How it works for us in our club: Maybe it will be of use for someone! Sorry for the long post!

Sense our club is a totally inclusive club we do things a certain way. First off we are not a club that is tied down with kids with mental/cognitive disAbilities as some on this forum may know if you turn your club into a development disability group you do a lot of baby sitting, etc. Nothing against this group but it is a completely different world. Luckily we were smart enough to know how to serve this population so they do not feel left out, actually we were voted by a local development disAbility org. as the most fun program for the this summer - for those interested email me it's a long story. So with that said we deal with kids without disAbilities and kids with physical disAbilities. Once again, if they also have a cognitive disability we have the means to get support for that. Therefore, for those who want total inclusion in their clubs there is a way to do this and not get buried by the effort and in fact your program will be better for it mentally and with participation numbers.

In a nut shell here is the boats we use and how we run our program.

Ages 6-10 is our PRE-JUNIOR sailors, they sail the Access Dinghy 2.3 and they also get to crew on bigger boats such as the H14 with or without Trapseats and the Access Dinghy 303.

Ages 11-14 is the JUNIOR age sailors and they sail the Access Dinghy 303 and Hobie 14 as a turbo or not, and with or without Trapseats, and of course crew on the H16 with or without Trapseats.

Ages 15-19 is our youth age sailors and they race the Access Dinghy 303 or H16 with or without Trapseats, and I might add with the Trapseat Spinnakers. And this is as far as we go with our boats. Now if some kids want to go to other classes, etc. great at least they have a strong foundation. If you can sail a H14 or 16 in a blow you can sail anything. Also the Access Dinghy and H16 have strong class racing, etc.

I will add that our kids love to sail together - kids with kids with and without disAbilities, which adds a lot of fun to our programs and also is making our program grow and get media coverage. So in our club there is a saying, "If it isn't accessible we don't sail it" Our club motto is "Sailing For Everyone." Our club is part of Sailability International, which is an international sailing organization that promotes sailing for those with and without disAbilities. So you will not see us sailing boats that are not accessible.

And here are some other issues to think about. My wife and I went to a Hobie fleet meeting about two years ago and we set through the whole meeting listening to them talked about what beer company sponsor they were going to get for their regattas, plus they joked about their drunken sailors they had at last years regatta. My wife of course was not impressed and I might add we have never allowed our kids to go to that regatta (along with other families), which is unfortunate because they are so close to us. Our club also does not have Sunday regattas, etc. because first, some have to travel far and need the day to go home or they are religious, etc. I can&'t tell you the numbers of times I have heard people say "I can't go to that regatta because it is on the weekend and I need to get back for work on Monday or the kids have something to do on Monday." So we have found being sensitive to these and other issues increase our club participation within our area and those traveling to our events, and making it conducive environment for junior/youth sailing.

Also, Mary you indicate the only successful youth program you know of is Larry Hale's Boy Scout Camp at St. George's Island in the Florida Panhandle )which I do believe they use H16's (most likely out of availability, which I hope it is more than that), but there is also a Hobie group in Baja California and other areas. It would be interesting to here how they are running these programs, etc. You can actually contact these groups via the NAHCA in the youth section of the website.

Seems NAHCA has just now caught on to the vision of junior/youth sailing, and Mary you are right they have not been very successful because of their junior/youth infrastructure, unlike Hobie sailing in other parts of the world, but I think this is changine. In addition, you are also right about the difficulty of convincing a yacht club to include cats (whether its one or two types of cats). I for one see no reason to beat them over the head with cats, and I do not see these yacht clubs anytime soon including us. Chris Mitchell the designer of the Access Dinghies has traveled the world and he has told me that the attitudes of almost all yacht clubs he has visited all have the same elitist and exclusion attitude. He told me to skip the yacht clubs! I have found yacht clubs in my area to be resistant to dinghy sailing and especially sailing for people with disAbilities. So yacht clubs seem to be maybe the wrong way to go. As for cost I also know that 420's go for a fairly good price and that I could by a used H16 and H14 for the price of one 420 (a nice 420). I just think hooking into yacht clubs may not be the way to go. So an inclusive club of sailors of all ages with and without disAbilities has tremendous political power, actually on Nov 12 we are meeting with the county officials to finalize the details our new sailing club facility (water sport facility). When you come to the county officials and indicate you can help them with accessibility issues (new regulations from the ADA Access Board guidelines), make their facility a standard that the rest of the county will use as a standard, a place that media will grab onto, a place where ALL people will love to come, etc., etc. they sit up and listen and not just with supportive words but also financial support. It's also a strong message when you show up to a county meeting with junior & youth, adults, people in wheelchairs, etc. Many times example (seeing it) is stronger than words. We have also teamed up with the local college, rehab facility, parks & rec., county to work together to run boater safety course, boater awareness events, etc. We are also developing a boater video series to discuss accessibility of sailing, safety, sailing (monohull & multihulls), as previous they only dealt with powerboats and jet skis, with a light taste of sailing. So to me we need to place more of our efforts on county and government groups, instead of wasting our time on biased yacht clubs that have no interested in multihulls and sure don’t want to see multihulls push in our their territory. Of course our club is for both multihull and monohull which makes use even harder to fight against.

We can do what we have done as a club, join up with Sailability International and USA, and fight together for both monohull, multihull, and disAbled sailors together, not just as a multihull group. Seems to me we are fighting so hard to be included that we are forgetting the bigger picture! This is what our club is doing and it is working!

One of the reason I am doing what I am doing is because I waited to be taught how to get junior and youth sailing going in my area and what I found was no one really knew what they were doing, heck they can't even agree with is junior and youth, to me these are two words that should not be interchangeable.

Once again these are my ideas, the clubs ideas (I can not take total credit for it), and especially my junior and youth members ideas.

GARY - as you can tell we train kids with and without disAbilities. We will need to get several more of your righting systems.