Datchet Race Report – May 20th

Nine teams at Datchet today – close racing!

Click here to read the race report

Open Meeting Circuit Design – and Corinthian Trophies… Adrian Speaks!!!

I’ve just read your latest post regarding open meetings.  I stopped collecting figures on open meetings in 2006, and championships in 2009, so unfortunately I’m not able to help.  Even when I was collecting figures (event reports in reality), they weren’t always complete.  A big turnout usually saw the number feature in the report, but a lack of that detail sadly implied that the event was poorly supported, and the organisers (understandably) didn’t want to publicise this.

I always used to publish figures for either the Qualifiers or the “Not the Qualifiers” (as appropriate for that year) on the website, partly so we could get a feel for how things were going, and we needed them to judge who was eligible for the Travellers’ series (the first incarnation of which went back to 1999), but prior to 2005, points were only available to the top 10 (20 at the Nationals), and it was only the Nationals, Northerns, Southerns and Inlands that were used.

I like the idea of “Corinthian” sailors, but how do you decide who is in which category ?  As I understand it, ISaF have a bit of a problem there.

Adrian – very good point, and the second year through we would have lots of choices of how we could do that… probably only the first time through we’d have to consider our options quite carefully.  We also could exclude “works teams” from the Corinthian definition pretty readily.  

Datchetman

Royal Forth Open Meeting Cancelled this weekend…..

Read Here

The Design of The Open Meeting Circuit….

Did you read Dave McKee’s excellent article on the design of the Open Meeting circuit that we published on May 14th??  If you missed it, you can probably pick it up under “Recent Posts” on the right hand side of this page, half way down….

We’ve been making a half hearted attempt at tracking turnouts at Open Meetings using the Y&Y database.  You can see what we collected here for data.  Does anyone have anything more complete and accurate?? (Adrian ??)

So what did you make of Dave’s idea that we have a sponsored “National Series”??  I thought it was excellent – it would I think be the basic qualifier series of alternate years, sponsored annually.

• UK Nationals
• Inlands
• Southerns
• Northerns
• Scottish

For 2012 the ever popular Bulwark was added to aid geographic distribution making six events.  So what about one for the Western Fleets and then add the Midwinters for better distribution of events through the Year. So that would make 8 events in total.

It might also help even out the alternate year surges that the Worlds qualification causes. What else could we try to deal with?  Have you noticed that recent events have not infrequently had low turnouts from the host club fleets?? What’s that about?

We have two thoughts that we might experiment with inside this idea that Dave has floated….

- in the Dragon Class they are cursed/blessed with a strong following of Olympians and even professional crews. They says that some owners “count the medals in the boat”… to keep motivation up for the “ordinary” (non professional) Dragon sailors they have instituted “Corinthian Trophies” for the highest placed non-professional teams – and I think they award them first at the prizegivings.  Rather like our own Northern Travellers Series not awarding to  the Top 15 UK teams, perhaps we should consider some kind of “Corinthian Trophies” for the ordinary club guys??

- then what about another effect that has been seen more than once?  The teams that cannot race two days of the weekend, but from work/family/budget pressures or preference only turn out for one day…??  Did you notice that Draycote are going to run their Open Meeting this year as a “sprint” – a one day event of 5 x 45 minute races. Maybe some of the National Series events should try this format to see if it boosts turnout??

What do you think??  Comments to datchetman@flyingfifteen.com

The Tide’s In At Bewl….!!

I was just browsing the web this evening and came across the great news that someone chucked a few million gallons into Bewl Reservoir (especially great news as I live nearby!)  and the Flying Fifteens are out sailing again!!

I found this entry on the Club website dated 4 days ago saying they had ten FFs on the slip for racing last Sunday and are hoping to build up to fifteen as soon as possible – fantastic news!!

Click here to read their race report.

Chew Valley – Final Results Available…!!

The final results for the Chew Open are now available.  You can see them by clicking here

To see the full Y&Y Report including the Results click here

The FF Blog at 90 …..!!

No – not ninety years – ninety thousand !!

Yes, amazingly by the time you read this, the FF Blog will have been viewed about 90,000 times – this in 500 days. You’ll be able to see exactly how many if you scroll down to the bottom right hand corner of the webpage. Remember that our Mk 1 blog had 10,000 hits before we started this one – so we are on about 100,000 viewings now. Humbled, we are….

In addition to the website “hits” we have Social Media followers numbering 157 in total. They prefer to get their FF news that way – 113 are on Facebook (more than 50% female by the way), 6 are on twitter, but 39 people choose to follow us via automatic email distribution. So on top of around 8000 hits per month on the website, we must add 4,700 hits in Social Media.  Social Media Users sometimes ‘click’ to read the blog itself, so there is a bit of an overlap – we get around 450 clicks from Facebook per month.

We have been “blogging” for about 500 days and issued 840 blogs and Flying Fifteeners have left 272 comments in that time (19 per month).  We’d say the Class is quite getting into this blogging lark…. we notice the rate of comments increasing, which is super obviously. We must admit finding things to write about is getting increasingly challenging, but we don’t think we’ve skipped a day yet. We may need to soon. If we can reach a thousand, that’s one blog posting per 3mm of boat length !

So what else can we tell?  Well, the FF Blog is being read by (i) FF sailors and (ii) non-FF sailors who are interested in us. You can see two distinct audiences in the statistics, as we’ll tell you in a moment.  The other thing is that the FF Blog is not just being read in UK. We think around half the active FF worldwide fleet might be in UK, but of the FF Blog viewings, we reckon 73% are from UK, 14% from Australia, and 4% from Ireland – leaving around 9% for everywhere else.

So what else can we tell about what FFers are looking at, and what potential FFers are looking at on our blog??  Well you need to know a small amount about the way a blog is structured….

First you have news entries (aka posts, ‘blogs’, blog entries) which appear on the home page – in our case every day. They are called “Posts” in the stats.  Posts obviously pass into history quite quickly at this rate.  The other type of material is static website pages (of FF Class information) and they are simply know as “pages” or “website pages”.  Needless to say we get statistics about what people are looking at.

So if you are a Flying Fifteener you’ll be thinking, “Yes – well it is all going to be existing FFers looking at this…”.  We did.  But look at what is viewed most – here’s the top 10 things people looked at on the FF blog in 500 days :-

1. - The homepage/newspage with your views and ours – 56,320 views. Naturally the biggest, but thank you for reading and commenting.
2. - 1,417 views of the general description of the Flying Fifteen. I doubt more than 500 of those will be FFers.
3. - 912 views of the Datchet Trial Sail Program. (They can’t all be Mike Firth…)
4. - now how about this in fourth place… 651 views of the FF video collection. It’s not too difficult to see what people search for on the web, but we didn’t expect it to be so high. To this,  you need to add this little gem – our FF photo slideshow, was viewed 545 times.  So about 1,200 hits on visual images in 500 days. We need lots of sensational photos and videos in future, obviously.
5. - 386 views in 500 days of the “FF Launching and Recovery” Page. So does this tell us that potential FFers of our future are worried about hard or easy they will be to launch and recover?
6. - 357 views of the Datchet FF Fleet Description (it can’t all be us…)
7. - now how about this, not including the superb download, 312 views of Phil Tinsley’s article on “Keel Refurbishment”. There must be some fabulous keels out there now.
8. - Light Air Techniques, written by Andy Clarke is next at 292 views
9. - very encouragingly, “Buying Secondhand” got 288 views
10. - and intriguing as ever, Trevor Sparrow’s article on “Voodoo Tuning” got 287 hits

So that’s the top ten. The other large number of note, very encouragingly, was “Ladies Viewpoint” written by Emma Mangan. This was viewed 258 times and is just outside the Top 10. What does that tell you about the future audience??

We’ve tried to make the FF Blog a repository of FF information for the ordinary Club Sailor. There are now huge resources on the blog for us ordinary guys and click on the “Categories” box to see them. We want FF sailors to come to the FF Blog first for information – and then click on things from here. So what did you find most useful in the last 500 days??  Here are the top clicks outward from the FF blog :-

• - Race Reports 811 clicks
• - windguru 608 clicks
• - Pinnell and Bax is a huge supporter of our Class and I’m delighted to say that the FF Blog passed 582 clicks to www.pinbax.com in 500 days. Not bad….
• - BIFFA 529 clicks
• - Y&Y FF Page 210 clicks
• - Goacher Sails 187 clicks.
• - Ovington FF Page 74 clicks

Remember that I said there are two kinds of material on the FF Blog – we have Posts (news) and pages.  So these posts or news pages appear in the ‘home page’ statistics of course, but some of them provoke extra ‘clicks’ to look at something (e.g. photos) , or clicks on the header maybe- which ones were clicked on the most?? The most clicked news items  were

1. “Composite  Craft Flying Fifteen” (289 clicks)
2. “Pump Cleat” (woohoo!) (274 clicks)
3. “The Case for the Ovington Mk 9″ (50 clicks)

Last thought – people either know our website, or they find us via search engines like Google. We just had traffic in April of 8,123 views and about 1500 (19%) of them came in from Google. Oh yes, and lots of those came from ‘Google Images’ – so people finding a Flying Fifteen photo that they liked and clicking on it. By the way, that month 547 came via the BIFFA website and 450 from our 113 Facebook followers.

Mostly the google searchers key in the things you’d expect like “flying fifteen” or “flying fifteen blog”, but one that caught my eye was that we got 50 visitors from people who had keyed in “Composite Craft”. Interesting….  Justin will want a Waples Wine blog next!

The bad news is that we’ve used up half our free disk space and so we’re starting to think about replatforming the FF Blog for the second time. There may be other advantages, but it’s a daunting thought. We may just have to stay where we are…

Datchetman, Written on 12th May 2012

Northampton’s Got Water – and Back in Action ….!!

Chris Bowen at Northampton says:

Don’t forget the Northampton Sailing Club Flying Fifteen Open Meeting for the Gittens Trophy,  which will take place on the 9th/10th June 2012.  The Club had to cancel the event in 2010 due to weed, and again in 2011 due to low water level. I am glad to say that we currently have a almost full reservoir and no weed!!!  We would love to welcome as many visiting boats as possible.

The notice of race and sailing instructions can be found here.
The jubilee weekend is the weekend before the open meeting and Northampton Sailing Club are holding a celebration weekend, starting on Saturday 2nd June and ending on 5th June. Visiting Flying Fifteen sailors are welcome to attend the celebration weekend and leave their boat rigged at the club until the open meeting the following weekend. Details are still being finalised, but some information can be found here, here and here. Camping is available on site for both events.

Calling All Waples Wines Northern Travellers….!!

The Northern Travellers kicks off soon at Bassenthwaite – read more about it on the Burton FF Fleet website by clicking here

It Never Rains, but It Pours – at Llangorse…!

They’ve had a bit of a deluge at Llangorse, which has clearly been out to break a few weather records of its own…. To add insult to injury, the Committee boat capsized with the engine attached.

Contact Dave Hemmingway at Llangorse if you need the latest update.

Chew Valley Open on Y&Y … with Photos …!!

The race report for Chew has just appeared on Y&Y with a couple of nice photos….

Click here 

You’ll be wondering about the full results table, but there is small computer glitch at CVSC and they’ll be posted as soon as possible.