Maybe people need to remember what happened when everyone wanted to stuff around with the class last time, it damn near went into history.
First grow the class to the numbers you used to have, second encourage the new guys to participate and then, maybe you can look at splitting fleets.
I keep hearing this line that changing the class (or wanting to change it) caused the class to die. Can you be more specific please?
From what I can see the class has not changed at all in more than 20 years, and it nearly died because it was replaced by the Taipan, and sailing as a sport went into free-fall anyway.
The original point of this thread was not to suggest splitting the fleet but to put it back together in order to stop the decline of the sloop rig. We currently have a very small sloop-rigged fleet that sails their own nationals while the cat rigs sail theirs. The suggestion was to sail them one after the other so that cat sailors could race in the sloop fleet and vice-versa.
If people are really rigidly stuck in their mode of sailing then it won't work, and maybe it's just too hard to get enough races in, but we know there are a lot of cat rigged Mozzies out there with a jib in the sail box, all sloops can be sailed cat rigged, and it would be a shame to see the sloops die out any more than they already have.
