Yachting Club

Lottery results - don’t lose all hope!

The lottery for places in sailing courses this season was drawn a week ago and produced fairly similar numbers of lucky winners and, regrettably, those that were not. It, the 2011 lottery for YCC sailing courses, was oversubscribed as usual: refresh your mind with the list of courses and places offered.

The result was that your YCC Committee has received a lot of questions from the unlucky as to what they can do instead. To clarify the situation for everyone, let us make the following points. Well, if you were somewhere near the top of the waiting list, hang in there: a few winners often drop out for various reasons, and there is a chance that you will be offered a place.

And if you were not near the top, we should confirm (in answer to a couple of questions) that these are the only series of courses we will be offering this season, so unless you choose to go privately (our Port Choiseul neighbour Moby Dick is very good, if more expensive: they teach on Solings mostly, so you could even combine their course with passing the Permis Lac; CNV is already doing courses in collaboration with us and has private courses as well). Elsewhere on the lake, yes, but you lose the friendliness of also being in our home port!

So if you choose to pay to join, even without a hope of a course, progress would then depend on how willing and available you are. For instance, joining the Club and coming every Thursday and trying for a place on a boat (likely, if not guaranteed) would mean you meet a lot of people, do some social sailing (if not always training towards passing a test) and usually have a good time. If you have some sailing experience already, we find that a few (but more than four is best) outings is sometimes enough to get you to the point of asking to pass a test, independently of the courses - and sometimes ahead of them, if you were already good at sailing!

It’s less easy, but there are still possibilities beyond the actual courses...

par Yachting Club