I agree that I've been too focused on a sail plan issue that some member of class are concerned about because of poor performance in one race against another class of boats on corrected time. Failing to mention that 2/3 of those boat were helmed by either ex-Olympians or current professionals. The 3rd had/has lots of experience in offshore conditions. This has been beat to death and I'll drop it for now.

Class Growth (another reason for new sails, to entice people to spend more money as soon as they buy a boat?):

So where is the land on which to plant a forest? I simply don't see it. This is the way I break down the current East Coast HP cat landscape:

SE: Roughly 12 N20's at Tradewinds, most of them SE/Florida boats. Rough interpolation leads to approximately 20 N20's in the southeast, including Florida. One fourth of these boats are owned by Velocity. The other fourth are owned by Team Royal. That's half the SE fleet that are owned by people that usually race the boats in distance events and many of these sailors are semi-pro. Based off similar estimates, the F18's had 14 boats at Tradewinds. There are probably 20-25 F18's in the SE. Many F16's showed up at Tradewinds, 4 showed up at Spring Fever. I bet 10 people OWN F16's in Florida and the SE. The SE and Florida have large A-Cat fleets with typical regattas having >20 boat fleets.

Mid-East: 6 N20's are registered for this weekends race. Probably 10 in the Annapolis area. I would say they have a similar F16 fleet size and growing. Hardly any F18's. Lots of A-Cats

NE: 30+ F18's within 2 hours of Newport (based on #'s from Newport sailors). Only a few N20's left at this point. ?? F16's, decent A-Cat class.

So the only area where the N20 is putting up comparable numbers to the F18 fleets are the SE and the mid-atlantic. The N20 market is offshore distance events, which are prevalent in the SE/Florida and USED TO be prevalent in the mid-atlantic. We need to cater to this market while also enticing the buoy racing crowd (which the boat does well in, and is just as competitive as the F-18 in the larger fleets).

Bottom line: more people are buying F-18's than N20's. Why? They update the hull design so you need a new(er) boat to be competitive, thus the older boats go for relatively cheap to new people in the class. No new N20's have been delivered to the SE, to my knowledge, since the 2006 Alter Cup qualifier. How are WE going to build a class if no one is buying new boats? We aren't.

The other factor is fleet size and available competitions. I bought the N20 simply because I KNOW at every event I race in in NC/SC, there are likely to be 3-4 other boats to race against. The F18's typically bring the same number of boats to these events, so there wasn't a particular reason to go that route. The N20 was also cheaper, and I can distance race it.

We need to drive this market. We need to buy new boats every 3 years so we can sell our old, yet EQUALLY COMPETITIVE boats to someone new and enthusiastic. We need to hook new sailors on the boat by taking them for a ride and showing them what a blast it is. We need a racing circuit with a points trophy to encourage participation in the class. If Todd is right and the N20 is no longer available new from the factory, none of this is going to happen.