Survey feedback from Ratchet - please clarify

[THG]

Sorry to be picky but on p14 of the current Rachet - SURVEY by John Meadowcroft

"...activity in Club fleets (low) and confirms Regional Series are NOT important..., although conversely many do NOT want to travel long distances"

Have I mis understood or is this a typo?  I would have guessed the regional series ARE wanted but don't want to travel too far...the next issue is how to provide this if there are not enough local fleets to support events.

Thanks,

Kean

[Jimbo41]

Boing!

[Antony]

John M is working on getting the survey results in to a format that they can be posted on the website in their full glory.  

In the meantime, from my memory of the results, Kean has picked up two conflicting results of the survey from two seperate questions.  It is, i think, right that people did not want to travel over 100 miles but were only really interested in the results of the Gill Series and not the regional series.  I do not think that this means that people are not interested in having local open meetings, just that they are not going to bust a gut to try to qualify for the regional series.

Hope that help, more to come,
Antony

[THG]

Very interesting and although just looking at responses to questions can sometimes lead to odd conclusions I would say that the activies / attendance in the SW tends to support the conclusion.

From a SW point of view it may be better to split the region into 2 mini regions to respond to the fact that there is a significant number of 'local' sailors that do not want to travel too far but enjoy being able to sail with other 12s - since there are very few Clubs with a large active fleet.

Personally I'd like to see the Gill series event then be extended so that within each Region (or mini Region) there should be a Gill event.  This will mean the Gill series will be extended (last year there was some feedback or limited discussion at Grafham not to extend) - however so far we've had an average attendance of Gills around 22.  Maybe look at how other Classes do their national events series (I think Larks have 17 'Gill' type series - AND they had 77 boats at their inlands!!).

As usual no easy answers but somehow we need to get better attendances at both events and of course Club sailing too.

Kean
All views expressed are mine alone and not a pigment of my imagination nor are the official SW view!

[Antony]

Kean,
I am not clear what you are trying to achieve by splitting regions.  If nobody cares about their aggregate score in a regional series then all that matters is to hold events that people want to go to and make sure there are enough of them within reach of where people live but not so many they are diluted and have a small attendence.  This is basically where we are at the moment.

The Gill Series is already very carefully designed around having events in every region, although it is true that the additional event this year and the loss of Starcross made this much harder and put a Midlands bias in that was not intentional.  At least the Midlands are in the middle!  There is obviously a risk that taking the Gill events to the extremes of the country, Penzance and Scotland for example, would result in small Gilll events as the distance for the 'average' attendee to travel would become too high for a weekend.

You are right that some classes have a single national travellers series, and many more events, but so far we have tried to focus the Gill Series on not being more than once a month to give people time to do other things, including sailing at their own clubs and encouraging other people locally to give the 12 a go.

As you get more involved you will appreciate that there is already a lot of thought put into the plans, and planning for 2008 is already underway.  New ideas and thoughts are always appreciated.

Antony

[grazz]

Full survey results now on-line at

http://www.national12.org/surveys/70th_Census/survey_70th_Census.shtml

Please have a peruse and let us know what you think