Kinsale Yacht Club

In the context of club racing - racing cruisers certainly does not mean cruising!!!

The term Cruiser refers to a sailing yacht that is built to potentially sail long distances. Cruisers consequently offer a certain amount of comfort and space, including bunks, cooking facilities and heads (WC), so that the crew can potentially live on board for extended periods. To achieve their goals cruisers are also equipped with several different sized sails for the different conditions that might be encountered on a voyage, lights and navigation equipment for sailing at night and out of sight of land and differing levels of safety equipment depending on the number of crew on board and the ambitions of the voyage.

A cruiser is therefore a handy and generic catchall name for boats with cabins that are well-founded and can sail day and night in all conditions. To achieve all this safely cruisers are significantly heavier than dinghies and small One Design classes and so cruisers generally need a lot of crew to handle the different sail plans needed to be set for the wind and sea conditions. Many of these boats are taken on different length voyages around the coastal waters of Ireland and Western Europe. Some go even further afield across the Atlantic. This is the past time of cruising, gently wandering around the waters of the world at a leisurely and seamanlike pace with friends and family on board, not to be confused with racing cruisers - a cut and thrust highly competitive sport that sometimes even includes professional sailors!

Kinsale Yacht Club’s cruisers are raced in club racing on Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons during the regular sailing season (May to September) and raced further a field during the myriad of Open Meeting Regattas that are organised all over the country nearly year round. Club races are sailed over short courses around pre-set buoys in the waters adjacent to Kinsale. Races last no more than 90 minutes during the week and up to three hours at weekends. There is a special subdivision of the Cruiser Class, called White Sails, which as its name suggests is for racing Cruisers without the use of spinnakers with their own programme. There is a special section for this White Sail class on this website HERE.

At Kinsale Yacht Club there are three Cruiser class divisions, Cruisers 1, 2 & 3 and they are divided roughly by length. Cruisers 1 are the largest and they range from between 38 and 52 feet (11 to 16 metres), Cruisers 2 are generally between 30 and 38 feet (9 to 11 metres) and Cruisers 3 are the babies and are from 24 to 30 feet (6 to 9 metres) in length. 

Crew are always in demand.

And this makes cruisers a great way to discover sailing for the first time and also a great way to meet new people and enjoy getting involved in some serious teamwork.

With any yacht the challenge for the crew while racing is to sail the boat safely around the course with precision and skill ahead of the opposition. Cruiser racing is the most popular type of yacht racing in Ireland and indeed around the world. With cruisers that have a lot of crew onboard there comes a certain amount of specialisation in roles compared to smaller classes and this only increases the skills and rewards required in the coordination of a big team. Some, but not all jobs are physical, most jobs require teamwork but all jobs are for the betterment of the boat’s performance.

Cruisers are all different

Assuming all crews are equal many things make a yacht perform, not only length but configuration, weight, beam, sail area, draft, age and many other parameters. So when it comes to racing dissimilar boat types, where generally a larger boat is faster than a smaller boat, a handicap system must be used to attempt to equalise the disparate performance parameters.

There are two handicap systems used in Kinsale and in Ireland, very often they are used together for separate classifications amongst the same fleet, a race within a race, and they have two very different roles:

IRC – This is an international rule that uses a scientific approach in making estimates of a boat’s potential speed against a scratch boat by measuring the important performance producing parameters such as weight, length, sail area, hull type, etc. This yields a number, the boat’s handicap, which is multiplied by the boat’s elapsed time, the time spent racing around the course, to give the boat’s corrected time. When all the boats in the race have finished and have all had their corrected times calculated the boat with the lowest corrected time is declared the winner.

ECHO – This is an Irish rule and is similar to IRC in that each boat has a handicap number used for calculating corrected time. Where it differs however is that the handicap number can vary significantly during the course of the season and is adjusted by the club’s handicap committee based on the performance of a boat in each specific race. At the end of each race the entire fleet’s handicaps are adjusted for the next race so that they would all finish the last race they sailed with the same corrected time. This effectively penalises the last race winner and encourages the boats proportionately down the ranking so that they do better next time.

The Crusier Class Captain in Kinsale is Connor Doyle, and his contacts are:
Tel: 087 2590345 
Email: dconordoyle@dfdoyle.ie

The Cruiser Class Racing Calendar, Official Notice Board, Racing Results, Class Newsletter and Class Open Meeting Information can be accessed by clicking on the menu to the left.