Seth,

Your story makes me think about Spring Fever 2001. 8 of us were put into the high USPN class as well together with boats like H14's, P16's and Mystere 4.3's. With 7 I mean 5 Taipan F16's, 2 Isotopes and 1 Tornado. I'm sure Mark Schneider remembers that one. Otherwise John Williams does. It was certainly not fair to either side. Our single lap races on miniture course took us 10 minutes to complete and thwn we had to wait eons for the I-20's to complete their 3 laps of the big course. We rebelled just like you on sunday and sailed the long course as all other fast boats and said "damn the score". Best part was that we STILL had to wait long times for the rear "Big boats" to come in. A hobie 20 or 18 without a spi is not such a fast boat when compared to a 100 kg spi equipped pocket rocket.

The only solutions I can come up with is that we organise ourselfs more on the US side and put force to our very reasonable requests. That and maybe really requesting (again) that our F16 UPSN ratings are dropped to a more realistic level (close to Nacra 6.0's) so that we get put on the larger course on our rating alone. We always seem to be on the wrong side of the High and Low PN split.

With the 5 new Blade F16 owners for 2005 and the already present Taipan owners we must be able to group in Florida and start breaking open the viscious circle. Of course a Florida sailor must take the lead in this, I already have my hands full at F16 in general and The Netherlands in specific although I get alot of help from several Dutch sailors.

So Floridian F16 sailors, worth a try ?

Wouter