Keith..
They F18 sailors will turn to distance racing when they get bored with turning left all the time.
However...It might be a small number of sailors who want to break the pattern and race from A to B.
Back in the day... the Hobie 16 and 18 sailors were the core group for all of the distance races.... They did both. Now a days... they have a very strong fleet and no ... zero interest in distance races. (understandably, they don't want to finish 2 to 3 hours behind the spin 20's and that is probably a strong negative unless they could get a fleet of like minded H16 sailors together.)
Perhaps, the strong one design buoy racing scene keeps them interested in buoys sailing and they don't have the itch to go some place on their boat. Those Hobie sailors with the itch to sail from A to B have moved on.
Another possibility ... when CRAC was successfully running distance races... our buoy races were all on portsmouth and we had a real range of boats.... We had 20 years of no strong one design racing to speak of... Distance racing on portsmouth was much more fun then portsmouth buoy racing.
Since the beach cat world has consolidated into a handful of fleets you have to look for distance racers in those ranks.
Bottom line, the group of sailors with the itch to go from A to B is small in any of our current OD fleets.
Your point that we don't have many opportunities to get experience in distance races may be true but not that important.. We still don't have new sailors taking on a 40 mile race with 200 other boats... We just get our 5 to 10 boats... same guys... no new faces.
So, I think that until the F18 and F16 sailors get bored with turning left week in and week out the numbers will be small. Putting a 1000 mile race on the schedule might get the old guard back out for their last extreme race... but probably not the average weekend warrior.
Finally, the more single handed the fleet becomes... the less likely that a distance race will be popular. I am not likely to run a 40 mile race on my A cat.... turns out the big boats need lots of crew and I want to do Annapolis to Bermuda one day!
My suggestion then.... Just keep asking the F18 and F16 sailors... are you bored with turning left yet?
Good points.
Well, following my critical mass line, you don't need all buoy racers to turn distance racers, you just need enough. So the small number (from a variety of locations) may be all that is needed.
Times have changed I guess - we used to relish hunting down the spin boats on our H-20s and N-6.0s when the conditions changed. But it was always two classes, spin and non, and I don't think it bothered us if the spin boats went out on the horizon - they should have!
I know it took awhile for me to gear up to be able to do just the local distance racing. It may take a bit to get somebody over the hump and into their first taste of it. This may be part of why Oxford doesn't get the turn out you'd like. But it's pretty much the only race on the Bay now, so if you have a sched conflict or something, that's it for around here. But I'll go on the record and I say I enjoy that race. And the glances you get are not always friendly...
