Hey Jake, et. al.

Been following this thread with interest - one of my frequently unanswerable questions is "why do you race?" A lot of folks get a blank look and either think it's so obvious it doesn't bear utterance, or (like me) they simply can't put their finger on why exactly they go through it all. Reading some of the posts here confirms my belief that the reasons for racing are as varied as the boats on the start line.

Jake - when you brought up the OD Wave racing, I thought I would add an observation. We did a Winter Series race here in Pensacola for which we used Waves. The consensus was that, to be fair, we should race in a round-robin, trading boats after each race. We were only a little surprised that the BOATS finished in the same order no matter who was on them. Everyone tied for first (or last) with an equal score and number of firsts, seconds, etc.

Of course, I am a proponent for Portsmouth racing - we don't have any one-design fleets here, and DPN seems to consistently work pretty well. Even for the events where out-of-towners help us have more than one fleet, we still try to start together and sail the same course because folks often want to know where they finished up overall. In the one or two geographic regions where I've bumped into an exclusionary attitude (we don't want you on our start line, you'll mess up our racing) I didn't really get it, and probably reacted poorly because I didn't understand.

All that said, I very much enjoy national-level one-design events. I still don't think the boats are equal, though - I view it more like Formula or box-rule racing, and it's just a coincidence that everyone has a boat from the same manufacturer.