Racing
The dinghy racing, today, is an inter-club activity, fought between the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club (RBYC), the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club (RHADC), the St. George's Dinghy and Sports Club and Sandy's Boat Club. Whereas most of the professional crews of the earlier sloop racing, which has since died-out, were probably Black, the restriction of dinghy racing to these clubs, with their membership historically restricted to whites, means that Bermuda Fitted Dinghy racing has maintained an exclusive, all-White reputation in Bermuda. Although it is true that mounting a dinghy campaign requires significant financial and personnel resource, new entries are welcomed regardless of race, and many of Bermuda's best-known fitted sailors are Black, including Stevie Dickinson and Glenn Astwood.
The racing is carried out on set dates in a variety of locations including Hamilton or St. George's Harbours, Granaway Deep, and Mangrove Bay. The dinghies sail windward leeward courses and the number of legs is decided based on the conditions at race time. Boats always finish to windward. The boats, despite their small sizes, are each normally crewed by six people, necessary to handle the large areas of sail, and also to continually bail the dinghies, which have very little freeboard, and which are often capsized by powerful gusts. A unique rule to racing states that the number of crew to finish a race can be less than the number that started. This can encourage boats to have crew dive off the transom during a race to push the boat forward, help lighten the boat and increase performance.
Read more about this topic: Bermuda Fitted Dinghy
Famous quotes containing the word racing:
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)