The VC Speaks - Tomorrow and the Mega Topper Event....

The VC just called from Datchet. 220 Toppers have turned up.... he says I way underestimated the number of F1 Mobile Homes - ha ha ha ha ....!

However, the GOOD news is that he's got them all VERY ORGANISED !! (Typical of ex-Naval Officer....) All 220 of them launched off the beach and the keelboat jetty is completely clear. Those mobile homes that can tow a rib have of course brought one, but he says that is all very well handled and the FF area is clear. The parking is down the bottom, and only boats are allowed up top - brilliant!

The other piece of fantastic new is the timings. Tomorrow, the kids launch at 0945 - leaving us to have a cup of tea and a natter in peace, and launch in good order. Today at least, the toppers have been dispatched to the far end of the lake so presumably we would race at the near end and not cross their paths too many times or at all. Their windward mark today is over the Castle.

Sounds good !!! VC is sailing 3888 tomorrow, so give him a wide berth of course....

More on FF Insurance - BIFFA Speaks....

Keith Jamieson, Secretary at BIFFA, left us a couple of messages on the blog last night - about Flying Fifteen Insurance.

The first was to clarify that JK Lee, who would be the name that we would all remember running the FF Scheme for BIFFA, have merged with Cobra Solutions and hence the change of letterhead. The second note from Keith was advice for people like me who might be shopping around for insurance - the three things that Keith looks for in a scheme are:-

- check how the premium ratchets up AFTER you have made a claim

- are claims handled in-house or shipped off to a faceless back-office somewhere

- compare additional clauses between policies very carefully

Very good advice, I reckon...

Ben Ainslie News...

Sorry this is not a Flying Fifteen item, but have you been following the Olympic Regatta in Miami?? Two bits of big news in the Finns...

The first is that GBR is holding first, second and third. Quite a shock for those of us who spent our teenage years reading the print off Paul Elvstrom's book....

Second shock horror is... Ben Ainslie is in third place. Blimey - there's two better than him.... Leader is Giles Scott.

Datchetman - Geographic Visitor Analysis....

In the six weeks that we have been measuring web traffic to our fleet website at www.flyingfifteen.com , it is noticeable that we are attracting visitors from a huge variety of places in the UK and abroad. I had become concerned that much of the traffic is not near enough to Datchet to be of use to our Trial Sail program.

Excluding my own traffic, we had visitors to our website from 47 UK towns and cities. There were around 160-170 unique visitors apparently, but in measuring traffic I can only see 'visits' as opposed to 'visitors'. But approximately though:-

- 25% were in "London" (big place obviously)
- 80% of them, approximately 130 of 160, were within a commute drive of Datchet (my reckoning)

Flying Fifteen Insurance - News from 3559.....

I have used St Margarets Insurance for a number of years, now part of Haven Knox-Johnson - Amlin Group. haven@amlin.co.uk or www.boatinsure.co.uk. I pay

an annual premium of £166-26 inc tax, cover £7000-00 craft, £750-00 trailer, plus legal exps cover and £3million third party liability. I am unsure how that compares but they seem to be quite efficient.

Only 200 Toppers eh! If we can keep them off the dinghy beach then we can go for some kind of record launching sequence from the east ramp. First racestart say 14-30 hrs???!!!

Non Dom

Datchetman - Your most popular links....

On "datchetman", we're collecting information now on what you like to look at and find most useful. We have a number of things you can click on when you find them interesting. So what are your most popular??....

By far, it's the Club Race Results service.... There are three pages - last Sunday's racing, the current series, and the adjusted points. You clicked on these 25,24 and 12 times in the last month - 61 in total.

We have links to about half a dozen weather forecast services - which do you like most?? Overwhelmingly you click on "Windguru" (24 hits last month). Next most popular is the Queen Mary Weather Cam (8) !!!

Almost as popular as 'weather' is our Photo collection which largely contains the outstanding FF photographs kindly supplied by David Harding at Sailing Scenes (22 visits). You clicked on the link to Biffa 14 times, and to Goacher Sails 8.....

Datchetman - Making Sense of Statistics and How People Find us...

When the Admiral started us off with this online initiative, we thought that people finding us on google was the main thing. It doesn't seem to have turned out like that....

I reckon we get 50-90 regular returning visitors each day, but around 5-10 new visitors who come for a little look. They often look at our .com website too.

In the last 2000 visits to the new Datchetman (about one month's worth), only 43 of them came via Google - and when people search they don't just say "flying fifteen". They find us when they add usually two or three words to the basic search. Most people are repeat visitors and have the address already - and one way or another they come back. However, surprisingly about 15% of our visits are from people coming from what they call "referring sites" - that is websites containing a link to datchetman. Naturally the most popular of these is the Datchet Club's excellent Website - which provided 100 of the 280 referring visits. Next biggest referring site though is Goacher Sails. We have a button on Goacher Sails and they have a button on our site. Thankfully, to my relief, we have some traffic going from us to them (8 visitors this month) but amazingly 53 visitors came to datchetman from Goacher Sails. Very interesting....

Other popular referring sites in the last month were :-

- Facebook 28 times (This is likely Tony looking everyday!)
- Yachts and Yachting 22 (exceptionally interesting for us, and the datchetman page on Yachts and Yachting has been visited 350 times since I loaded it)
- Twitter 21 times

.....and I notice that even Linked-in has sent us a referral from the Datchet Man profile there... intriguing.

Our Flying Fifteen Website - where the Visitors Come From....

In addition to the 'datchetman' website, I also keep our own regular website ( www.flyingfifteen.com ) running. It is where our Flying Fifteen Photo collection is kept, but it is gradually climbing up the Google rankings in its own right which is useful - it's now on page 9 for a search of "flying fifteen". We started at page 20... It also gives us very detailed statistics and feedback on who is looking at us - and we have a steady stream of visitors...

In the last 30 days, 28th December - January 27th:-

- we have had 130 unique visitors, who made 250 visits in total, looking at 660 pages. Zero days had zero visitors.
- when people arrive at the site, they look on average at 2.7 pages, and spend an average time of 4'40" visiting. That's good!
- 210 of the visits were from the UK (I know which towns too!), but the rest came from 11 other countries who are mainly the FF sailing countries. France, Belgium, Australia were the most of these.

Importantly for our Trail Sail Program, the pages that were most popular to look at were:-

- 345 Homepage
- 49 Photos
- 45 Trial Sail Program
- 26 Buying Secondhand
- 25 FF Running Costs

.... that's a pattern which should give us great encouragement.....

Sunday 30th January - Breeze Forecast....

Weather forecast for Sunday says, .... 6mph North East, 4 degrees, dry.

See you there!!

Flying Fifteen Insurance....

The renewal notice for my fifteen's insurance popped through the letterbox this week. If you insure through the BIFFA scheme, I expect your quotes have come through too. Did you notice that the National Fleet was insured with JK Lee, but has now shifted to Cobra Insurance in Caterham?

Anyway - it looked a tad expensive so thought I would shop around. Inspired by a conversation with Grayson Eacott, I called Newton Crum. They more or less hang up the phone with indecent haste - they wont offer cover for FFs. So then I called Noble Marine, who even have a Flying Fifteen page (with a great photo, by the way) on their website. Interestingly, it was even more expensive than the BIFFA scheme. So that's where we are going this year - back to BIFFA !!....

If you have any cheaper sources of Flying Fifteen Insurance, let me know on datchetman@flyingfifteen.com.....

Winter Warm Up Application Form....

You should have all received an email from "Midnight Rog" enclosing an Application Form for the Winter Warm Up. Note that the event is free to members, but the Club Request that we complete the application form and return it to the office in advance.

If you didn't receive Roger's email, you can download the form by clicking on "DWSC WWU Application Form" under the "Interesting Links" column on the right hand side of this webpage (Note - only on the new website at www.flyingfifteen.org )

Hayling Worlds - More about the New Zealand Team.....

Nelson sailors John Leydon and Sandra Williams have been selected for the New Zealand Flying Fifteen Worlds team after competing at last week's New Zealand national championship and world championships qualifying regatta held as part of Bay of Islands Sailing Week.

Leydon and Williams sailed Flypast 3838 to fifth place in the regatta, securing one of six New Zealand team places to contest the world championship regatta to be held at the Hayling Island Sailing Club in England from July 15 to 28.

Leydon works for Doyle Sails Nelson and Sandra Williams works as director of marketing and student services at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

With eight of the 12 scheduled races completed, their best result of the regatta was a first in race three. They also took home the Craddock Cup as the most improved from the 2010 nationals.

Racing was competitive among the fleet of 22 boats from Christchurch, Wellington, Nelson, Napier, Auckland, Whangarei and the Bay of Islands to compete in the series with first places shared among five boats in the eight races completed.

A Leap Forward in Flying Fifteen Thinking.....

Charles Apthorp phoned yesterday - great news, he should be with us for the Winter Warm Up.

The other interesting news is about his very radical new carbon boat. It is fantastic for the Class to have more than one builder - it pushes thinking along and keeps everyone on their toes. I don't know if you have seen the new boat, but it is packed with very advanced ideas, super technology - take a peek while he is with us. Smart stuff, plus it is all loaded into a computer model so can easily be upgraded. Charles has been racing it hard this year and built up yet more knowledge. It sounds like the builder, Composite Craft, might be about to review the mould design and refine it yet further.

Hopefully Charles is going to bring along some of his photos for us to feature some of the thinking here in datchetman over the next few months.

The VC Speaks - From the Sailing Committee....

The Club Sailing Committee met last week and finalised the dates for the year. For the Flying Fifteen Fleet, of course, part of the Club's Value Proposition in terms of "special weekends" is very good. On top of the four weekends of the Winter Warm Up, we get a stack of extra events too. I'm told that if you are a Hayling member, not only is there no racing during the Winter, but you also cannot race on about 7 key event weekends during the year. Essentially we have the reverse!!

You will find the VC's key dates for Flying Fifteens in the "Interesting Links" (see on the right hand side of the webpage) download labelled 'DWSC FF Key Dates' . On top of four WWU weekends, we have two Flying Fifteen Opens, a Club Regatta, a Fleet Championship weekend, the Hughes Regatta, and 'mini' events for families in the plethora of four day holiday weekends we have this year (eg Royal Wedding). Then there is the Wednesday series, which is in fact three series. Plus Purple Marine are sponsoring (Hurrah!) a whole weekend of Pursuit Racing in June. There will be a pursuit race on both Saturday and Sunday, with a BBQ on the Saturday after racing.

For those of you who haven't tried the pursuit races, it's where all the FFs join in with everyone else to give all the members in manufacturer classes someone to race against for a change. Essentially the race is carried out backwards, so that we all finish at the same time and drive the caterers to the brink of patience!! Think of it as our way of "giving back".....

New FF Video about the 2011 Hayling Worlds....

Be the first to see the new promotional video from FFI for the 2011 Haying Worlds...

Go to
http://www.ishowreel.co.uk/

and click on the Flying Fifteen Video.....

Race Report - Sunday January 23rd

Defeat grabbed from the Jaws of Victory......

We had terrific racing at Datchet today - just plenty of passing and overtaking....!! Nine boats on the line, and by my reckoning four of the regulars sitting at home - so, very good and we had great racing. Breeze was 10mph Northerly, but surprisingly quite mild. Thankfully no rain.

The course was a bit odd, shut up in one corner of the lake so that presumably we would not mow down the visiting Cadet Fleet... and not oriented at all well - one two sail reach and two runs. PROing is not easy, but we sure look forward to the fixed marks being back in use. For race one, the PRO was very prompt and at least aboard our boat we almost didn't make it to the start on time. However, the fleet was away cleanly - interestingly the left hand side seemed to have better breeze out in the middle. Our heroes, Mark and Tony sailed a blinder but allegedly grazed the windward mark - no, surely not !!! Anyway, the super-fit triathlete hero seemed determined to take a 360 basically chucking it all away on the second leg. Tony can be so decent. Poor Mark was in a ghastly state of health so I feel sympathy is in order (ha ha ha ha ha !!!) It turned out to be too fine for the optimistic spinnaker flyers, then too broad on the next leg. Mark and Tony soon made up for their penalty and wiggled superbly back up into third. Out front, the stars of the weekend, John and Helen, sailed a stormer - with Ian Linder coming second, Mark and Tony third and Richard and Howard fourth.

Race two was also cleanly away. The fleet hammered down to the pin, and to be honest I'm surprised our zeal didn't push us all over. However, we nipped up that beat and it was again John and Helen setting the pace, with Ian Linder next and Howard/Richard third. By the end of the lap, Howard and Richard were a bit surprised to find themselves out front - and this is the way it stayed until the last lap. The third beat was a Laser inspired disaster for Howard and Richard, enabling John and Helen to pass them on starboard. At the top mark, Howard and Richard just squeezed back in. It was pretty close stuff down the next two reaches, and within yards of the last mark, John and Helen squeezed by giving them a second very deserved victory for the day. Defeat grabbed from the Jaws of Victory!!!... Ian Linder was third and Mark/Tony fourth.

Brett Dingwal came along to grace our Bar and is, by the way, looking for a crew for the Winter Warm Up. If you'd like to try sailing with a God, get in touch quickly.

Now it must be said that the official results (click on the results photo) seem to bear no particular resemblance to what I have written or what I recall. The results look as if they are from a totally different day. If you could all email me with what you remember of the two finishing sequences, and I'll try and piece all our views together and with Roger and the VC's help, get the Club records corrected......