Compulsory membership of the class assoc.

Would it not be easy to put up club memberships by £2-3 a year and then pay the relevant associations that money for club racers.  Think how many people club race and do no more.  The associations would get hundreds of extra pounds a year that they could invest in paying coaches to go to individual clubs and give good class coaching.  This would surely encourage more people to go to opens, join the association, more funds........etc.  They could also provide a club racers association pack with tuning info etc.

Everyones a winner!!!!!

Unfortunately CA's do tend to be a bit of a circuit racers club, for the simple reason that it's the circuit racers who tend to care enough to get involved.

Generally it's a cultural thing in the clubs, it's the older, long standing sailors who seem to set the example of "there's no benefit in joining"; new sailors then take this as gospel.

At the end of the day the guy with a floating shed who sails 4 weekends a year is never going to join anything. From a club perspective he's easy money as he turns up to do his duties, and the club won't want to upset him by asking for extra money in case he leaves altogether.

Most classes do offer savings to their members, it's a hard message to get across though.  As for password protected websites.. well someone has spent the time to put it all together.. why should none members get the same advantages as members.

(As a quick aside, go to Class Training events, if you have no intention of ever doing an open you'll still learn loads about your boat, get more from sailing it and maybe clean up at your club if you pay attention and work hard.)

The RYA could have worked wonders here with the Champion Club and Charter, require a minimum percentage of regular club sailors to be CA members in order for the club to qualify. AFter all both Champion Club and the Charter are about promoting racing and observance of the rules..

Perhaps I'm just an utter fool for the amount of time and money I've poured into my CA over the years.

food for thought.

cheers

Originally posted by Garry Biometric ID cards are obviously the solution! Some vital part of the boat is digitally recorded and placed on a chip. Cost should be less than £300 and the technology won't work, but surely this is a price worth paying for protecting the security of our class associations. What's more it will make moving boats across international borders much simplier, especially if going to the USA. Any boat unable to produce an ID card on demand will be indefinately impounded with no judicial review. In fact this is such a good idea Tony's going to get every person in the UK scanned as well.

Don't get me started on that one!

I quite like Rick's idea about the sailing clubs collecting a coupla quid for each class represented at the club.

Maybe, as the CAs are (in general) so heavily based on racing, membership should be free but with the entry for opens being 'a coupla quid' more to cover the diffrence that way you don't need to have paid up front to race at an opens and overnight the CA's would boost their membership. Then with their huge mailing list they can go into marketting overdrive and make a bundle on directing people to their preferred chandlers who pay a % commision on anything sold.