After Dan Lawrence (past CABB Commodore) moved from the area, I started running the Tradewinds. The first year we ran it CABB made profit.
John McKnight, the new Commodore told me we did not want to make any money on the regatta as we already plenty of money in the club funds.
So, we kept the same entry fee and unlike most other regattas offered a t-shirt for each sailor (two for 2-up boats, and 1 for solo sailors).
That did it.., no more profit.
Same for this year.., we ended up just about even Steven.
When I first started sailing we did not use beaches and sailed out of sailing clubs and yacht clubs. Each would have a designated and agreed upon time and date to host a regatta. One would do theirs in June, another in August, etc. The idea was to get all the club sailors to travel to another club to race, meet, have fun, find more competition than the same old locals, etc.
It worked just fine.
And the nomad beach stuff was very similar. Mary and I sailed in Division 10 and our club hosted an annual regatta, as did Toledo, Columbus, bunches of places in Michigan, etc.
It was pretty cool in that we could travel less than 200 miles every weekend and be racing against as many as 60 TheMightyHobie18 in our class.
By reciprocating like that it really builds fleets and makes the idea of hosting a regatta worthwhile. Nothing worse than planning a big gala and no one shows. It is costly and defeating to the future of sailing.
I only wish I could get to more events. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />
Rick