Europe’s SAILING Championship Series 2017 Program

(Hamburg, Germany)- The impact of the sailing league program, originally created in Germany by Oliver Schwall’s Konzeptwerft Group in Hamburg, Germany and their J/Germany partners Mittelmann’s Werft, has simply re-defined “club sailing” in Europe- for thousands of sailors across the continent.

Started in 2013 “on a wing & a prayer”, the dynamic team managed to engage 18 sailing clubs in their first season in 2014 to hatch the Deutsche Segel-Bundesliga.  Teams of four sailors from across Germany sailed “college-style” regattas, rotating in each team after sailing short 10-15 minutes races on evenly matched J/70s.  It has proved to be an extremely popular and very successful format.

Since that time, the SAILING Champions League was created to provide an overall European Champion for the fourteen countries participating from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany (Junior and Open), Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. The 2017 qualification program for the 300+ sailing clubs across Europe includes the following schedule:

• Act 1: 11-13 August, St. Petersburg Yacht Club, St. Petersburg, Russia
• Act 2: 1-3 September, Segel-Club St. Moritz, St. Moritz, Switzerland
• Final: 22-24 September, Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, Porto Cervo, Italy

The extraordinary impact that J/70s and the sailing leagues are having on “grass roots” sailing in Europe is quite astonishing.  Here are the basic numbers (the demographics):

• 14 National Leagues
• 24 Sailing Clubs (average)
• 500 Club Spectators (average)
• 12 Sailors per club (average)
• 7 Regattas per league (average)
• 6 Boats per event
• 15 Races per weekend for each team

In short, each club sails about 105 sailing league races each season.  Each club has 12 sailors and 500 club members actively engaged for each event (virtually or onsite).  In other words, across 14 European countries, there are more than 172,000 sailing club members actively engaged in their club’s success in each event; 4,032 alone are men, women, youth sailing as crew on the boats.  A total of 1,470 races are scheduled for the 2017 season!   For more SAILING Champions League Sailing information