About UKCRA

Welcome

UKCRA was set up in 2001 to deal with anything of common interest to multihull sailors in the UK, which is not already handled elsewhere. That is to say its purpose is to fill any gaps left between catamaran class associations, sailing clubs, national and international sailing authorities.

Long distance events: the need for such an organisation was originally felt when long distance catamaran events were struggling for survival, and some events were badly organised by clubs nervous of litigation. By bringing together all classes and encouraging the transfer of best practice between organising clubs, UKCRA has supported a healthy long distance circuit, including the East Coast Piers Race, the Loch Ness Monster Race, the Whitstable Forts Race and the Fast Cat Round the Island Race.

Promoting catamaran sailing: A second role has emerged in promoting catamaran sailing to the wider public. Recognising that the cat classes have more in common than they have dividing them, UKCRA has encouraged classes to market co-operatively. For example At the RYA’s Sailboat Show, where the various catamaran classes had previously been allocated pitches within the sections booked by their respective manufacturers. Putting most of the cats together had a dramatic effect in increasing co-operation to mutual advantage, which still helps to boost the welcoming image that our branch of the sport extents towards newcomers at Alexandra Palace annually. UKCRA has, under the guidance of individuals such as Brian Phipps and Nick Henson, supported youth catamaran sailing

Handicapping systems: Thirdly, cats needed their own handicap system because there were very few cat returns in the Portsmouth Yardstick system. The RYA was happy to acknowledge any internationally recognised alternative and there were two specially designed for cats – the Texel Rating System and ISAF’s Small Catamaran Handicap Rating System (SCHRS). The latter has now become well established in this country, and indeed is now largely run by British volunteers.

While no system is perfect, the advantages are that the UK can now hold large multi-class events as these cope – on a reasonably fair basis - with the rapid rate of innovation that has created so many strong new cat classes in recent years. We can do so, because SCHRS is a measurement system, which needs only a sample boat to measure, rather than a performance system, which needs many results to become statistically significant.

That in turn has helped develop a distinctive feature of catamaran sailing in this country – long distance events, of which Marconi’s East Coast Piers Race is the longest established – nearly quarter of a century – and Whitstable’s Forts Race is the second – over a decade – while the cats version of Round the Isle of Wight is the most demanding and the Loch Ness Monster Race is the most spectacular.

For those rare occasions where sailing clubs need to give PY numbers to catamarans, it is therefore also possible to generate PY Look-Alike Numbers for any new cat simply by taking the ratio of SCHRS / PY ratings for a benchmark cat, such as Dart 18 or Hurricane 5.9 and converting the SCHRS number for any other cat pro rata.

Olympic campaign: recently, the UK has also found itself at the centre of the campaign that multihulls are once again appropriately represented at the Olympics – in general because the UK is one of the leading sailing nations and in particular because our E-Petition to ISAF attracted 4000 multihull sailors around the world as well as 2000 others. This became the basis for creating the International Multihull Council to represent our community globally, which in turn led to ISAF to establish its own Multihull Commission internally last year.

Principles: UKCRA works on a few simple principles.
As we are there to fill gaps, the less we have to do the better.
If anyone has a strong belief that there is something else for us to do, they may well be volunteered to do it.
Delegation is the way to get high quality people to volunteer.

Thanks therefore especially go to Jon Worthington for his e-petition, Nick Henson for the UKCRA Youth Squad, Brian Phipps for representing UK on the ISAF Multihull Commission and Carl Jones for making this website. Thanks are also due to many others who have been working behind the scenes in many different ways.

Nick Dewhirst
Chairman

UKCRA_Constitution - Click here

Photo- Bob Carter Sprint 15 Open Meeting Grafham Water