Regatta attendance is down, events are being cancelled due to financial constraints, people are getting upset about it, I read of people complaining of having to do MAJOR travel to race and yet we still only have 2 F-18 signed up for the Ocean Springs event for April IN THE SOUTH. What can we do to make this regatta work for you guys??
I've been dissecting Spring Fever attendance data for the last 12 years and have come to the following conclusions. This is a very complex problem and there is more than one issue that is leading to the decline. These are facts that have come out of the data I'm working through and it's early...Having access to this registration data over such a long period is really interesting and I'm seeing patterns emerge. I probably wouldn't have been able to make these conclusions without the data, but they make sense with observations in hindsight.
1) This one surprised me: Out of the top 10 overall attending boat classes in that 12 year span (based on pre-registrations), 60% of them are no longer being manufactured and the classes have all but died off. Nacra 20 (78), Hobie 18 (75), Hobie 17 (62), Mystere 4.3 (51), Hobie 20 (34), and Nacra 17 the old one (33). It should be no surprise that the other boats that round out the top 10 preregistrations in the last 12 years are F18 (181), Hobie 16 (160), A-Cat (117), and F16 (69).
2) the Hobie 16 pre-registrations peaked at 28 in 2002 but didn't muster more than 7 in each of the last three years.
3) There has been a steady decline in the Open, miscellaneous boats to the point that there really haven't been any to count in the last few years. I'm talking about the odd dead-boat-society Nacras, Prindles, etc.
4) F16 registrations have been pretty steady over the last 5 years - including being only slightly down this year.
5) A-cat pre-registrations have been increasing (except for one year) since 2007 but the bottom fell out in 2014. They peaked at 25 last year but only got 10 to sign up for this year (and several of those were coerced).
6) F18 registrations have been fluctuating at around 16 entries since 2004 but the bottom also fell out in 2014 with only 7.
In summary for the Spring Fever situation, the box rule classes were clearly taking over and the odd-ball boats were no longer showing up. There are a lot of factors for this from event promotion and larger sport wide influences.
The question I have after this brief look, is that is the disappearance of the odd dead-boat-society boats a bad omen? Does this illuminate the lack of new sailors entering our sport? Does the gradual evolution of box rule boats, making older boat designs less competitive, choke the entry level purchase point that used to be a spring board for new sailors? If this is the case, should we be trying to attract sailors from other active sailing classes to multihulls?...so, yeah...lots of questions.
I'm starting to put together some data on what sailors migrated to other classes and how many sailors just quit coming and I'm shifting my data source to race results (actual attendees) instead of pre-registrations (pre-regs were easier to extract from the website). It will be a little while before I have this together but I'll put together a report with graphs.
