I need to ask Jim to write us a piece on this, but I do have a few reflections of my own. Firstly and most obviously, an event like this takes a lot of volunteers to run it – and the Volunteers Team at Datchet was fantastic. Our Jim, was Officer in charge and I suspect it was pretty challenging.

Datchet Radio Sailing is not a large Club. Our members could never cover off the jobs on their own. We simply needed help from lots of Clubs all over the Country plus help from the very kind members of the local Dinghy and Keelboat Club, DWSC.

Big surprise for me was how many volunteers you need each day simply to make a Worlds happen. It’s not like a weekend Open Meeting, but a tad larger!

I had in my mind that there would be about three dozen on the daily Volunteer team. If you add in the seven umpires, that’s very close to what I paid the kitchen to deliver each day in terms of lunches.

Does 36 volunteers to run an 84 person event sound a lot to you? I suppose it does to me, but the first obvious thing to think through is that you need more people to step forward than even that number. If your Club has an event which is a week long, you have to allow for those still working for a living on weekdays. Most probably you need 40-50 names to cover three dozen roles every day of the week.

During the event, Jim was on Heat Board duty. The Volunteer Group had to manage themselves – arrange the rosters and get work done. To my delight, as I’d arrive around 8am each day, I’d find the volunteer leaders sitting in the upstairs lounge outside the Scoring Room arranging the duty rosters of the day…. keeping stress away from Jim ! Keeping the security gates staffed from 8am!! Keeping the bins empty and the porta-loos cleaned.

It’s hard too – people kindly offer their days but don’t always turn up. Anyway the Volunteerr leadership Group got it all to happen.

Scoring Considerations:-

In 2025, I Parallel Scored a 50 boat UK Nationals on my own. It was at another location (Bartons Point), which did not have the Venue Challenges which Datchet presents. What I’m about to describe to you is a bit of a step up from one person for the Worlds.

I can write about the Scoring Team specifically which could not have operated without a whole lot of volunteer hours. It was a good proportion of the volunteering overall. Two of us were from Datchet Radio Sailing. The other team volunteers stepped forward from the local keelboat fleet at DWSC (where I spent 25 years racing). Plus we had a brilliant Scoring Coach on the phone from New Zealand all day.

The first thing you need capacity to cover with Radio Sailors of a certain age… at the World Championship level,… is what happens to your Championship if one of them cannot make it to the Club on a day. It doesn’t have to be just illness or stomach bugs either.

Datchet is situated on one of the World’s most congested highway systems. We cannot assume the scorers (all commuting) would actually get through. You can’t expect to tell competitors, “Racing cannot start as the scorers are stuck in traffic” !! As we ran our Championship planning meetings on weekdays, it soon became apparent this was a real challenge. That and regular car mechanical issues etc. (also happened during our IOM Nationals Dress Rehearsal)

On any day, because of the layout of the Datchet venue we knew we needed at least three people on the scoring team. In fact, it would be a sweat at three. One scorer in the Clubhouse, one on the line and one transferring documents between the two, keeping the library of documents neatly filed and the results on the Official Noticeboard posted.

We ran like that at the UK IOM Nationals (a “dress rehearsal”) – it was hard. We needed to cover all days of the week, preferably with four people on site on any day. We ended up with five names on our list – not all present every day due to work commitments etc, but we got through the one week workload.

When the team is assembled for your event, if they are not all seasoned radio sailors they will need training in heat based racing and scoring systems. We ran three training workshops in advance of the championships.

A note too about our “coach on the phone” – by Worlds day two, we figured a workflow that simply pulled him into the team with a full time functioning role of QA partner – to check the Quality of simply everything. He helped us to get the cleanest and most accurate set of results ever presented, (we reckon!). Two thousand results in the system, all double checked and perfect. Inputs and output results were all 100% audited in two directions. Plus in between bursts of QA’ing, he was trying to get ahead of the Board Managers – attempting to see if there were any promo/relegate nasties out there as the Umpire judgements came through. …. It was a pretty protesty event.