I have devoted over 50 years of my life to catamaran sailing as well as towards the recognition of catamarans as legitimate racing sailing craft.
I have sat on YA committees at most levels and I have been elected to the position of vice commodore and commodore at different yacht clubs. I have served on protest committees too many to count, so I have gained a little experience of the ways in which ideas and bias interact with the decisions that are made behind closed doors of the yachting hierarchy.
When I first started sailing cats we couldn’t gain membership to any yacht club. As catamaran sailers, we couldn’t compete on any course set by any club. For many years we took the vitriolic abuse by virtually 100% of the “established” mono hull sailing community and slowly grew our numbers to the stage that it was better for the finances and club numbers to allow the cat sailers to become “legitimate” members of clubs than it was to turn them away. The abuse and undisguised antagonism both in the club rooms and on the water still persisted and still does persist today, albeit to a much lesser degree and more veiled today than in times past, but it is still there. Scratch the surface of many mono sailers and you can still find an anti, even hateful multi hull sentiment. While actively involved on various YA committees, whenever the opportunity arose, I always tried to promote the cause of multi hulls. This was usually disappointing and, even when a slight victory was achieved, all benefits obtained for multihulls were always greatly compromised and placed a distant third or fourth to similar benefits accorded to any mono hull class. When, after many years, it became painfully obvious that no matter how much work that I and many other multihull sailers did from WITHIN the sailing administration, there was never going to be the justice due to us, the recognition that we deserved, or even the financial benefits pro rata relative to the income that we supplied to the YA. If and when we put forward proposals for any benefit for multihulls on the same basis that were already “automatically” accepted as “rights” by mono classes (particularly for funding and youth training) that to any reasonable person were undeniable, all we would get in reply was grudging admission of our “proposals” then when put to the vote have every mono class represented vote overwhelmingly against. To cut a long story short, from personal experience I can say unequivocally that for multihulls to achieve equal rights from working within the established yachting administrations is a delusional dream. The only way for multi’s to achieve anything in sailing is to do it by ourselves for ourselves without the dead weight of the YA hanging from our necks like the mill stone that they are as far as multihulls are concerned. They want our money, they want to control us, and they want us to shut up, and hopefully not be seen or heard. The ISAF treat us like a corrupt politician treats his electorate. They promise us the world to get our vote and money but after they have their perceived power, treat us with total disdain or completely ignore us and then have the unmitigated gall to tell us (over a sumptuous dinner paid for by us) that “we may not like what they have done, BUT it has been done solely in OUR best interests” Does any one really believe that?
They want our money, THEY DON’T WANT US. We can never get the results due to us from working WITHIN the system, we are just too out numbered by self interests that are NOT multi hull interests, so why are we there? Why keep trying to bang our heads against the proverbial brick wall? Just how long does it take for us too see just how the land lays? It has been this way for over half a century, what makes any of you think that there is going to be a “C” changes over the next half century?
In the words spoken in a great Australian movie “Tell em their dreaming’”