Yesterday the fifth Caribbean Sailing Week kicked off in the Caribbean Sea
But first, a bit of history to help understand how this regatta was born and what the organizers set out to achieve.
«Everything is simple, says Boris Boltyansky, one of the founders of Sailing Week and irreplaceable leader. - Five years ago, together with my colleague Alexander Belonovsky,we first attended an amateur regatta, Volvo Sailing Week, which was organized by the Russian Yachting Centreof Mikhail Savelyev. We saw the event from the inside and realized that this genre, this format is very cool in terms of building communications, building relationships between people, but we need to adapt it for
For a start we had to replace Turkey with
We focus mainly on medium-sized business owners andof large companies.top managers
These are those who regularly read RBC's website, which was used to promote the regatta. I have to say this - our website has a huge traffic, we are visited by a million and a half people a day. And 99% of our audience know about our regatta. Just imagine how widely known this event is in the business world. It is not a private hobby club, but rather a projection of yachting onto
But although the club is not closed, we cannot expand it endlessly. The very first regatta brought together 160 participants and today there are 230 of them (37 yachts). Practically it is limited. Infrastructure of many regions simply cannot sustain more participants (try to feed 300 people at one restaurant simultaneously). So the task is to increase the level of participants, and the quality of the event.
Here is a typical indicator of the usefulness and popularity of our Sailing Week. A lot of people come to the regatta for the second time - in fact, it is 70% of our current guests. Yes, for many of them it was their first step into the world of sailing. But today most of them are taking it a step further.
People who started with us five years ago as guests have now become yacht captains themselves, andeven become yacht dealers.some have
For example, Mikhail Mishchenko who is well-known to you and who opened a dealership of interesting yachts Salona (moreover he also creates a charter company, though it is rather an emotion than
Today we are actively cooperating with the Russian Yachting Federation. RBC became the general information sponsor of the Russian Yachting Federation, and
As for the prospects that we see for our offspring, it seems to us that in 10 years we will either find an investor or attract internal investments in order to have our own fleet of monotype racing boats. It is even possible that we will have our own class - something like Russian "RC 44", following the way of constant quality improvement, we will come to it».
A few words on the format of the current regatta. It is organized in three divisions: two monotype divisions (Sunseil and Dufour) and one handicap division (Harmony of various lengths). Very high level captains, including Sergey Dzhienbaev, head coach of the national team, are engaged to control the boats. Andrey Arbuzov, Evgeny Nikiforov, Dmitry Zaritsky - these and other names of the skippers of this Sailing Week are well known in the racing community of our country.
Unfortunately, the first day of racing was not without its troubles. During the first race on the yacht of Sergei Dzhienbaev the