National/Regional Circuits.

Surely many major suggested 'multi-class' events are already there ....  Summer sailing weeks around the coast are a fixture for many, winter 'Sailjuice' events and a multitude of mult-class 'one-offs' such as the Starcross Steamer, IOS Sheppey race, Paignton POSH (singlehanders only)... You name it - there are many many others....

These are already very well attended.  However you will never know how good they are if you don't go to any of them    .... just like for the purists 'single class' ones I guess.   At many of the multi-class events it is relatively normal for individal classes with good numbers to be officially separated out for a class result ... or by the individual CA's on a less official basis.

It really is all there already - just use the existing organisation and event frameworks already in place nationally, regionally or whatever.   But do a bit of research maybe - and turn up at a few  this winter !

Forecasts ?  Surely you don't really rely on them by now ?  'good' ones or 'not so good' ones.   IOS 2016 was in fact rather windy .... (many of us got round about 1 hour faster than normal !!)  Given the sheer distance involved you must surely expect many junior and club sailors to have opted out on the day - as they did.   This is highly sensible as the event can be unusally demanding in real breeze and the course is pretty exposed.  However it is  a very good general example of a multi-class stand-alone event open to all including Cats etc.

For those who cannot travel or commmit for family reasons etc any sort of even regional, let along National series is not really going to work anyway.   


Edited by Cirrus - 04 Nov 16 at 4:31pm

If I wanted to travel to lots of events, I'd buy a boat with more events in places I wanted to go to.That probably means a Merlin.
Another thing that's possibly happening is that people who are looking for a high level of competition as often as possible are now sailing in several classes.
Why do an open when you can do a Nationals or an Inlands ?
That may mean there aren't so many people to do an open every other week?

And at the other extreme, are more people going to Europe more often?

Then again,do we have more classes? Or at least more 'serious' classes? Are we spread too thin now there are new boats coming out and the late 90s SMOD classes mostly refusing to roll over and die?

In the dark ages we had Merlins, Fireballs, Ents, 505, GP14, Scorpion plus a few others? as serious 2 man circuit classes. Are there more or less circuits of opens now? Compared to when exactly...?

There were far more "serious" classes in the 70s. Sadly, many have faded, and many of the boats which supposedly replaced them turned out to be a bit rubbish unless planing, and failed.

I had a look at the attendance tables for this century and there are some interesting stats.

If you take the totals of all attendances, they peaked in 2011, with 7496
This year gone is the lowest this century with 5653 maybe they're not all in yet but it's still pretty drastic.
It's 17% below average attendance (6871) over the period and nearly 25% below the 2011 peak.

So what happened after 2011? 2011 was still deep in the recession fuel costs were higher then, the Olympics came and went could it have been that?

Interesting the Phantom class almost parallels, could it have been 2011 when they really started f**king about with the handicaps?

Edited by iGRF - 04 Nov 16 at 9:54pm