I just have received a mail from South Africa explaining to me how the South Africans sees themselfs.

I didn't include them in my "boat-count" in the above post as I was under the impression that the SA mosquito class had adopted the spinnaker as a One-design mosquito class feature. I intepreted this to mean that they preferred to be called Mosquito OD over F16's. This was wrong, that was my mistake. While is true that the spinnaker is fully accepted as a SA mosquito class feature, the SA sailors still wish to be linked to the Formula 16 class as F16's and would like to be counted in our "head-count".

Well, no objections from me ! This just upped our numbers with 17 boats and a good 25-30 sailors.

So the paragraph in my former post should read :

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"F16 world distribution is about (alfabetically) : Asia 23, Australia 10, EU 40, US 26, South Africa 17 (as counted at their last event, I don't know how many skipped). (116 total)

I didn't include the Aus and German Taipan 4.9 classes as their leaders don't want us to include them. I only counted those Taipan 4.9's that are sailing with a spi and have bought the boat for spi sailing. There are some in Aus who did that. The other aus F16's are the boats like Altered from Gary, Tim's modified Mosquito, Stewarts homebuild as well as the homebuilds of Phill and others.

Nor did I included the Swell Spitfires as they are a seperate OD class. Of course we will continue to welcome them to our class format and we look forward to racing them."

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Again my appologies I meant nothing by other than doing what I understood as being the prefered way.

Good luck to you there in the south and keep us warm with your stories during our cold winter months !

Regards,

Wouter