History......
I have been sailing competitively for around 30 years, starting out as a young child at Onerahi Yacht Club, and Whangarei Cruising Club. I can remember that even in a city of only 30,000 people, there were regularly fleets of 40 boats, being around 10 Optimists, 10 P class, 10 Starlings, and a smattering of Lasers and Cats.
As a twentysomething, in the same city, the fleets had changed very little, and there was a strong fleet of lasers, no cats, and still good numbers of juniors. There were also around 30 Traileryachts, and a similar number of Keelboats racing every weekend through the winter, which had probably been there when I was a kid too.
I went overseas about a decade ago, while NZL held the Americas Cup. Sailing was very popular here in NZ, and had good media coverage, with club level events getting newspaper exposure with a whats on, race results etc.
Upon my return two years ago, a lot had changed. I had applied for a position with Yachting New Zealand, which fell through at the last moment. In retrospect, that was a good thing, as had I been successful, I would probably have joined the bureaucracy, and not noticed what a sad state our sport is in.
When I contacted WCC to find out when the next dinghy racing day was, I was told that there was none, as there were very few people actually sailing there now. Shortly after that I moved to Auckland to discover that the story was similar here too.
The Present......
There is now a real problem with the public perception of sailing being an expensive, elitist sport. If your goal is an olympic medal, then this is the case, but for most of us, local or regional competition is as good as we're going to get.
To use a rugby analogy, it's like devoting yourself to becoming All-Black captain and winning the world cup, while the rest of us are happy playing in the ITM or local competition.
This perception may be the result of the Americas cup publicity campaigns. The cup demands ridiculous amounts of money, which is often referred to during the build-up to the events. This makes our sport look and sound like a rich mans play area. This turns people away.
Kids wanting to learn to sail have two main options -
The NGO preferred route of spending lots of their parents money, replacing their boat, sails etc every few months, and travelling around the country for coaching, regattas etc, which will cost around $5,000 for the first two years. The resale value will be ok, but you will lose money.
Or find a local club that has its own boats, join that, and use the resources available at that club. This option will cost somewhere around $1-200 for the first two years, or perhaps after a short while the parents decide to buy the child a boat - $3-600 should suffice, and you can sell it for the same when you've finished with it.
Of course, most people should go with the latter option, as it's easy to upgrade to new gear once you have mastered the basics. Plus it can provide an incentive for the children to save up their pocket money for better gear.
At club level, having the best gear wont make any significant difference to performance or enjoyment. At higher levels it might.
more to come....
No comments:
Post a Comment