Fastsail?

[JB9]

Hi, the website for the above group looks a little abandoned, any idea if they are still going?

http://www.fastsail.org/news.php

[roger]

unfortunately it seems to have died a long slow painful death. The concept put together by Mike & Cath Pickles was to be a joint events for symetric spinaker trapeze boats to hold joint events and raise profile of all classes. There was a certain amount of sniping about handicaps which meant that a lot of the Fireball fleet decided not to attend events and the last SGP only had about 30 turn up which was embarrassing for the organisers and for the host club.
I attended several of the early SGP events when there were100+ boats and they were great fun with emphasis on prizes throughout the fleet and the "rock" stars offering loads of help. Mike and Cath moved on to other things and the committee that took it on never managed to keep up the momentum.
Shame really as it gave us big fleet racing of similar performance boats. I am sure the JB would havebeen made welcome.
My favourite memory was at Rutland when a fisherman had managed to put himself on the layline for the windward mark only to find himself with over one hundred fast boats charging past him within inches of his boat. He did the sensible thing pulled in his line, waited for us all to pass and then went and found somewhere a bit quieter. Thank god he didnt try to move!!!

[JB9]

That does seem a shame. Maybe the boats have been sold and RS500s bought instead. I did make contact a couple of years ago and they were happy for me to take the Jollyboat but sadly it was too far and the wrong time.

So, is there some potential to attract the Fastsail sailors in the older boats along to CVRDA events?

[Rupert]

It would be great to get more fast boats along to events - Roadford and Clywedog would be ideal, Bosham would be great too. Certainly Whitefriars is big enough even for Fireball/Hornet speed boats, and I was crewing a 505 there at the weekend, and we did pretty well. At somewhere like WSC, I think I'd look at handicappings to allow for the time taken on corners by big boats.

How you get them to come, of course, is something more difficult, as Fastsail found.

[roger]

We did have several fastsail boats at netley. In fact our nat champion for that year was also Hornet nat champion. He got a lot of ribbing from the rest of the Hornets after winning. I am not sure if thats why he never came again.
Of course a lot of these guys prefer to sail on the sea with waves. I used to push quite hard to get mk 1 Ospreys etc to come and I posted on Fireball and FD forums at the time and on the fast sail site.We have had ealry fireballs so who knows it may be worth pushing it again.

[JB9]

The website seems to have gone. Is it worth trying to get a message directing people here?

[davidh]

I hate to say it but I think that 'Fastsail' is indeed dead and has finally sunk without further trace. However a simple re-direct here may not be the answer either, for there were a number of boats at FastSail that wouldn't qualify as CVRDA boats: If you start 'inviting' and then having to say "sorry, these boat CAN attend but these can't" then it will just end up with more unhappiness. The bottom line was that FastSail encouraged the state of the art boats to compete which is far from the Classic ethos - before you know it we'd have a situation very similar to that currently being discussed in the 'Merlin Number 8' thread - where the problems of sailing a true classic boat against a modern variant, supposedly with the PY system making it a level playing field, are becoming all to apparent.

And yet..... in my experience, this is just an area where the CVRDA does need to recognise that it has yet to really develop an 'offering' - something for the boats at the performance end of the PY scale. It is not that the boats doesn't exist - we have a number of contributors on here who are owners of trapeze boats, but to date there has been little to attract them out. To my knowledge, we've 505s, Ospreys, Fireballs, Typhoons, Mirror 14s, Lazy E, Jacksnipe, Ghost, Hornets, some wonderful International 14s and you could even add the Pegasus into the mix plus the stately FDs. As Roger rightly said, we had the infamous 'Strangler' win the CVRDA Nationals when they were held on the sea at Netley, but would he, or many of the other owners, really put themselves out to travel to an event where they're just not going to enjoy the experience.

Roadford is okay but is on the edge of the known universe for many, Bosham is okay if you don't mind racing on the sailing equivalent of the M25 at 5pm on a Friday but there is one club where there IS the space for trapeze crews to 'stretch their legs' - Blithfield. Just as on the Moth Roll Call topic on this forum Hunts has been suggested as a great location for a lowrider Moth 'special' - then Blithfield would make a great event for a classic performance boat event. No dis-respect to Peter Vinton in his Finn or eventual winner Ian Marshall in the Moth, but Nick and carolynn Smith in their Mirror 14 would have 'horizon jobbed' you at this years event. As would Nessa in 'Aggie', a good Fireball and as for the Phil Morrison 505, use the small kite (so you could carry it down the reaches) and it would have been fun fun fun.......

So, FastSail might be RIP but the CVRDA is there already, it has a core of owners with the right boats, what is NOT to like!!

Dougal