Sailing Venue
Castle Cove Sailing Club provides direct access to the 2012 sailing waters in Portland Harbour.
The immediate access to the waters creates efficient use of water-based training time and enables intensive use and understanding of the Games’ waters. It also ensures the collection of the crucial knowledge of the winds and tides of Portland Harbour and Weymouth Bay. These opportunities will be highly sought after.
All of the medal races will be sailed on the Portland Harbour waters. These waters lap the Castle Cove Sailing Club slipways and beach. The excellent viewing of the sailing provided by the Club location further enhances the value to the teams of the use of the Club’s facilities
About the Club
Castle Cove Sailing Club is family-based, having about 400 members. The Club’s ethos is one of self-help and is very sociable and friendly. The members are generally local (all coming from a 30 mile radius of the Club) and so have a fund of information about the locality, the historic sites, its restaurants and pubs and local non-sailing events. Members will be pleased to share this information with the teams so that the overall experience of being in Weymouth will be interesting and enjoyable.
The Club, which was formed in 1923, has held many regional and national sailing regattas since its inception to the present day. It numbers, amongst its members, international race officers, jurors and race officials and so there is a good understanding of the overall needs of top-level sailing competitors.
The Dinghy Park
The dinghy park map, as of May 2008, shows its present layout and the position of the four slipways. The teams from visiting countries, contracting with the Training Camp, will be allocated space for their boats and some storage. The dinghy park has electric power, fresh water for washing boats, non-slip slipways, a mechanical winch for boat launching and recovery. There is also a range of easily recovered buoys and ground tackle available for training use.
Adjacent to the Castle Slipway is a permanent pier, extended by floating pontoons, from which ribs and boats can be launched and loaded. Trots are available for the mooring of ribs; and ferry boat services to and from the trots are available at weekends and some evenings during the summer.
The dinghy park is well lit and has a security fence surrounding it, with electronic entrance gates ensuring controlled access. The contracting teams will be given authorisation to use these gates.
The Clubhouse
The clubhouse is on two floors: the lower ground floor has changing rooms with showers and WC’s, wet room, debriefing/training room with video, wireless and screen facilities and internet access. The ground floor is a dry area with a meeting room, club lounge with its own restaurant/cafeteria, kitchen, bar and WC’s. Doors lead out onto a balcony overlooking Portland Harbour and the club gardens, with picnic tables and benches, makes for an excellent site for outside barbeques. There is a gas barbeque for teams’ use.
Our collaboration with Weymouth College means that its catering department uses the kitchens in the clubhouse to provide high quality and reasonably priced food.