Ditto Andy, Looking at this attendance (HMW) and other regattas being canceled, it's time to organize when events are to happen, work together, don't exclude boats, if someone travels to ours we need to make a point of traveling to theirs, if not every year, then every other year.......This just seems maddening that events do not have a common place to schedule our multihull regattas and if necessary, make them every other year events so that everybody has the same goal, get as many boats as possible to an event, work together to plan for all the events.......open it up, this is about multihull growth and getting all the boats we can involved and on the water.....
Mark has been making this point repeatedly and there is certainly some truth to it. The problem is going to boil down to who is giving up our dates. If you look at the schedule on our website (Emsa-sailing.org) you'll see the EMSA regattas and "other events" listed there. It used to be that all of those "other events" were in our EMSA regattas list and it was too much...we were losing people. We decided to whittle the list of official regattas down and it's helped a little. It still drives a lot of discussion about who's regatta is official when we have a conflict.
With the time and energy we spend on nailing down our own regional schedule, I start to wonder who would really move their dates around to accommodate a neighboring regatta on a larger scale? The a-cat class clearly didn't make any effort to avoid Spring Fever (and event that was drawing a significant number of A-cats) and it probably cost them both their events. Spring Fever is always Easter weekend and I have my doubts as to whether or not we could have talked the a-cat organizers out of that weekend if we had the chance.
That said, I definitely think it's worthwhile to setup some scheduling discussions around major events but it's a BIG nut to crack and events aren't all scheduled at the same time.
A sailor exchange program is a good idea but it is difficult to get any significant buy-in in our region for something like that when they're happy with our regional schedules.
