Tim, If you follow A cats (all on the USACA website) (you can also sign up for our webmail list on that site) you would have certainly heard about this event. We are hosting the event off the front lawn of Ben Hall’s new home on Pine Island. We are expecting 25 + A cats. Ben has a lot of personal boat contacts in the area (no club affiliation) that will be running the regatta so it will be very personal and flexible as to adapt for the best possible racing to suite everyone over the weekend (the way regattas should be). As we did last year, we just had the A cat midwinters at Ft Desoto Park with a similar format, no club affiliation and it worked great. The A cat association is also funding to have Lars Guck fly in for the weekend to run a training clinic on the Friday and debrief after both days of racing. On the Friday night over a few beers, Ben H is also going to run a session on mast bends and mast dynamics. If you are in the area give me a call. (Mat McDonald has my number) I am sure you would be more than welcome to come along and see what we get up to. With all of the discussions about witch cat to sail I think more emphasis needs to be placed on the how active a class is. We have a great group of fun people sailing the class from all ages and abilities and everyone has a great time. By the time this event is over we will have had 5 events this year with more than 20 boats participating in each and another 1 per month for the following two months. No this is not an over commitment, we have enough events and people that you can chose one or a few that suit, over the 5 events we will have had 40 + and by the NA’s in May (the last event that we are expecting 50 + boats) that number will have risen to 60 +. The notion that A cats are not for the average cat sailor is a lot of crap….. We may not have spins but we do a lot of great racing and attract a lot of great sailors. And because of this, no matter what you level you will learn a lot and have a great time doing it. Less talking more sailing!! Come join the fun!

Cheers, Ben Moon

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