your responsibilities as a sailor

I suspect a lot of people do find that the capital layout is too much. Even if they don't want to buy a boat and only rent, few these days will pick up sailing without doing a training course first and that ain't normally cheap in its own right. It doesn't cost much to pick up a borrowed hockey bat or rugby ball. You only need some shorts and trainers which most people already have.

Just been talking around my office to see if people are thinking of taking up a new sport (presuming that they weren't already doing one that took up to much time) would they consider sailing and if not why not.

The general consensus was that their impressions of sailing was that it was too expensive to get into with all the kit you needed and would take up too much time.

It had nothing to do with the type of boats at all. After all those who are looking into sailing probably don't know what boats are available anyway up front.

Those who do come to our club and want to sail are prominently wanting to mess about in boats, not get into serious hard core racing. That would come in time once the club system suggested that they tried racing.

Originally posted by maxibuddah The general consensus was that their impressions of sailing was that it was too expensive to get into with all the kit you needed and would take up too much time.

Originally posted by pondmonkey  So why the desire amongst us all to keep banging the drum about promoting the sport?

For the same reason the windsurfers should, to keep the costs within reach, sadly windsurfing has priced itself off the shelves. Dinghies were never on the shelves in the first place which was part of the problem.

A shame that a 'packaged' well marketed thing, like that little MX Ray promised to be didn't gain traction, but then it wouldn't, faced with the competition of loads of old luddites telling everyone they don't want 'that' here, you need to sail this boring old complicated thing that only we know how to work...

Edited by iGRF - 16 May 13 at 11:46am

Originally posted by hum3 The vast majority of people who went through our courses didn't come back to be regulars.

That's one of the things I'm trying to focus on in my club. Having just gone through RYA Coach training, which was very good on the coaching bit, it did leave the impression that much of the training we do stems from trying to grow our future Olympians, not to get more people having fun and enjoying the sport. It does make me wonder what training might be like if the RYA wasn't the managing body...