Demographic Changes

Not sure the delivery of £5k advertising revenue a month is viable, given that if I were to do it for a job i would want most of it for wages!  Also ashamed to say as a MTb rider i have never heard of IMB

Only on my road bike!

There but for fortune goes a 29er fixie rider.

Fortune being us keeping his Onanist arse on the straight and narrow.

"How can you foresee what will happen in the future without an understanding of what has occurred in the past?"

Thanks Rupert for making that clear to Oldtimer though I fear that the common sense nature of your thoughts may be beyond him! There are two key issues here! Writing about what might happen in the future is a lot of fun, but journalism it isn't - it is being opinionated and there is more than enough of that on here already!

More than that, if I thought that like Deep Thought, that I had the answers, I'd be working for one of the big consultancy companies that the RYA seem happy to pay vast sums of money to. Instead, it is actually far harder to look at what is happening today, then be able to pick the raisins out of the ratsh*t and make some sense out of some of the madness that is going on out there. Mind you, if I was in a position to set the agenda, the first thing I would do would be to organise a real boat test for ALL of the current crop of single handers: what would be important to me would be to look at what the 'ownership experience' is like. Everything from getting the cover off in the dinghy park, to getting it back on after a day of launching, sailing, recovering.... that to me is what a test should be about, the boat, warts and all. But hang on, what is all this about 'futuristic boats'? Is that what the D-Zero and RS Aero really are. Null, nail hit on head! When you've got your success that says that the boat has the legs to last (you want futuristic - to me the RS 600 ticked more of the boxes there...and look at that now) I'll be beating a path to the class to find out the how - and "what we all want to know" why you succeeded when others may have failed.

Right now, the single handed themed article that gets my attention the most would be the one that looks at boats such as the OK, Supernova and Solo (sorry, all old fart boats again) and take some time thinking about how these well established stalwarts of the genre are going to handle the competition from two excellent newcomers. Anything more forward looking at that is nothing more than fiction, suggest that Oldtimer tries the works of JK Rowling for that!
D

In order to establish why old classes like Merlin & the Fireball are still going strong you have to examine why more recent offerings are not getting traction.

Imv other than the obvious 'Bandit' take, it is because of the failure of the Bethwaite generation in the 90's and noughties and the harsh climate into which the more modern offerings were launched, combined with the stifle at birth attitude of those who can sway the PY system to protect those classes.

Classic example being the way P&B conned poor old Mike Arnold and killed his Alto rather than let it interfere with their beloved 505, then look at the intercenine politicking surrounding the Icon, one guy gets worked over for commercial expedience by another, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but that is typical of them.

Petty politics and bollox aside, unless a body or group came together to decide a particular type of boat is required and an open to all interested parties of builders and sail makers invited to join in, I can't see anything getting any serious market share in the double hander world and the chances of that happening?

Edited by iGRF - 03 Feb 15 at 8:26pm