About
Our Story
The Vikings Sailing Club (VSC) was founded in 1984 by the late Hector Borg Carbott and a few friends as a non-profit organization. The Club is run by volunteers, with the objective of facilitating and promoting sailing especially with the young, promoting good sportsmanship and seamanship and organizing racing, social, educational and informative activities which aim to foster the love of sailing. The club holds year round beginner sailing courses as part of the Sportmalta on the move program and also offers other more advanced courses for sailors interested in competing both locally and abroad.
The Clubhouse
Our clubhouse is situated at Haywharf, next door to the AFM Maritime base. Our premises are not large but they house all our fleet and some members’ boats. We are still refurbishing our premises and hope to soon have a proper classroom where to hold our theory sessions and pre and post session briefings. We have a spacious roof on both our garages where we hope to soon hold some social events for our members.
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Committee
The Vikings committee is currently composed of 8 members. Although each has their role in the committee, all members assist each other whenever required. At Vikings we are one big family!
Dr Sandra Agius Darmanin
Commodore
A marine biologist in love with the sea and sailing who joined the sport by chance over 20 years ago where she crewed for many years on J boats during both coastal and offshore races organised by the Royal Malta Yacht Club. Sandra was also a member of Vikings at the time and would spend her summer holidays sailing Mirror 10s. After taking a pause from regular sailing due to family and study commitments, she resumed contact with the sport when her son showed interest in sailing and joined the Vikings Sailing Club five years ago through the SportMalta On the Move Program. Sandra herself also sails regularly on her laser. She was co-opted to the Committee in 2019 after taking it on herself to get the Club enrolled as a voluntary organisation. She was voted in as commodore in March 2020 and again in 2021 and is the Club’s representative on the Malta Sailing Federation Board. Her aims are to rebuild the club to its former activity by providing rich sailing experiences to all sailors, from just fun with friends to competitive racing.
Sandra oversees all the work of the committee and staff, is in charge of Sponsorships, EU funding, Partnerships, certifications, Child Welfare and Human Resources. She is also part of the Club’s Race Management team.
Kenneth Bowman
Vice-Commodore
Kenneth oversees all racing activities run by the club including club races and is responsible for issuing NORs and club race results and reports on our website. He is also a member of the club’s race management team together with Sandra and Jonathan who oversee our club’s participation in local ranking events and abroad.
Sandra Attard
Hon Secretary
Jasminka Deguara
Hon Treasurer
An IT consultant helping companies to build their data warehousing and business intelligence solutions during the day and enjoying dinghy sailing and the sea in free time. Jasminka always wanted to try sailing but started only about 5 years ago while she was looking for a good summer course for her daughter to get introduced to sailing, and discovered there was an adult course too at Vikings, which she decided to try out. The moment they put her on a topper she got addicted and enjoyed sailing ever since. Nowadays she enjoys sailing for fun with club members on her Laser Radial and promotes sailing to those who like to try sailing through Sailing with the Vikings Women courses. She has been in the Vikings committee since 2019 and works towards rebuilding the club.
Jasminka has the challenging task of managing the club’s finances and keeping our accounts and payment records up to date. She also assists in the coaching when required.
Kleaven Maniscalco
Premises Manager
Victor Bugeja
Fleet Manager
Henriette Putzulu Caruana
Events co-ordinator
Matthew Wallis
Safety Officer
David Aquilina
Sailability & Sailing events
Our Coaches
At Vikings we have a team of very dedicated coaches who share their love for sailing and pass on their knowledge and sailing skills to hundreds of sailors who attend our courses every year.
Batuhan Cesur
Partner Performance Coach
As the child of a family whose parents were sailors, Batuhan grew up in sailing throughout my life. His sailing adventure started with Optimist when he was 6 years old. With sailing, his responsibility, decision-making mechanism and individual skills in his life developed much faster than my peers. He represented his country in the national team in many competitions. He competed in many classes including Optimist, laser and yacht. From the age of 18, he took a break from his professional sailing life and started coaching. He has taught in many national and international competitions and continues his coaching career actively in the competition. While his passion for learning and coaching increases day by day, spending time with sailing athletes at sea is his best therapy. The secret of success is to do what you love, correctly and by improving it. The key indicator for this is development. He tries to sail as much as possible to improve sailing skills and to raise more moral, ethical and sportsmanship sailors.
He proceeded with his teaching career in Malta since 2019. This is a perfect island where sailing can held for 12 months. He is working to train more sailors and bring more international success to Malta.
Matthew Wallis
Freelance lead and performance coach
Laura Zammit
Freelance Lead Coach
Laura is currently reading for a degree at the University of Malta and spends her free time coaching our younger sailors. She has several years of sailing and coaching experience with her favourite being double handed sailing on boats such as the RS Feva.
She is particularly patient with young kids and has been one of our lead coaches since 2022.
Daniel Agius
Freelance Lead Coach
Daniel started his coaching experience as a helper on the Sportmalta on the move programme after having sailed on topper and laser for a number of years. On reaching 16 years he became one of our freelance coaches and was promoted to lead coach in 2023 where he assists mostly on our summer programmes.
Daniel is currently pursuing a degree at the University of Malta and juggles between laser competitive training and studies. He has also competed in the International topper world championships in 2022 and 2023 as part of the Maltese team.
Ernest German
Freelance Coach
Ernest is our veteran sailing coach. He has been with Vikings for several years and has taught hundreds if not thousands of sailors how to sail, many of which are still sailing to this day! He currently teaches on the Sportmalta On the Move Programme.
Junior Coaches and Helper Team
Daniel Agius, Angele Vella, Andrea Vella and Paul Bonnici are our Junior coaches currently in training while Benjamin Borg and Noah Galea and Toby Piasecki make up our current helper and are being introduced to basic coaching skills.
