I talked to a sailor at Brant Beach today, and they did not sail due to winds at a fairly steady 25 with gusts to about 30. It sounds like they were right on the edge of sending them out, but decided against it. Another nice day at the beach - 65 degrees and raining.
I saw Geezer was complaining about low international competition, and am sure he will have some complaint about not sailing in breezes of 25 knots. I am positive the class would appreciate his assistance in boosting international participation - please consider volunteering to help, contributing ideas, suggestions, etc. I don't think either Clinton Edwards, USSCA president or ISCA President Andres Santana would decline if you offered to volunteer or possibly run for office.
BB
Charter Boats have anything to do with it?
If you were not there, you can not make any assumptions on the conditions. You also can not believe everything written in Scuttlebutt.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I don't believe anything I read on the Internet (especially on this forum) unless I was there myself and then sometimes I don't believe myself. But I wondered where Scuttlebutt got their incorrect information? It reads almost like an official press release from the regatta organizers and why would they want to downplay the wind conditions?
Irrespective of how strong the wind was, nobody has responded to the two real points in my rambling post...
a) what has charter boats got to do with the decision?
b) how about going for less quantity and higher quality of sailors at future Worlds?
And if the class said we only want, say, 70 boats at the Worlds and we will strive to attract only the top sailors from more countries to fill those slots, would Vanguard tell us we can't do that?
I can think of many reasons why 'foreign' participation was down this year. I guess anybody can, so I won't list them. Too bad that so few sailors from the Caribbean participated this year.
More in general, now that Vanguard has been taken over by the British company, I am concerned about what might happen with the way the championships are run. Vanguard sponsors quite a few other major league events by providing boats.
I'm writing from Brant Beach. Another factor in the decline of partcipants might be the fact that BBYC was not going to host the Worlds but the NAs. We were approached by the class to do the Worlds instead and it wasn't finalized until Fall 2006. Wouldn't some of the overseas sailors need more time to apply for visas, etc.
joanne McCarthy
Well I can't think of "many reasons" why international visitors would pass up the chance to sail in a World Championships that's close to several major airports and that was being run by a club with a great reputation for running superb regattas. Please enlighten those of us that are too dumb to think of all those reasons. And, by the way, if it were so obvious that attendance of Central and South American sailors would be down, did our class leaders anticipate that? And, by the way, will those same factors affect next year's Worlds?
Well, I do know that PSE provides major Laser regattas on Europe with large numbers of charter boats so I don't see why they would want to change Vanguard's policy in the US for supporting major Laser and Sunfish events with boat charters. Surely these events are very positive for the manufacturers... they make money on charter fees, they then sell all the boats to dealers, and they get a lot of publicity for their product.
We discussed some of these "many reasons" in a 2005 thread: http://www.sunfishforum.com/showthread.php?t=620
We can also improve communications between the 3 major continents that race Sunfish (North/South Americans and Europeans).
Just an aside from here at BBYC, in the last couple of weeks since the worlds, the number of fish in our club races has doubled, my son is seriously considering dropping the laser to go back to the Sunfish, other clubs are getting more people out and alot of people who have pooh-poohed the Sunfish as not being as competative as the Laser have shut up!! I'm not saying any of this is going to last, but hosting the worlds has really helped our little Sunfish fleet here!
Joanne McCarthy