Tag Archives: marblehead blog

Datchet IOM Worlds – Hull Designs – An Embarrassment of Riches !!

We are somewhat spoiled for choice, don’t you think??

We have three major builders dominating the fleet with around a quarter of the fleet a piece. Hugely mixed results and they are all terrific! 2026 was a brilliant year for one of the strong contingent of V12s to win – a poignant note to mark Ian Vickers’ departure from life.

And how old is the BritPOP! design now?? Amazing – and the 2026 GBR National Champion sailed one of the first three to be built! How terrific is that!! 12% of this fleet in 2026 :).

Plus, I have a feeling that the K2R is one of the first K2’s built.

Then if the original IOM Charter was to encourage new designs, just look at that! Proteus and the other unique designs were almost 20% of the fleet.

A special note about Craig Richard’s Proteus. As a project, it seems like it has only been going 5 minutes and already three boats entered into the Worlds. In fact, Craig sailed his Proteus to two 1st Places during the 18 race worlds. Brilliant, really brilliant !! For those of us at Datchet who have lived through the Proteus story – especially David and Nigel, it’s quite something – for Craig and for 3D printing technology. We shall be hearing more and more of Proteus, I’m sure.

Superb – An embarrassment of riches. A golden era is upon us !?!

Post Worlds – Horizontal Position….!

Apologies for being quieter than we should be “post Worlds”!! There’s a lot to tell, obviously.

Still a huge amount of post-event work crashing through …. I popped in to remove a few flag poles on Wednesday and DWSC told me to leave them there! Thank you to our wonderful competitors for not taking their flag home as a souvenir!!

How nice are those people at Thames Water. Despite the drought. they kept the water level high for the Worlds!! Now – two to three metres came out at roughly 1 metre per night.

Interesting. VERY dry in my home town…..

More analysis soon.

IOM Worlds – It’s a Wrap ….!!

The Club Website has been a little quiet while we organised the IOM Worlds at Datchet Radio Sailing!

In the end, a pretty BIG thing to do and, we feel, went well 🙂

Alexis was amazing, wasn’t he?! Hope you have been following everything at the excellent MYA site

http://www.IOMworlds2026.com

(You can see the full official results there)

If IOMWorlds2026 website is no longer online when you read this, try

https://connect.afleet.app/events/7G1umvd38yGVLemstzbX

There will be lots of post event analysis to come on the Club website in the coming weeks. Plenty to tell you. We learned a huge amount about how to put something like this together, plus we have the robot marks, checklists, costs analysis, scoring tech, parallel scoring, how to audit 3000 scores, boat designs, the Proteus story (2 Worlds Race Wins for Proteus!!), fully Umpired Racing, safety (somebody managed to fall in in addition to the winner being thrown in!)

Going to lie down now.

Till then…..