For northern sailors participation in southern events. I don't speak for everyone, but traditionally I am one of the more active particants in southern events and always encourage participation of others in our fleet.
We only have so many resources. Getting to MS isn't easy. There are also very few F18s around there. I wanted to go but my schedule is slammed and we are going to start sailing up here a week later, so why bother spending a lot of money and time to go. As far as Spring Fever goes, the party is amazing and I love going, but the sailing has never been worth the 32+ hours of driving when we can train up here against 5-10 other boats and get ready for the season here.
If we could pull together Charleston Race Week at a reasonable entry fee I think it would be much more appealing to NE boats as we would be sailing a regatta with a lot of our other sailing friends (most important about that is getting exposure), it's a conveinent stop on the way back from Florida, and likely to be very good sailing conditions.
I'm much more likely to do a midwinter event when I really have the sailing bug rather than right before our season starts.
I also chose to spend my money to go to Florida than MS or GA, can you blame me? We even have a rough time getting a good fleet at Tradewinds. There's only so many events we can support.