(Above : Half the IOM Worlds flag set)

You cannot really run a continental, global or world championship without country flags can you?

There’s the Opening Ceremony for a start and I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of making the race marshalling areas look a bit more jolly. Plus at the recent IOM Worlds we had the traditional opening ceremony to cater for….!

We had 28 countries in attendance. No matter how you look at it, just about any budget number that you have to multiply by 28 is going to end up being a four digit sum. If you take a minute to work it out, the income fees for 84 entrants comes to around £40,000GBP. So if you’re not resourceful, you could be looking at 5% of Championship income just to play for the >*&+<& flags!

So what to do? You’re only like to use them the one occasion at your club….

For a start, where to get your collection of flags from? We used “The Flag Shop”in UK. We ordered pretty large flags, maybe 5’x3′, (see photo) for each country. They must have stocks of flags already made, but if you order all 28 at once it turned out to be quite low cost. I recall maybe £300-£400 for the set of 28. If the Championship WDN/Wait-list springs an extra country at the last moment the cost for one flag was a LOT higher.

TIP : grab an indelible pen and label them all upon arrival with country name and “TOP” …well in advance of your championship ceremony. It’s easy to cause offence by flying them upside down. The Union Jack is not the only flag with this characteristic.) NO human really stands a chance of remembering 28 flags by country name.

Your venue is unlikely to have a nice stock of flagpoles to accommodate 30 or so countries, so you might have a procurement problem. You need around 4m high poles, with block and lanyards … all times 30. Financially that’s a big part of your budget right there. If you can get a rigged 4m flagpole for £30 each I’d be amazed. Let’s say £1000 of poles. So what to do?

Our venue host is a 50 year old dinghy and keelboat club. You’d be amazed what broken masts and booms get dumped by club members as the decades sweep by. In fact, Datchet had the entire history of mast design and building right there hidden in the pile…. Selden/Proctor sections, carbon masts, tracks riveted on/inbuilt, laser two section masts … and an old wooden enterprise mast!!

I’m not going to kid you that it was a small amount of work, but saving £1000 of budget is a huge deal.

A couple of lovely people teased us that we got the flagpole lengths different each time (see photo above)…. but were generally delighted to see the recycled materials that the flagpoles were actually made from.

The work involved:

• we had one day with around six or seven DRS volunteers sorting the old masts, stripping spreaders, hounds and various fittings from them. Our sailing sec, Hugh, is a demon with the angle grinder and cut around half of them to 4m (ish) lengths on day one. If they were topmasts, they usually had a masthead fixing we could re-utilise. Sounds a lot of man-hours, but honestly it was a ton of work.
• On day two, Hugh-the-angle-grinder-king, cut the remainder to a length and ensured we had a top fixing of some sort …. and that from our sponsored flagpole halyard supplier they were all rigged with a hoist lines.
• On day three it took three volunteers to fix 28 or 29 poles to the landlord’s railing uprights. It took two scaffold brackets per pole – we got around 60 from somewhere but I feel the cost was around £150 for a box of 60..

Saved a fortune.

Post championship, I was about to start quietly dropping the flags (what to do with those? Sell them to the next Worlds?) and taking the poles down maybe two per day…., then the Dinghy Club Manager said it all looked great and could maybe a continuing club asset – they host lots of school and junior events for example. Flags a nice feature there…

Good!!

To the Team running the 2027 Marblehead Worlds, if you want a set of country flags, do get in touch!!