what if you had a meeting and nobody came?

What if you had a fleet meeting and nobody came? Because that's what just happened.

13 SF Bay 30's signed up to do the Great Pumpkin Race. This is the largest group of 30's in any one place since the Vallejo Race. Of those thirteen, only five of those boats returned to the Richmond Yacht Club after the race. Yet, skippers on all of those 13 boats knew that there was going to be a scheuling meeting after the race today at the RYC.

Bill from Borderline, who was crewing on Redux, came to the "meeting". Steve from Tortuga dropped by for ten minutes. Nobody else bothered to show up, whether they were tied up in Richmond or not. Two skippers spent time in the protest room, so I suppose they have a reason for not attending. I suppose. From my perspective, I just wasted six hours of my Saturday.

In light of this utter lack of interest in forming a schedule for next year, I have one final suggestion before I throw in the towel as fleet organizer. The way I see it, the fleet has four options.

1. Have a schedule just like this past years schedule. This is easy, just tell Ed to go to HDA and sign up for the same schedule as this year. It'll be HDA and nothing else, unless the fleet is invited back to the Great Pumpkin and the Big Daddy again.
2. Adopt the schedule I've proposed in the past few weeks. This is shot full of holes, because the "specials" part of the schedule, what I was calling "Tour Series" is all set up, but I have no idea what people want in the HDA part of the schedule. THAT was what we could have talked over tonight, but since nobody showed up, well.... I suppose y'all could e-mail Ed and tell him that you want to do Alan's proposed schedule, and Ed please sign us up for whatever HDA schedule you deem to be good for us, that would fit in with Alan's schedule. Then the HDA part of the schedule is Ed's call, since he's volunteered to be the go-between with HDA for us. It shifts a lot of the scheduling buredn onto Ed's shoulders, and he never volunteered for this, so it's up to hi if he wants to do it.
3. Make the whole fleet a "loosey-goosey" organization that happens to get together when we all happen to choose to do the same race. It's likely that you'd get a reasonable turnout at Vallejo, Big Daddy and Great Pumpkin, at least. The rest, who knows?
4. Turn out the lights and go home.

Personally, I'm going to register to do Vallejo next year and if I happen to see some Olsen 911's and Santana 3030's and Tartan tens and Laser 28's starting in my division, that's great. I'll wave at you and maybe we'll party in Vallejo. But, that's it.

I'm re-thinkng my plan about doing Corinthian Midwinters. I might or I might not, but I'll decide when I decide. If I happen to see you there, great!

As of now, anything else I might have proposed in previous schedules...parties, cruise-in's, trophies, etc....Forget it. If someone else wants to make those things happen, go for it, and good luck. If I sound a little sour, it's because I'm sick of trying to extract specific information from the members of the fleet. I have other things to spend my time on, and it's not a efficient use of my time to continue the way it's been going.

All that said, I'm really glad the racing was so good today, and I'm glad folks had a great time out there. I heard it was really close on the water. Thirteen boats on the line is just fabulous. So, yee-ha!

Me, I'm going to go do the SSS stuff that's my primary goal anyway, and I'll see you guys when I see you guys; maybe in Vallejo.

Ciao, Bella!

Alan
Wisdom
Santana 3030 Received on Sat Oct 27 20:41:47 2001