Mark, I just noticed the title of your post, suggesting NAMSA could cause multihulls to lose "Respect."

In my humble opinion, respect is something the multihulls have not had in the mainstream sailing community precisely because of the fact that we are not organized. The monohull mainstream sees us as a bunch of maverick nomad tribes wandering from beach to beach. They lump all the beach cats together. They do not recognize us as having distinct classes the way they do with the monohull classes. Everything with two hulls is just categorized as "Multihull." You don't see US Sailing referring to "Monohulls" as though everything with one hull is all one thing.

We are treated like a minority group. When Sailing World does a survey to find out how many racing boats there are of different types, beach cats should probably be included in the "dinghy" category, but they are not.

In the ideal world (as it was for us back in the 1960's), multihulls would have their fleets within yacht clubs and do their fleet racing at the yacht clubs and maybe even be able to race at other clubs within their RSA, and be affiliated with other fleets of their kind at other yacht clubs around the country, and fleets would be able to host major events at their own yacht clubs, complete with restaurant, snack bar, and swimming pool.

But that is not the way it is today, and I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future (except for maybe A-Class fleets and Tornado fleets).

So most of us continue to be nomads, outside the mainstream of sailing.

To gain respect and recognition and stature and influence with US Sailing, we need to get organized under a body like NAMSA, and we need to do it in the same type of format as all the other bodies that are members of US Sailing.

NAMSA is not about providing another layer of bureaucracy. It is about uniting all the multihulls so we can become a part of mainstream sailing and earn respect within US Sailing.

It is about NAMSA being able to help the Multihull Council, because if NAMSA has a lot of members, those members can be polled on what multihull sailors want and need. They can be surveyed to find out the current demographics of multihull sailors, ages, kids, etc., and what kinds of events they like, what kinds of boats they are gravitating to (formula classes, smaller, single-hander beach cats or bigger cruiser-racer multihulls, etc.). All this information will be very helpful to the Multihull Council in representing us within US Sailing.

It is a cliche, but it is usually true: united we stand, divided we fall.

P.S. I should add that these are all just my personal opinions about what NAMSA should be about, since I am not involved with the organization of NAMSA and have never been privy to anything the officers and committee people are doing (except what they put in my magazine on the NAMSA News page).

The reason I am not involved in NAMSA is because if I don't like what they are doing, I want Catamaran Sailor Magazine to be free to criticize them and I don't want any suggestion of conflict of interest.