Mark's right - While John Bauldry (TigerBoy), Paul Krutty and myself will drive 12 hrs (each way) to race on a weekend, the rest of our fleet is pretty much strictly social.

If you go to our web site www.fleet276.com you'll see that we only put on only one regatta (Regata de Gatos in Port Burwell, Ontario) in conjunction with HCA Division 16.

What we do otherwise is:
* Get together nearly every Thursday night for a couple of pints
* Skiing this weekend (although with the temp not projected to get out of the teens, there's liable to be more drinking in the lodge than skiing)
* Help put on a display at the Strictly Sail Show in Chicago
* Bowling in Feb.
* Fun Sails - early ones are just to shake the cobwebs off, later ones we go out to an island in Lk. St. Clair & have a barbeque. John, Paul & I dispense free advice and assistance.
* A "Swing & Sail" event, where we golf & sail the same day and try to come up with some method of combined scoring / handicapping

Bottom line is we have fun. I used to never take my boat out pleasure sailing - I thought it was boring. The key is to do it with somebody who still has that "WOW - THIS IS NEAT STUFF" look on their face that we had 30 years ago when we started. Look at that photo of the Tiger on our fleet's homepage - that's me scaring the crap out of a couple of novice 16 sailors - and having a blast doing it! (And they had fun, too - I let him drive later - but not downwind )

I have to give credit to Jeff Rabidoux (Rabs) for getting us off our collective a$$es two years ago and re-invigorating the fleet.