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 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 & Safeguarding officer
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
Henriette Putzulu Caruana
Events co-ordinator
Matthew Wallis
Safety Officer & Fleet Manager
Anouschka Vella
Inclusive sailing
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.
Steven Kavanagh
Full time coach
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
Emma Borg
Freelance coach
Emma has been passionate about sailing since she was 7, starting with optimists, moving on to lasers, and now racing on keelboats. She has a deep love for sports and thrives on the dedication and competitive spirit they bring. She also loves teaching and finds joy in seeing kids excel in their sport. Emma is currently our optimist novice coach, getting our keen group of younger sailors into racing.
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.
