Dragon Report Medway 2025
Where did 2025 go?
The season started early with two boats – Taniwha and Gandalf – travelling to Burnham for the Easter Regatta. Strong winds made this challenging for the first sailing of the year, but a great get-together with the very welcoming Burnham contingent.
Our Medway Club racing started at the end of April, with the majority of our seven boats on the start line most weekends.
The sailing format this year has been designed to fit in more shorter races – we have had two or three races on many Saturday afternoons. Gate Starts have been used to quickly and fairly restart the fleet downriver, and we have quickly become accustomed to them.
This format has made our racing much closer most of the time, giving us a great opportunity to measure boat speed against one another, while our boat handling and mark rounding have needed more thought with some very crowded marks. The feedback from the fleet has been very positive, as it has kept us all much closer together.
The beginning of the season incorporated the East Coast Windward Leeward series. Taniwha and Gandalf again travelled to Burnham at the end of May for the East Coast Championships which doubled as the Burnham leg of the series, and Gandalf travelled to Aldeburgh for their regatta at the end of June, which was the Aldeburgh leg of the series. Our own Medway Keelboat Regatta in June completed the series; factoring the series into our travelling decisions gave the fleet more of a feeling of belonging to the national fleets. Early indication is that participation will grow next year, and we hope other fleets will react similarly.
A further major innovation of 2025 is our adoption of a “Dragon fleet boat”, Freebie. Toby Atack found this boat advertised and arranged to have it brought to the club with the support of the fleet. The boat was in a pretty sorry state, and it has taken many many hours of time and skills from Toby and a few others, with plenty of begging and borrowing and buying of the missing or worn out features, to put the boat on the water (rigged in such a way that sailors without too much Dragon experience can comprehend the controls!), and to make the boat competitive with the fleet. Freebie is now available and active for the use of fleet members, or for others to try a Dragon, perhaps as a stepping stone to their own boat, or for charter at extremely reasonable rates. Hiring Freebie could be an easy way for visiting Dragoners to join us for a Saturday race! Our heartfelt thanks to Toby for making this happen through his long hours of putting the boat together and making it competitive, and for his commitment to using it to introduce new people to Dragon sailing.
Regular Club racing on Saturdays has been very well supported by the fleet throughout the year, but we do have a perpetual problem of looking for crew. Over the summer, members of the local Sea Scouts have been welcomed into the fleet, and this has been a big help for some boats. As we sadly head to the end of the season, we can look back on a very busy year on and off the water at Medway Yacht Club, and look forward to 2026.
Medway Yacht Club