From Dinghy Park… to Playground!

It’s fairly well documented that end-of-life boats and abandoned boats are a bit of a headache for sailing clubs. And with a pretty big dinghy park at Stewartby, they’re inevitably something we have to deal with too.

Normally we’ll try to re-home them in the usual ways - either popping them on eBay, or offering them to members in the hope someone can give them a second life.

So when we were contacted by Shefford Lower School last year asking if we had any old boats they could use for an outdoor play project, we were genuinely delighted to be able to help.

A brilliant new home

Shefford Lower School have been working with OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) to sustainably improve the quality of outdoor play at the school - the kind of play where kids are learning without even realising it: building confidence, teamwork, problem-solving, and resilience.

We were really pleased to hear they’ve now achieved OPAL Platinum (which is a proper achievement). Huge congratulations to Amber and the whole team.

Even better - the boat looks like it’s already being put to work exactly as intended. It’s always nice when something that was on the way out gets a new purpose.

So… could we do something like this at Stewartby?

A few members at the club have been chatting recently about how we could improve the outdoor play facilities for our younger members, and seeing what Shefford have done has definitely got us thinking.

Maybe this is something we could explore at Stewartby too - and if we can do it by repurposing an old boat and keeping it out of landfill, even better.

If you’ve got any thoughts on this, we’d love to hear them.

And if you’ve got a boat in the dinghy park that you no longer want or need (or you know it’s realistically not going back on the water), please get in touch with us - it might just end up with a completely new life.