SNAKES!

Most of our new members are silver sailors, either learning or returning from a brief dalliance years before. Many of these people may only sail every now and again, but may join in with the club in many other ways. We talk about the demographic time bomb, but people get old all the time, and some will see sailing as a great way to stay healthy and join in with something new. It is racing that suffers from this, as our older racers tend to have either sailed right through life or have come back from many years of racing in the past.

Trouble is, there needs to be a balance between racing and other club activities, or a club starts to fade.

Of course one thing we could all do is look at Sport England's Active People Survey.  Sadly it's now an Active Lives Survey with no individual sport data.  So the last year is 2016.  And the data there is interesting:

I found an old survey from 2013 that showed things were on the up, thanks in part to an excellent summer, the weather playing its part as it does in water sports participation. Last year for me as a purveyor of kite equipment was excellent since it was quite windy, but nevertheless we have to accept what might be good for one sport isn't for the other, my hours in my boat were probably the lowest I've recorded since I've been messing about sitting down.

Then I had a google and found the latest summary of that same survey, it's here where I note racing in 2016 at least was up a tad even though the general trend is down.

It's a fact across all the sports I either have been involved in commercially or am still involved in as a hobby, they are down because they are either no longer the 'in' thing or have lost the critical mass required to continue to introduce enough new folk to cope with natural wastage.

I think small boat sail and racing is resilient in that it has critical mass and the fluctuations will be largely down to weather, and family trends. Even though I always feel throwing money at youf is wasted, there is sufficient volume to ensure returnees long into the future.

But I do caution that the trend away from civil obedience and reluctance to observe rules and regs that has been prevalent since the 60's does sway a lot of folk away from the regulation that is such a part of our world and I think a simplification of the rules is long overdue. I also feel that a degree of stability in all things handicap is desperately required as I've said over and over, it's not that important in the greater scheme of things but like selling things generally, removing sales objections is key to the success of any product being marketed and at the end of the day that's what we're trying to do, market a leisure product and sport.

Edited by iGRF - 01 Feb 18 at 9:34am

Well a conspiracy theorist could make the argument that the continued movement is there to generate boat sales churn.

Surely I can't be the only one who doesn't care what a boat's PY is when making a decision on what to sail in?