Wouter,

I had intended to step back and stop posting to this thread, however, after your last series of posts I realised that I couldn't let this lie....

Why, oh, why do you have to treat questions as personal attacks on you? Why do you have to be so patronising and sometimes venomous with your responses? The people on this forum are either existing F16 sailors or potential F16 sailors. Whatever they are, they are also part of the multihull community in general - which is already far too fragmented. Civility costs nothing. Try it sometime, you might be surprised at how much easier life becomes. Sorry, now I'm at risk of being patronising - but you get my drift

With regard to the original theme of this thread and the way in which it evolved, I believe that the 'trigger' was this comment from you in the original post:



The Boulogne brothers have not asked for 'grandfather' status for their new boat nor, as far as I am aware have any of their customers. Yet you felt it necessary to openly state that the Evolution could be 'grandfathered' (oh HOW I HATE THAT PHRASE!)into F16. This has (not unnaturally) prompted people to think "Why?".

Surely the time has come, with the number of existing COMPLIANT F16s, to say that we don't need to grow the class artificially by adopting other classes into a theoretical 'Open F16 class'. For the coming 2006 season could we not demonstrate that the F16 class has finally come of age by doing away with rule 6.1 and its attendant criteria, declaring that ONLY boats fitting the box rule are F16 (apart from the foundation boats - Taipan 4.9, Mosquito and Stealth R) and all formerly dispensated boats are 'out'.

GENUINE growth in GENUINE F16s must be the way forward if this class is to be taken seriously. No matter what you say about 'no grey areas' there is a PERCEPTION that you can sail anything if it's close enough in size to an F16 AND IT IS RATED SLOWER. This may indeed be because people havn't read the rules properly or understood them, but the reason this perception exists is because the 'grandfather' clause exists. In that sense it is a bad rule.

Please note this IS NOT a personal attack but simply a comment on the way I see the 'grandfather' rule being percieved and why I believe it is not really helping the class now. (There is no doubt that in the early days of the class such a measure was expedient, even advantageous, but not now).

Finally, I hope that if you were to re-read some of your invective above you will feel that perhaps you took serious, genuine queries and comments a little too personally.

Step back, count to ten ..... DO NOT RETURN to check if lit