apart from the obvious....
update an old look
slight performance gain
attract sailors from other classes
attract people to sailing

..... there really isn't an advantage !!!


The hard part is attracting people to the sport, the really hard part is to attract them to our class ....
For me I don't see we've addressed that well enough as yet to take the next step. We really could spend a lot of money to gain nothing in numbers but give a distinct advantage to certain boats to move ahead of the fleet with the upgrade..... sadly that's the A class line of thought, he with the fattest wallet wins, I for one cant afford to play that game and I doubt many of us here could or we'd already be on A's... the other side of it is when do we stop..... MK1, MK2, MK3......MK6, MK7, MK???


The whole idea from the start of this thread was to upgrade the look and in doing so hopefully get more mosquitos on the water .....


If we attack that idea at the basic core then we've missed quite a few obvious steps and we've jumped way ahead of where we should be looking.


We have the best part of several hundred mosquitos "out there", mostly they are older girls that only do club sailing with the occasional regatta with a couple of the local clubs, if..... and its a big IF, we could somehow attract them away from their home base and get them actively participating in the other events then we'd possibly see a numbers increase, a +65 class is something I belive is a very workable idea. Over the w/end I participated in a regatta at which there were 4 Mosquito's..... one was busy dueling with the A classes and Tiapans and giving them curry, Ross even took out the 2nd place overall (well done mate !!)
The other 3 mosquito's had some of the best racing I've ever encountered, it was that electric it caught the eye of several others that were enthralled at the tight racing we had, I'm not talking boat lengths and minutes I'm talking feet and seconds of very tight tactial racing, not only was it very gratifying to hear the respect we got from many others on how good the racing was but just the actual thought that we were noticed over the other boats that were way ahead

I would like to see a more active inclusion of the older boats into the competitive racing of today, the + 65 is good but we need to get it off the paper and get it active....
if we can get ~20 modern mozzies at a state tittle, if we had an active +65 group then how many more would have attended ????

from another thread.....

the key words here are
round up a few of the older boats to come and play
and yes I'm still kicking myself for not attending the tittle with a boat instead of the camera, bloody hindsight is a mongrel thing....



My Summary:



we are not going to gain lots of new sailors, we might get 1 or 2 if we're really lucky, lets face it, how many of you would go to the arrow class because they have a square top


we are not going to see new boats being built just because we have a new sail


we can strengthen the mast to cope with a square-top for a reasonable cost and without altering the current mast rules via a carbon tube insert.


we need the word MOSQUITO on the sail, this needs to be done for all new sails and be encouraged for existing sails too
I don't know how you 'enforce or encourage' that but I'm sure it can be done via the association ?????



We already have lots of Mosquitos out there and most of them are in the +65 range.










Don't get me wrong here, I'd love a square-top and a sexy carbon mast on both of my mozzies, it would look just so right parked on the beach along side the Tiapans and A'classes......

hang on...... I sail a mosquito..... aren't we way different ????