Sailing instructions

The St. Joseph River Yacht Club Notice of Race and Sailing Instructions for 2025 are published!  This document governs how the racing program is conducted.  It enjoys a minor rewrite and a major re-formatting and cleanup this year, thanks to Tony, Bob, Nick, Louie, Darryl, others, and me, too.  

The sailing instructions are now more consistent with the new 2025-2028 Racing Rules of Sailing.  Requirements are listed for the regular Wednesday evening races and also for the specialty and distance races.  The document includes a new start/finish sequence from the north pierhead to consider as an option when wind and sea-state conditions are too dangerous for the race committee boat.  Chart excerpts of the pierheads and images of the common signal flags are included to help us all.

An appendix to the sailing instructions includes diagrams of 6 standard race course configurations that the race committee will employ.  The goals for using standard courses include simplicity, efficiency, predictability, fairness, and consistently longer-duration races.  These courses are derived from a race courses planning document that I authored and iterated (many times over the winter and spring!), and we have had quite a lot of discussion about how to make this work and be easier for the race committee than inventing unique courses for each section each night.

The sailing/racing calendar of events for SJRYC is also finalized.  This matches what is on the Schedule page on the blog here.

All of these documents are also linked on the Racing page, at the top, under St. Joseph River Yacht Club.

Looking forward to a good racing season!