[J24 ListSrv] Fwd: [Fleets] Is There Any Appetite for Any of This?

[Joshua Bone]

Fleet 1,

We already have mid-distance racing. Every week there is a Round the Island Race (on Saturdays). People who like that should show up and do it.

Mid distance racing is great for PHRF as well as training new people in One-Design boats.

Buoy racing is fun but the format is generally the same, although we did do a LW2.5 a couple of times this year. Why not mix up Buoy racing? Put a start line in the middle of the course, short first upwind leg, short reach leg, long down, long up, long down, short beat to the finish, with this format you could theoretically set 1 course for all of the fleet and then very the number legs (less resources so it's cheaper to run). Or what about doing downwind starts, just turn the course around.

Thursday is buoy racing and it draws the most boats; this is probably true for all fleets. 

We went down this path to change things last year when people voted to make the Rumble the Champ series. Comments were, oh that sounds great and it will be fun to get a lot of racing in. Then guess what happened? Very few boats showed up.

We have the same number of Thursday night races as we do Saturday Big Island Races. We also have the Night Crawlers, Shackleton, Commodores Race and the Burton Cup. We have 3 Rumbles. It would be good to understand why people aren't showing up for the Big Island race before making a change to any of our racing formats, same goes for the Rumbles. We are essentially a 50/50 split for Buoy vs. Mid-Distance.

Introducing more racing is a great idea. In Austin we would do a pursuit race every Friday night. Each boat would have a specified start time, there was no race committee. Boats started between the channel lights. You had to round 3 marks and then sail back to the finish. Someone was appointed each week to decide which marks to round. You could round them in any order. You finished when you crossed the harbor channel and recorded your time. This could easily be done in the bay using no wake buoys. The best part is that it costs nothing to implement. 

2 cents.


Joshua Bone


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