Category Archives: Boat

Take a Look Around This Prototype Website…

Three of us at Datchet have been discussing the two facts that there are no consolidated Marblehead Knowledge Bases online… and more broadly, how very hard it can seem to potential newcomers to enter into the Sport regardless of Class they sail.

This little prototype website has been built around all our club fleets to give us an impression of what it might feel like if we were to build the idea out more fully. Try and imagine it populated with a thousand items of knowledge scattered through the subject categories listed.

In earlier years, when this gap in the market for the Flying Fifteens was identified, we at Datchet embarked on the idea to build a knowledge-led website, that did race reports as well. It quickly became followed in 26 countries and it now treated by many clubs worldwide as a way of supporting newcomers. We wrote about 2,000 items about buying, owning and racing Flying Fifteens. To date it has been read more than two thirds of a million times.

It would be focussed mainly on our Club, its members, our classes – and trying to encourage potential members to join up – whether they be World Champions, or more importantly, potential new members in the South East who are considering the sport, and DWSC members in particular.

Don’t worry about the pesky adverts – if we go ahead with this kind of idea, for a nominal annual fee we can turn the ads off.

It works on a browser or your mobile. Let me know what you think. Richard J.

Marblehead Background and History

Marbleheads started pre-radio back in the early 1930s in the town of the same name in Massachusetts. During that very decade it became a National Class (1932), then an International Class(1937). At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin it somehow had a Championship aligned with the Games.

Radio controlled racing appeared in the mid-1970s and their popularity quickly gained ground.

It was often known as the “Marblehead 50/800”. Those were the two basic rules – 800 sq inches of sail maximum and a length of 50 inches plus or minus a quarter of an inch. It is said that the 50 inch length rule was chosen because it would fit across the back seat of a normal American car of the time.

Here are two interesting articles, if you’d like to read more:-

https://usvmyg.org/the-marblehead-50-800-class/

https://usvmyg.org/history/marblehead-history/