cornwall winning the overall team competition.

In the 2009 season we ran a family cadet group for 8 consecutive weeks in the early Summer. This group took 14 children though the basics of learning to sail. It was a great success some of the children are now keen to start racing and several of the parents who could not previously sail would like to learn. There are two main factors that hampered this group, firstly not having an RYA trained instructor and secondly having to use poor condition borrowed boats from a mixture of classes.

Where would we like to be ?
We would like to run courses for beginners and others starting to race. We would like to offer boats for “try out” sessions. The club would consider moving towards RYA Accreditation as a training centre and then on to the RYA Onboard Scheme drawing in the local schools and consequently getting more young people sailing.

How will we get there ?
We would like to train 6 volunteers as RYA Dinghy Instructors. We would also like to purchase 5 Laser Pico’s as club owned and maintained training boats. The estimated cost of this would be £16,000.

Timeline
Oct 2009 Meet with the Isle of Wight watersports development officer.
Nov 2009 Apply to various charitable institutions for funding.
Nov 2009 Explore Commercial Sponsorship Options.
Jan 2010 Allocate volunteers for Instructor Training.
Feb 2010 Apply for match funding.
Apr 2010 Instructor training.
April 2010 Purchase boats
May 2010 Start first courses.

Simon Giles
SSC Vice Commodore
SSC Child Welfare Officer