The Sailing Committee puts together a sailing programme for the year and oversees the race managagement and organisation. All members of the club with a dinghy in the dinghy park, or who regularly crew in club racing, are expected to help run club racing at least three times per year.
The club uses the web based system Duty Man to organise the rota to ensure every club race, Village Regatta, open meeting and championship has correctly qualified members to fill all the required roles. Sometimes the members on duty are loosely drawn according to the class of boat they sail. Club Race duties are allocated at the beginning of the year, but members can swap duties, using the tools within Duty Man, if they are unable to carry out their duty on the day allocated. Other duties (e.g. Village Regattas, Opens, Championships) are left open and members can volunteer for roles and earn work vouchers for doing so.
The roles for a club race are Race Officer, Assistant Race Officer, Recorder, Safety Boat Driver X 2, Safey Boat crew X 2, Shorebase and Additional Help. There are more details of the responsibilties and what these roles entail either in the yearbook, or in the case of Recorder, 'So you want to be a Race Recorder' is online. For an open meeting, or championship, more roles may be identified.
New members who join during the year will either be allocated some duties, or be expected to volunteer for some vacant slots. Doing duties is a great way to meet other members and get experience of club racing.
Some useful information about racing organised by the club:
The Sailing Instructions for normal club racing & pursuit races are published in the current yearbook.
There are normally two pursuit races each year, the Commodore's Best Boat and the Christmas Pudding Race. In a pursuit race there are two fleets, the Slow fleet (boats which normally sail in Slow Handicap) and the Main fleet, so two winners. Since Portsmouth Yardsticks for the season are published in March, the list of Pursuit Race Start times cannot be included in the Handbook, so are on the SIs and Amendments page instead.
A risk assessment of RSC organised racing and Junior/Youth training is available, see Club Racing and Training risk assessment
Racing Rules of Sailing (World Sailing website)
The club's handheld VHF radios