Sand Yacht Racing at St Annes

I've got up to September 1982 in my scanning of my old black and white negatives.

This week I came across a number of photos that I took for an article for Lancashire Magazine in 1982 of the sand yachts on the beach at St Annes on Sea.

This is a huge expanse of sand, open to the Irish Sea although the tide here never comes close to the edge of the beach.

As such this is a very windy place! There are huge sand hills here, dunes that are held back by star grass - at one time there was a local law that families had to plant so much star grass every year to keep the sand from swamping the villages along the coast. Even now you regularly find huge piles of sand as far back from the "front" as the main road from Lytham towards Blackpool and Starr Gate.

This wind is what makes the sport of sand yachting possible.

In the September of 1982, there was a brand spanking new Coastguard Station on the front at St Annes and it's from around here that the sand yachts congregated and went off on their zig-zag courses out on the flat sands.

The Fylde International Sand Yacht Club was formed in 1951 and hosted several large national and international competitions at St Annes.

In 1953 Richard Denning and a number of friends broke the British and World speed records here on the beach in their yacht Coronation Mk II. Unconfirmed speeds of over 70mph had been achieved - and here I'm looking back at my notes of 1982.

However thare has been no sand yachting at St Annes since a blanket ban in 2002 after a racing yacht struck a member of the public, killing her as she walked with her two sons in 1982. The pilot of the sand yacht was cleared of manslaughter but the ban has been in place ever since.

Currently a three month trial of sand yachting is coming to a close with close scrutiny on public safety and the effects on local and visiting wild life, particularly the various bird populations.

Large verions of the photos: racing yachts, coastguard station, lone yacht, stationary yachts

Back in the Capital

Wherever I end up in all my travels for work, and that's a lot of places, I hardly ever get the chance to see anything of them. Waking up in a Premier Inn you know you're in a Premier Inn because they all look the same. But is it Nottingham? Cardiff? Edinburgh? But there's just something about London that makes me want to get out and walk miles. Too many miles.

In London I normally stay in the Tavistock - an art deco ground floor and a few staff who have got to know me over the years. But to eat I always trot (stroll/crawl...) out of the door and down to Leicester Square to see if there's a premiere about to happen or anyone famous knocking about, or just to soak up a bit of atmosphere.

There's so much close by. The Waterstones on the corner of Trafalgar Square is open late enough for a mooch and there's the pillock-of-the-hour on the fourth plinth at the moment too... Standing still whilst painted as a statue has always struck me as a moronic way to earn a living and the result of too many students allowed to choose theatrical studies as a main course, when we need engineers, entrepreneurs and (desperately) people who can think of things we can make that the rest of the world might want to buy. We need living statues like we need our eyeballs pecked out by crows...

Anyway, far too often these London walks leave me with sore feet. So last night I decided to hail a cab and return to the hotel in a slightly easier manner. I ended up with one of those brilliantly witty London cab drivers, who kept me entertained throughout the journey. He told me how his son was a water polo player of county standard. His wife was from Serbia and whilst on a visit there, their son had been invited to play with a Serbian water polo team. The lad's verdict was that not a single member of his county team would stand a chance of getting onto that team. They trained 6 nights a week for 3 hours, warming up by swimming at a pace for a full hour.

That's dedication to the exclusion of any other pursuits and an acceptance of pain of endurance that does away with what most of us would term "fun".

Then we got onto the subject of cab drivers and their knowledge and he told me tongue-in-cheek how it was all for the good of the public and not for financial gain. "We're a service for the good of the people, Sir, we don't do this for the remuneration..."

"Ah good," I said, "because I've got no money..."

"Ah well, Sir..." he said with a slight sigh, "You can f**k off and walk then..."

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