While ever we continue to put our fate in the hands of mono sailors, we can expect nothing short of what we are experiencing. And given my comments/feelings above, [a result of many, many years involvement in cat racing] I have little confidence in anything changing anytime in the near future, however, nothing would make me happier than to be proved wrong! But, you'd need to have experienced the apathy, even worse, the absolute complete disregard, the resentment and even disdain shown to anyone who doesn't sail/campaign/design and/or build cats of 16ft LOA or bigger in Australia and in I'm guessing, most of the rest of the world too it seems.

I remember the first time I turned up with a 14ft boat to an open cat regatta. When I requested help to lift my boat off the trailer the guy said, "got any spare gloves?", the inference being that he really didn't want to touch something so un-cool as my 14ft thing. That says it all really. Daryl is experiencing exactly the same indignation with his AO 14, and to add insult to injury, there's now talk of designing and building yet another entry level cat for Australia. Thousands of dollars and time spent/wasted trying to do something constructive at entry level for catamarans. It beggars belief that people could be so unsupportive, so un-cooperative so completely dismissive and short sighted.

And you want to know why things are so bad?

Monohulls will kick our ar$e all day and night and it's no wonder the way we behave. While we completely ignore our juniors, they have massive campaigns to introduce youth sailors to their boats. We have almost zilch and anything we do have is treated as I have already outlined above.

You still want to know why the $hit has hit the fan, really????

Yes I'm passionate, who wouldn't be?

P.S. Now that most all of the big cats have spinnakers, our biggest cat regatta has decided to run only windward / leeward courses which means smaller, kiteless cats are even more disadvantaged than they would otherwise be. And the grapevine suggests they will again withdraw their support for that regatta.