See, now that's the thing here. We're talking about getting young kids into sailing via a small cat class. The main aim I'm guessing is, or should be anyway, to put bums in boats but already we are having discussions about restricting the activity to an OD class which immediately excludes the many, many, many, existing small cats. There's plenty about, several here in Australia and I'm guessing elsewhere in the world and your master plan to achieve your objective is to make all these boats redundant. This is just BS. Why? I'll tell you why, it has nothing to do with getting kids sailing and everything to do with EGO!
If this was a legitimate effort, the main focus would be on the kids, but it isn't. They don't give a flying fig what sort of boat it is at age 8/10/12, they just want to have fun. And second you want to make all the efforts of people who've already done what you blokes want to do and make their efforts even more redundant than they already are, push them further into the background.
You'll expect support from the existing cat sailors but you have no interest in doing the same yourselves. No it's already become a pissing competition amongst all of you to see who has control, who can get the boat out into the public arena first, who can design the best boat and who can make a good dollar out of this. What a crock!

And have you done a market survey? I mean, is there a market for what you are doing. How many orders do you have? Are parents already lining up to buy or build this thing? I mean serious commitments to it? You've got the cart before the horse already, before you even get started.

And so the wheel turns and nothing changes except that there'll be more moulds rotting in back yards and more cats sitting in sheds and more sailing clubs going to the wall because what is needed is NOT another cat. The very last thing the cat world needs is another small cat!
What we need is people to support each other. We need people to get off their butts and help out at the club, help the kids and their parents by encouraging them to come down to the club and have a sail. Jumping in the rescue boats and coaching and organising fun races for the kids and to get this done, we should be making cheap boats available, like less than $1000, not $2000 or $3000 but $500 to $1000. Not 160, 180 200 hours in the shed building something which already exists. Cheap boats are there if you go looking but that's not cool, there no kudos in that.

No I'm sorry guys, this is just rubbish and all it will do is cause lots more people to become disillusioned with the whole silly mess and go bowling.