But just how much demand is there for F16? Are there any figures?
At my club there are only 1 or 2 F16s out of 500 cats.
There is also a lot of overlap between F16 and F18, and it seems to be only getting bigger
as I think we can all agree that the F16s are getting "fatter" with every design iteration.
When you see that 140kg teams can be very competitive on the F18 one has to ask the question.
IMHO the FX-One never took of as a serious (racing) class but not because there was anything wrong
with the product, but because the sailors couldnt be bothered to go to regattas.
This "doomed" the FX-One to a life of wednesday-night club racing with some clubs having as much as 5 or 10+ boats.
Yes I agree but there are statistics and statistics, they can be manipulated to your desire as any politician will agree.
Out of 500 cats how many are sailed more than 50 hours a year ? 50 hours is not a lot but to most boats in your boat park I would bet there would be less than say 50 - 75 boats. Certainly at my club where there are probably 50 - 60 cats the majority actually are sailed very infrequently for what ever reason.
Now if we look at my clubs active boats then the F16's have become probably the most used boats with one or two F18's, a few Darts, a couple of FX1's and a Tornado and if you then divided those by class then the F16's certainly would be the most active boats within a class.
Why then is it active, principally the single handed issue where most are sailed 1 up and the occassional girlfriend or rugrat comes on as crew.
In my opinion there is no crossover between the F18 and the F16's, different horses for different courses. The F18's are for the big boy crews and the F16's for the little boy and crew.
The FX1 failed at Datchet which had over a dozen at one stage for a very real reason, it was a compromise boat that sailed well with 2 light crew but failed abysmally with its other hat, that of a single handed boat being just too heavy and unrightable ( which I think has now been resolved with the use of a righting pole ). Sadly the final nails in the FX1's coffin was that the F16's are now on average faster, considerably cheaper and can be moved around on the beach single handed.
