This summer I’ve been trying to get some decent pics of our club’s racing. It’s tough, since I want to be racing myself, but I’ve taken a few races off: http://www.widernets.com/images/soling/
We race Soling 1M’s exclusively, usually during weeknight evenings, but most of these are from a recent weekend regatta.
Most of these are actually of boats from a different local club, Chicago RC Model YC. They do a better job of painting their boats than us urban folks usually do.
If you click past the tiny picture to the medium picture, there’s a link to wallpaper size pics, in case the mood strikes you to change your desktop background. I like this one myself… http://www.widernets.com/images/soling/imageFull11.htm
Those are some great photos, what model camera did you use to take them?
Is model yachting starting to make a comeback in the Chicago area? I ask, because I?m from Champaign/Urbana, and it has always seemed to me that clubs in are area of the country, are pretty sparse.
Thanks. I used a digital SLR (a Canon 350D/RebelXT). Great cameras, you can fire off a hundred or two shots, without commiting yourself to any developing costs. Great for getting more keepers. Of course, the cost of equipment makes up for that, but I had some lenses from back in the day…
Chicago RC scene: It’s hard to be sure if anything is changing, but our club seems to get a fair number of inquiries. Many from people that were given an RC boat of random make and want to race.
I live in downtown Chicago, where anyone interested in sailing can get onto a crew on a big boat. Our three year old RC club has done all right, recruiting from the yacht clubs and sailing weeknights, because we’re on our big boats on the weekend. We usually get 6 or more boats out, out of more than 20 Soling 1 Meters built in the last three years.
We’re definitely a racing club, and not so into the construction except to add to our one-design fleet each winter. Of course, very few of us urbanites have workshops, let alone a place to paint.
I’m not sure what the trends are for the suburban guys, but it seems like things are on the upswing. I think there are three or four very casual small clubs around, and then two more organized clubs: ours and http://www.chicago-rc-model-yacht-club.org/ in the northwest suburbs. I know there are a lot of CR-914’s around the area but they haven’t gotten organized yet, it seems.