At some time in your sailing exploits you may have attended a RYA dinghy sailing course, either at a sailing club or sailing school. Depending on your age you may have achieved a Day Boat Elementary certificate, a National Dinghy Certificate, a Seamanship certificate or a Level 3 certificate.

The RYA has decided this year to introduce a revised scheme. This scheme has come about for several reasons. These have ranged from the type of dinghies available to the fact that more advanced courses are not well attended. The RYA has also felt that most people have dinghies to go racing on inland waters (unlike us) and that the dinghy manufacturing is geared towards this market. If people want to cruise, a small second hand yacht is cheap enough now whereas in the past, when a dinghy was assumed to be a poor man’s yacht.

Therefore the favourites like the Enterprise, the Mirror, the Miracle, the Wayfarer, etc are no longer the in thing; people are going for your Laser 3000, 4000, 5000, RS600, 49ers, etc. All these types of boats are fast, ‘all sail and no boat’ and certainly no-where to keep your anchor! Even boats like the 29er, don’t even stay upright if there is no wind! With boat type and usage changing, people generally went to a Level 1 or Level 2 course to learn to sail, but not on the higher levels. This was due to the fact they didn’t want to use a week of their holidays and didn’t want to learn how to land on lee-shores when they had a fast boat.

With this in mind the RYA have changed the scheme. The scheme is now as follows:

'Start Sailing' and 'Basic Sailing' are the traditional, 'never sailed before and by the end you can sail courses'. These are basically the same as the old Level 1 and Level 2 courses. The 'Basic Sailing' course is usually a five-day course. After that, the other five courses are designed to be run over two days and can be done in any order depending on your tastes. The 'Seamanship Skills' course is to cover anchoring, lee-shores, sailing without centre boards, reefing, etc. The 'Day Sailing' course is intended for sea sailing with passage planning and basic navigation skills. The 'Sailing with Spinnaker' course is aimed at instructing you in the use of traditional spinnakers and Asymmetrical Spinnakers, 'the later being the more common one now (a big Genoa). The 'Start Racing course is to help the club sailor to understand the basics of racing and thus take part in club racing. Finally the 'Performance' sailing course is aimed at racing specification boats (so if your Wayfarer is up to racing specification, this one is for you), this will cover sail and rig tuning, etc. All the above courses are available for Keelboats as well as Dinghies.

As you can see for the dinghy cruiser we have the 'Seamanship Skills' and 'Day Sailing Courses' and for those of us who may wish to know how to set a spinnaker properly, or how to set our spreaders for the correct point of sail, other courses are available. The big advantage is that these courses can be done in a weekend and if you wish to learn something new, or check out your skills, or just to gain some confidence in sea sailing these can be more easily attended.