Advertising via sail numbers? 55

 

At the Tiger I saw a number of them;

 

555 Fireball

550 Merlin

552 Osprey

55 Enterprise

55 Phantom

 

Without wanting to get to 'picky' over class rules I'm sure these arent the actual hull numbers. I remember writing a letter to the race officer at events to request permission to use a sail number which wasnt the hull number. I didnt see any of these notes on the Official Notice Board at the Tiger.

 

When I sailed a Laser people liked sail numbers with '1's in because the number was shorter and stayed nearer the leech allowing you to be further over the startline before reading your number! These all have short numbers.

 

*Rant over*

For the Dash, several boats arrived at registration and handed in scratty bits of paper with hand scribbled notes asking to use sail number 55 and thinking no more of it at the time we accepted them. But then they all stood round discussing it and it became apparent to our registration team what had happened.

They caused more than a few headaches when we were trying to compile our results, as you can imagine trying to finish 90 odd boats and get times all in one go didn't always allow for classes to be read out so we only had sail numbers to go off in some instances. And with 5 or 6 boats of different class all with the same sail number it wasn't always apparent which was which. Pretty selfish really.

We mentioned it for the other events in the series and so they asked them to add the extra sail numbers to the 55's.

To be honest, had i not been told what they were trying to say I would never have put two and two together so not really sure how successful it is as advertising. To me it looks a bit like those people that squash numbers up on numberplates to make them look like they are trying to say a word but don't quite manage it.....