Busy 2025 Plans for ILCA/Laser fleet
The RCYC ILCA class is a very diverse fleet with sailors young and old sailing together each week. The ILCA is the only Olympic class boat that you see sailing at Crosshaven from week to week and offers an opportunity for many sailors to race against current and former olympians in Irish and international events. Latest handbook here. We welcome sailors from any Munster clubs who would like to tune their skills to come and join us at Royal Cork and get some advanced coaching in racing ILCAs to a high level. We bring sailors from club racing through local racing in nearby clubs and then to ILCA Ireland regional and national events. For ambitious sailors, we can bring them on to international event level through our intensive coaching led by sailors who have competed and won at many levels.
The sailing year is divided in three main phases each year and we are right in the middle of phase 1.
Phase 1:
February coaching focus will continue with a three day camp at Midterm to help bring on new sailors and get our sailors ready for a busy season. Defrosters will being early March with a Sunday afternoon start time. Sat 29th March is the PY1000.
Coaching focus in Feb/March:
Speed!
- -Fitness Awareness
- -Sessions addressing deficient areas from last block on boat handling.
Upwind:
- -Keeping flat and fast.
- -Integrating subtle pumps. (Within the rules)
Downwind:
- -Kiting the boat.
- -S-turns.
- -Wave Technique.
This block will be heavily relying on sailor-to-sailor feedback on what is working to keep our boats moving fast and what is not working (inc. video debriefs). Sessions will
be mainly made up of long upwind and downwind grinds.
Racing:
The ILCA Ireland Ulsters is scheduled for April 5/6th in Larne which has some logistical challenges. We won’t be bringing a support rib, but there should be some RCYC sailors attending. Please let us know if you plan on travelling.
We will have a coaching session in Baltimore on Friday before Munsters to help encourage more sailors to enter the event and reduce any pre-event logistics. This has been a fun event for past few years with some pizza available afterwards looking down on the harbour.
This year, the regional Event calendar is highlighted below with Ulsters and Munsters in April.
To prepare for a busy April, we have some more frequent coaching sessions across February and March. Three day sessions for mid term in February as well as St Patrick’s weekends.
February Racing in Kinsale – Feb frostbites in ecnouraged to test out your new skills. Racing in Kinsale starts on Feb 9th for four weeks and scheduled for Sundays allowing coaching on Saturdays at Crosshaven.
Defrosters 2025 March at Crosshaven, in conjunction with our coaching, we will have the defrosters again. Check out https://www.royalcork.com/rcyc-defrosters-2025/ for NOR and all details of racing.
March 29th in the PY1000 pursuit which is always a fun event.
Phase 2:
After a hectic April for the ILCA class, there are more local events at Crosshaven with our local club racing which starts up on Wednesday evenings. It is a full mixed dinghy event with a great social league element with old and young sailors in a wide variety of classes sailing together.
The summer sprint series is also fired up for the summer. It gives sailors the opportunity to sail some beautiful sailing areas in Cork county and has two distinct models -the individual racing on the one day and also a series component which allows sailors to build a score over a number of events. This allows for missing some events due to summer holidays.
More Details on Sprint Series can be found here: https://www.royalcork.com/ilca-summer-sprint-series/
NORs and dates for individual dates will be published soon.
Glandore, Kinsale, Cove, Bantry, Iniscarra and Crosshaven.
Summer coaching schedule:
Even though its peak sailing season, the combination of other events, holidays, sailing courses etc means that we generally are pretty quiet during the summer months and so coaching will be less intense and more focused on the newer sailors. Senior fleet members will be expected to get some on the water time in racing and training in smaller groups.
Phase III Autumn
After all the summer events wind down, the focus returns locally and regular coaching returns with stronger numbers.
The kick off to the Autumn calendar is the At Home event at Royal Cork. This kicks off with a passage race that provides an interesting return to the club on the first day along with regular club racing on the bank on the Sunday.
At the end of the month, there is the ILCA Ireland End of Season event. This will be a large regatta with up to 100 entries. We are hoping to have the main race course outside the harbour.
After the End of Season event, the return of our winter coaching kicks in and we coach right through the winter.
Transition Year Students can avail of a Mediterranean training camp with Sailcoach. https://www.sailcoach.com/
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