Would you like a sailboat for your own use in the summer? Are you interested in the opportunity to offer wonderful sailing experiences for you and your friends? As a member of TRIP, all this is possible, and what’s best – in a student-friendly way without a thick wallet! Below you’ll find out how making your own reservations is possible in practice.
1) Join us in different working bees (talkoot) and collect enough bee-hours
Making your own boat reservations is based on work done for the benefit of the club, which is rewarded with sailing days. Work hours can be obtained from boat maintenance, volunteering at events and other various tasks done for the club, which are separately defined here. You are responsible for recording your bee-hours in the bee-hours excel sheet as the hours accumulate.
The bee-hour collection period is one year, from May to May, after which the work hour lists are returned. The hours collected after returning the lists will thus accumulate sailing days for the following year. Boats can be booked when a minimum of 20 hours have been accumulated during the booking period. Skippers are also required to skipper at least one introductory sail to be able to have personal reservations.
If you wish, you can also form an alliance of several members, in which case everyone’s working hours are added together. The alliance is treated as a single person during boat reservations, i.e. it is enough if the total hours exceed 20 hours!
More detailed working hours instructions and the excel template for bee-hours list can be found in the material bank.
2) Come to the Skippers meeting in May to make your reservations for the upcoming season
Reservations for TRIP’s keel boats FirsTrip, GinTrip and ElecTrip for the sailing season are made at the Skipper’s meeting, which is held in May after the return of the bee-hours lists. Reservations are made on the basis of bee-hours in such a way that boat reservation days can be booked in proportion to the completed bee-hours, and those who have accumulated the most hours can reserve the days they wish first. The booking procedure is described in more detail in the boat reservation rules.
3) Find yourself a skipper
If you have already acquired TRIP’s first mate or captain qualifications, you can act as the head of the boat yourself according to your qualifications. However, you can reserve boats even if you do not have the right to skipper boats; in this case, your responsibility is to find a qualified skipper for your journey. A convenient way to increase the probability of getting a skipper is to make an alliance with the skipper. With a first mate’s qualification, you can skipper the archipelago cruisers GinTrip and ElecTrip, and with a captain’s qualification you can skipper all of TRIP’s keel boats. Current TRIP skippers with contact information can be found here: Skippers
4) Navigare necesse est!
5) After the sails of the summer…
A fee is charged for booking boats, which covers the maintenance of the boats. Payments are determined based on the reservation dates, and payments are invoiced after the fact according to the reservations made. At TRIP, the principle is that money does not determine the possibility to go sailing, so the booking fees are comparatively low and student-friendly. The amounts of the payments are decided annually at the Annual meeting and are also announced in the skipper’s letter.
Dinghies
The booking procedure described above does not apply to dinghies, which are booked throughout the season on their own booking calendar. Booking requires an orientation, which is given by the Head of dinghy maintenance.