Class Politics Killing Sailing in Texas...A primer for the rest of us

gouvernail

Super Opinionated and Always Correct
Definition: weather ignorant
Planning an event that is dependent upon the weather without taking any time to consider the probablility of having appropriate weather.
Examples:
A snow skiing event planned for Florida in August
A water skiing championship in the Sahara




Saturday July 8 and Sunday July 9 Austin Yacht Club is hosting a regatta for centerboard boats.
Sailors have been asked to pay real money, drive from Dallas ( 250 miles) Houston ( 250 miles), Corpus Christi ( 250 miles). and other areas of the state to come play the great game of Centerboard racing.

Look at the wind site link>>>
http://home.kxan.com/wxtech_surfacewinds_tx.asp

Notice how the winds will be nearly dead until 4 pm Saturday and 2 PM Sunday. The visitors are being invited to come bob around in powerboat wakes and roast in 95 F ( 35 C) plus temperatures and the scheduled sailing is already planned to end at 5 on Saturday and noon on Sunday.

I live just one Kilometer from the dock where my boat is stored and I can leave my house and have my Laser rigged and ready to race in about 15 minutes.

Friends from out of town have already asked to sleep in my air conditioned office. I have told them it is extremely unlikely I will bother to bob around in the poorly planned event.

Anyone who has paid attention for a year or more can tell you the winds in this part of the world rarely blow before 3 pm in July.

There is no plan to sail into the evening on Saturday. In fact no race may be started after 5 pm .
There is no plan to sail after the wind picks up on Sunday. No race may start after 12 noon.

I can already assure everyone that many people will be leaving AYC on Sunday promising NEVER to attend another stupid event like this one.

Of course some of those disappointed sailors will quit racing forever.

If only that were the goal of the organizers it would make sense.

This is not a slam at my home club. I bet every one of you remembers attending a similar weather ignorant sailing event.

USSailing sets the finest of examples of this sort of blatant weather ignorant scheduling when it annually invites sailors from all over the world to sail 50% or fewer of the scheduled days in Miami. USSaiing's flagship Olympic Classes regatta is deliberately scheduled with no consideration for the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by the competitors on days where no sailing happens.

RUNNING A GREAT REGATTA INCLUDES PLANNING THE WEATHER!!!
Certaiinly no one can guuarantee great weather, but all of us are bright enough to look at the history, ask the locals about the history and make plans based upon reasonable expectations.
The Miami OCR has had crappy sailing weather on a HUGE number of its days for year after year after year. It is well past time to look for a different place or time for the event or just stop holding it.


Or we can continue to set up the same stupid event until nobody shows up.

A few years ago the Fort Worth Boat Club was awarded the St Petersburg Trpophy for holding w J-22 world Championship in September. The competitors spent all but two of the days sitting on shore playing board games, volleyball and frisbee. In the Fort Worth area, there are plenty of dates during the year when sailable winds happen 80% to 90% of the years. USSailing actually gave an organizational prize to a Club whose members hosted an event duing a part of the year when sailing is not lilely to happen at all.

The FWBC did a top notch job of providing food, drinks, entertainment, and race management in the pathetic winds. The FWBC failed miserably at hosting a fun SAILING event.

USSailing is so ignorant of its mission it gave an award for hosting a swell no sailing gathering that had suckwad sailing.

Once again YOU CANNOT HAVE A GREAT RACING EVENT WITHOUT GREAT RACING CONDIDIONS. There is no way we should ever give a regatta management trophy to a club when it fails to manage the weather awareness part of the scheduling

Soooo..


I believe sailing can be lots of fun. If the events are planned with fun sailing as the primary goal, I believe the game will prosper because it is lots of fun and people are drawn to fun..

How do we got ourselves re focused on hosting FUN SAILING events??

How do we stop people from setting up events like the one we are about to wish we had not held in Austin??
 
thats how 4 out of 5 days at orange bowl were like where people came from puerto rico, california, maine and the bahamas but if they start talking and maybe playing a game hile bobbing around it can be fun.
 
With the ILCA-NA scheduling, we seem to be hostage to some "interest" groups. We can't have NAs unless kids are out of school (and what is your child's schoolyear? Probably different from my local public school, which is different from the one in the next town, which is different from the private schools...). We have to allow for the Canadians winter break. We have to allow for the [insert something political, not sailing-related]. Yet when we don't play to these groups, when we schedule events in places when there's breeze and warm weather, these groups show up anyway.


Witness the NAs at Cedar Point YC. I'm a member there, and everyone around here knew it was going to be a crapshoot. We got REALLY unlucky, but because we were hostage to hosting the event after kids got out of school, it ended up in the middle of summer - exactly the worst time to sail on Long Island Sound. A couple weeks earlier, fine. Late September, fine.

Why are we going to Clearwater YC when it's COLD there? Why not go in March? Or early April? Breeze is still on, weather is much better!

If we're desperate for regatta hosts (and it sounds like we are), we need to be proactive about recruiting new host venues. If there's a place that'll have us, and they have good conditions at such-and-such a time and run the regatta then, put 'em on the schedule!

Sorry if this too strong. I'll get off my soapbox now...
 
Let's try to go positive with this thread....

We only have a few weeks left to get the entire 2007 regatta schedule set so that it can be published in the fall newsletter...

You know the fall Newsletter is the one EVERYBODY takes to the Thanksgiving dinner and shows to Grandma to hint about Christmas preSents

and

The fall newsletter WITH ALL THE REGATTAS LISTED FOR THE NEXT SEASON is the one we get BEFORE all the winter fleet parties so the fleets can plan FLEET trips to big regattas in the coming year.

Our officers and employees are almost certainly already frantically calling people from all over the country making certain the VERY important scheduling is done on time.

This is your chance to provide input.

Go to the Class website and look at the proposed dates and venues. If you know something about the venue, or the date that may be important, start a thread here about that event and get the Forum Members to discuss the pros and cons of that part of the schedule.

Of course, If you see an opening in tHE 2007 schedule and you can do the job of filling it..HELP THE GAME BY HELPING THE SCHEDULE!!!
 
OK I looked and didn't find the 2007 schedule.

I think long range scheduling is very important. If any facet of my performance as a class manager embarassed me it was my lack of sufficient attention to the long range regatta schedule.

The following urls are for pages that were part of the NA site on July 31, 2002. Anyone who expressed the slightest interest in regatta hosting was sent by me to all the pages listed below.

http://cerebus.winsite.com/laser/laser/racing.html
http://cerebus.winsite.com/laser/laser/2003majreg.html
hidden work in progress pages with no direct links to them>>>
http://cerebus.winsite.com/laser/laser/2004majreg.html
http://cerebus.winsite.com/laser/laser/2005majreg.html

Those pages are pretty pathetic aren't they?? We need to do better.


Suggestions:
1. We need better more user friendly scheduling pages than the ones linked above.
2. We need to pay someone to manage those pages and set some public deadlines for filling those pages with real events.
3. We need to publish the results of the efforts for 2007 in the fall newsletter

Scheduling is very important. If I am being unreasonable by harping about scheduling somebody just copy and paste the next statement and post your personal signature with it.

"Advance planning and publicity for schedules and events has nothing to do with the quality or participation levels in the events eventually held. "


Yeah right.


another whine ends here
 
Gulf coast sailing in May/June

I'll put a plug in for the Fort Walton Yacht Club during May/June. We have great, very consistent sea breezes & the water & air are warm. I'm not a member of FWYC, actually belong to the Bluewater Bay Sailing Club, at the other end of Choctawahatchee Bay. BBSC doesn't have adequate facilites to host a very big dingy regatta, but FWYC does and they have had a very active local dingy racing schedule the last couple of years. Which means they are very efficient at running races.

www.fwyc.org

Just a plug for a great venue (besides it means I get to race and sleep in my own bed :) )

Mike
 
"Why are we going to Clearwater YC when it's COLD there? Why not go in March? Or early April? Breeze is still on, weather is much better!"


Boy, the above is close to my heart! March is SO much nicer.

The lousiest, coldest sailing I ever do is in FL in February. (and I live in Buffalo!).

Go figure.....
 

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