YSC Scows
Yarmouth Sailing Club scows are the largest class sailing and racing at YSC. There are around 40 boats at the club, including two, Coot & Christine, that are owned by YSC and which are available for members to hire out. The YSC scow class races are well supported and take place almost every weekend from early April to the end of October with a winter series running fortnightly through November before a season-ending "Bubbly and Mince Pies Race" in early December. The season highlight is Scows Week at the end of July/beginning of August with a variety of races each day including several on the Solent (weather permitting) and usually a passage race to Newtown. YSC sailors are pleased to welcome members from other local scow classes for the week. The class has a wonderful & historic collection of prizes and trophies include those for bank holiday weekend series, a Solent, and top of the river series as well as monthly series. Racing is friendly but competitive and generally produces a mixed range of both male & female winners ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians.
The first scows were built in wood around 100 years ago in various places around the Solent including Lymington, Yarmouth and Bembridge. AA Coombes in Bembridge for example built over 200 wooden scows before the wooden classes began to decline in the 1980s. In the mid 1980s Alan Coombes took a mould from a Bembridge scow and made the first GRP scow and that is the mould used for YSC scows. Today therefore a GRP Bembridge scow and a YSC scow have the same hull and the difference is only in the rig with the YSC scows having a slightly larger & battened mainsail (identical to the wooden West Wight Scows) which was designed to cope better with the stronger tides in the western Solent. AA Coombes have now built over 220 GRP scows which confirms the popularity and timeless appeal of the design which encompasses both traditional characteristics and ease of maintenance and reliability. The hull and rigs are all one design but boats are personalised through the hull colour, choice of gunwhale and sail design with many colourful designs seen on the river. The class Rules are available to download below.
YSC scows are simple to rig, generally quite stable and easy to sail and will comfortably take two adults or an adult and two children on an adventure up to the Freshwater Causeway. However they take time to master and it is a real challenge to understand what makes one go faster than another............
If anyone would like to try a scow or would like any further information about them or the class at YSC then do please contact one of the class captains - either Niall Wallace (66, Loro) on niallathome@yahoo.co.uk or Bill Ford (58, Curlew) on bill.ford@outlook.com
Downloads
Last updated 09:26 on 6 September 2023