Hi All,

My 2 cents.

There are two points which I would like to make. 

These are new sails and the full potential of these sails has not been realised yet.  For example, a middleweight is already running a 5.5m up to 15 knots of wind in America before changing to a 4m. This may seem wrong to you, but come the worlds he will most likely be using it and if he wins the class what are you going to say then!  Everyone may need to get  5.5 meter sail.

Secondly the cost of being competitive even locally has potentially just risen $1200 - $1400 dollars which maybe fine for some of us out there but others are going to drop out of the sport due to the high cost.  The BBC has already lost members to the increasing costs of competing and losing more members over 5.5m sails is not what I want.  If you wanted to start blokart sailing competitively and brought a new kart you would be looking at a cost of $8000+ to set up.  This is far to high in my opinion for a new sport that relies on the wind, which means you are not guaranteed to sail on any given weekend. Spare time is becoming more precious to all of us.

So a solution I can see to keep the sport of blokart strong in NZ clubs: 

If you actually look at your club and say how many members from your club would go to the next world champs if they were held in Europe. Even the BBC with a strong travelling group of members may get 7 going in reality, so they can race at those events under the international equipment rules.  I would suggest we redefine the performance equipment rules ideally for NZ within the NZBAI but at least at club level to excluded 5.5 meter sails and potential other performance equipment to make the competitive side of the sport a reasonable price to get into, keeping our clubs strong and everyone with a fair chance of winning at a reasonable cost at a local level and maybe even the nationals.

So from the BBC point of view the question to be discussed at the next committee meeting is a complete ban on 5.5’s or ban for all, other than supers and offer a financing deal to the supers to make sure all of our supers have a 5.5 meter sail.

Something to think about

Richard