I am curious as to the reasons why individuals, fleets, yacht clubs, sailing clubs, etc. put on regattas.
Most fleets and clubs have regular fleet and club racing for their own group, so why go to the work and expense of inviting a bunch of outside boats for a big regatta every year?
because it sucks to race against (and get beaten by) the same schmuck over and over again.
😛
Because we like sailing in other people's regattas and we realise that if we don't run one when we're able to, why should anyone else? And if you get things right, it shouldn't cost you anything to runn a regatta anyway.
I go to regattas because:
- I get to see, socialize with and sail against friends who I don't normally see on a regular basis.
- I get to sail at places that don't normally allow access to the water (like the beach at Wildwood, NJ)
- I like to sail in places I've never been to before. I have a personal goal of sailing in at least one new place every year.
If there were no regattas, none of this would be possible.
Things would get awfully boring if always sailed with my own fleet.
I'm not asking why people GO to regattas. I'm just asking why people HOST regattas.
I thought we were hosting regattas to help grow the sport.
Regattas are HOSTED so that others will come to play at your house that normally won't come over! 
We also get to have a cool party and everyone pitches in to pay for it!!!
Oh, and we give out prizes, and a trophy, drink beverages, look at the girls and oogle at the boats (or is it the other way around?) 
Clayton
1. Brings excitement to our beach and fleet.
2. It attracts new sailors.
3. It attracts new fleet members.
4. It attracts attention for the state Dept. of Rec.
5. It puts pictures of cats in the regional papers.
6. With a good staff, the work is secondary to having a good time, so I don't see how it is "work".
7. Brings in money for the fleet.
8. Allows businesses an advertising outlet and free stuff for sailors.
9. General promotion of the sport/lifestyle.
10. Hosting a social gathering is fun.
Ask me why we have to always use the standard US Sailing course layouts... I have no clue. Got the be the most overrated, boring way to race.
Regattas hark back to the original traditions of sailing as a sport as opposed to a business, the object being to pit your sailing skills against the best sailors no matter from where they come. In the early days of "social" sailing/racing regattas were the "norm" and "club sailing" was almost non existant. This "tradition" still applies today, and if clubs/classes neglected to have regular regattas, then a very important part of sailing, as we know it today, would be lost, and we would be the poorer for it, besides, here in Australia, clubs run regular regattas, not just for the benefit to the sailors, but to put more "bums on seasts" at the bar and dining rooms before, during, and after the actual races(s) and to show a very healthy profit from them (the regattas) at the end of their financial year.
One very succesful regatta was conducted in England a long time ago, and you Americans were so impressed with the concept that one boat SAILED all the way there to compete, - that boat was called "America", so I would have thought that the first people to understand the "relevence" of "regattas" would be you "septic tanks"??
why not host them? 
regattas are hella fun, either on or off the water
I say fun factor! 
Is it supposed to be fun to host a regatta? 
No it is quite simple so your club makes more money. If it wasn't profitable the clubs would not or could not continue. It is all very noble to say you do it for the sport but if your club lost money they would soon stop.
There maybe all secondary reason but money/profitablity is the key.
I know our clubs don't make much money on the regattas - a few regattas lose money consistently. The approach is rather to promote activity and visibility for the club itself to attract new and maintain existing members. It's the frequent regattas (and active catamaran sailors) that convinced me to join Lake Keowee Sailing Club.
Mary,
From where I come from running a saiing club is a very costly business. We not only pay for insurance, initial purchase and upkeep of rescue boats and safety equipment. Radio Licence, Council rates, Rates to the Dept of Land and Water, Aquatic License so we can set a course on the lake, AYF fees, upkeep of club house and things like annual Fire insoection certificate the list goes on and on. It costs over $10,000 per year to keep the club going.
In the course of a finaicial year, if we are lucky we just break even. Without the income from running regattas and State and National class title events we would not survive.
There are many different reasons why people go to regattas and there would be many different reasons for different clubs, depending on their individual circumstances, for running regatts. Most of the clubs I know of run them to survive.
Regards,
Phill
There maybe all secondary reason but money/profitablity is the key.
I think New2 is right. I used to think that regattas were run for all those noble reasons, until I got on our fleet regatta committee one year. I was informed by our commodore that the primary reason for putting on the regatta was to make money for the fleet, so the fleet would be able to afford more activities and amenities for its own members.
We are hosting regattas to build our fleet. If local people see that there are all kinds of things going on they will take an interest. Oh, and folks are welcome to come to our events:
3 day long distance event, W1000 style July 30-Aug1 2005:
http:/
We are also having an around the marks event Aug 6-7.
Dave
http://www.westlakesailingclub.com
What is wrong with making money on a regatta? I seen no excuse that you can not make money on a sailing event.
I think negative attitudes are more of an issue than whether it is worth running a sailing event. I also think those of us that are critical about racing / sailing / events, should run their own events if they are not happy.
Bottom line, fun events are fun, not only to particapate in but to organize. Attitudes ruin events, not the percived work involved. Nothing "easy" is ever great.
Nobody said there was anything wrong with making money on a regatta. It's just one of the reasons why people host regattas. And in some cases it is the most important reason.
THe club I sail at would not survive without income from open meetings. We run about 13 a year. Some are absoulutly massive - The RS open (RS200/300/400/600/700/800) has now had to be split up as we were getting more than our max (250 boats) for an open. We also do a cat open once a year that (recently) has been averaging around 130 boats. A few years ago we were getting 200+ cats.
200 cats, 8 feet wide, 1 foot to walk around = 1800 feet of beach room 
Wow! I have always heard there is not much beachcat sailing in the U.K. And for some reason I also thought there were not many beaches. (Guess I have seen too many pictures of the white cliffs of Dover.) Where is your club located, and on what body of water?
Mary,
The club in on an inland lake.
I was wrong, only 102 boats at last years event, but preceeding years went (no stats for 2003),
2002 - 154,
2001 - 120,
2000 - 128 !
Linky to Grafham Water Sailing Club
After Dan Lawrence (past CABB Commodore) moved from the area, I started running the Tradewinds. The first year we ran it CABB made profit.
John McKnight, the new Commodore told me we did not want to make any money on the regatta as we already plenty of money in the club funds.
So, we kept the same entry fee and unlike most other regattas offered a t-shirt for each sailor (two for 2-up boats, and 1 for solo sailors).
That did it.., no more profit.
Same for this year.., we ended up just about even Steven.
When I first started sailing we did not use beaches and sailed out of sailing clubs and yacht clubs. Each would have a designated and agreed upon time and date to host a regatta. One would do theirs in June, another in August, etc. The idea was to get all the club sailors to travel to another club to race, meet, have fun, find more competition than the same old locals, etc.
It worked just fine.
And the nomad beach stuff was very similar. Mary and I sailed in Division 10 and our club hosted an annual regatta, as did Toledo, Columbus, bunches of places in Michigan, etc.
It was pretty cool in that we could travel less than 200 miles every weekend and be racing against as many as 60 TheMightyHobie18 in our class.
By reciprocating like that it really builds fleets and makes the idea of hosting a regatta worthwhile. Nothing worse than planning a big gala and no one shows. It is costly and defeating to the future of sailing.
I only wish I could get to more events. <img src=
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Rick
Hi Mary:
This may be a little late for your review, but our Fleet went through this same kind of analysis through the last few years. From 1976 to about 1992, we had one of the largest Hobie regattas in Division 16 in the Northeast. Then, we lost our format when a new DEMOCRATIC Park Commissioner came in and caved into an attorney who owned property next to our County Park and insisted that we be refused access to the water and remove the ability to host an event. He rationalized it by saying we were dangerous (We have never had an accident or created problems and always payed our own way). The real reason was that he wanted to limit the use of the county beach next to his property; over time maybe he could even buy it by saying it was unused anyway.
Well, the years went by and we sort of struggled along. The racers in our Fleet continued to race, but you could see participation drop down year after year. The people that were on the road to the races always were made to feel comfortable, but they never really felt part of the scene; sort of like always being invited to your friends house for a barbeque, but you were never able to reciprocate.
A few years ago, because of a fresh vision from one dedicated racer (Don Wilke), The Fleet fashioned a no-frills regatta using a private beach bar as the main format. Since then the local town, campgrounds, and businesses have helped, and we're up to fifty boats. We even added a pre-race cruise/race to show area boaters the neat venue we have (sailing from beach bar to beach bar within fifteen miles).
Our Fleet feels good about itself again. Five new Tigers have been purchased in the last two years; Many upgraded sixteens; and probably the largest collection of Hobie 18s, 18 Magnums, and 18-SX in the Northeast (They are the perfect boat for cruising on Lake Erie and running up on the beach). Since then, the Democratic Park Commissioner is gone and more rational and supportive leaders are back in office; life is good.
All of this because sailing and racing are back.
Wyatt
Fleet 119, Angola New York, Lake Erie
What a great story! I love a happy ending. 
Mary, its a great question. After 25 years at the helm, the most pure cat sailing is 10 to 15 boats coming off the beach, crashing through the surf, and racing north and south down and back to some distant bar. Its as simple and as complicated as that.
Not to be flippant, but why are there parties? There's all that work involved, and expense, and the mess to clean-up afterward! The answer is that it is fun. Otherwise nobody would do it. It is also why people who never throw parties tend not to be invited to many.
There is of course a commercial dimension to a regatta, because space on water and the facilities required to feed everyone, and store boats cost money, as do crash boats and fuel. These are fixed costs that the club pays from member dues. Other costs like trophies and food and t-shirts and beer are paid out of the regatta fees, primarily. But at our club we are not required or even encouraged to make a specified profit on any event, and in the past I have aimed for breaking even. I generally have a small amount of money left over as a courtesy to the club, because there is a lot of volunteer labor going into the mix and I feel I should compensate the club for all that. But it is not a requirement and no one says anything about it.
There is definitely a tradition of reciprocation in sailing. This applies to sailors as well as clubs. Hence all the exchanges of burgees by visiting sailors, and writing your home club on the entry form. The notion is that as a sailor no matter where you are there is a certain ethic and you will be offered hospitality at other clubs, and that you will offer other sailors the same at yours. Perhaps this is a holdover from the blue blazer days, but it sure is a nice holdover, especially when you've been on the water in your dinghy all day getting the snot beat out of you and, looking like a drowned rat, you walk up to a foreign club that is about five stories tall with its own parking garage and they say "Come on in". The tradition is also very important in cruising, where boats put into new clubs all the time.
As to why people race, again I would say that it is fun, and regattas add to that fun by getting new sailors into the mix. As someone else in this thread said, getting beat by the same people over and over again makes for pretty stale racing.
>I only wish I could get to more events?
Perhaps this is a making of an online/internet C.S. Virtual Regatta?
What is a "virtual" regatta? Sounds interesting for a winter regatta up north. But I think somebody else will have to do that, because it would be beyond our limited computer abilities.
The reason Rick is not able to get to more regattas is because he is a little busy. He puts on at least three regattas every winter and helps out with a couple others, and he runs at least five of his seminars every year, plus he covers the entire Atlantic 1000 (as he did with the Worrell 1000 before) for my magazine and for his website.
And still, he/we manage to get to about six regattas a year to actually sail. And that is despite the fact that any regattas we go to range from a drive of 5 to 24 hours away from us. And we always lug two boats behind us, and sometimes three or four.
The reason he said he wishes he could get to more regattas is because we think it is important to go not just for our own fun, but to support the fleets and clubs that put those regattas on.
We are hoping that this year we can go, for the first time, to Spring Fever, because for once it is not happening during one of our seminars.
Our situation is not unique. A number of people have stories very similar to this.
This thread has been full of serendipity -- how much fun regattas are and how much we need them to hold the sport together.
But what we have not heard is the stories of all the fleets that no longer put on regattas because the same people (usually one or two people) always did all the work and finally got burned out and quit. And nobody stepped up to the plate to replace them.
A way to reciprocate. For the memories. Many people remember the regattas & parties that they attended or have run. Fleet members still recall the year end party at my place 18 years ago.
Mary,
Hobie Division 9 is an example of the attrition that occurs when Fleets die/burn out.
Some Fleets are down to a couple of active members, some are down to only a few willing to do the work.
Some also lost their regatta location.
Fleets 97(Raleigh, NC), 101(Carolina Beach, NC), 191(Greensboro, NC), and 170(Lake Waccamaw, NC) have recently ceased holding regattas.
The "paper" fleets(91, 101, 191) don't have other resources (staff, crash boats, facilities) to draw from.
Just a few years ago, we had so many regattas a year that we had to decide which ones we would attend.
All is not bad news though.
Hobie Fleet 100 in Oriental, NC has been revived by Kyle Harrison and holds a regatta on Hatteras Island in Rodanthe, NC.
Hobie Fleet 32 in Virginia Beach, VA, has added several distance races.
We have had some new regattas begun by independent groups.
Spring Fever, By Nigel Pitt and Mr. Ernie on Lake Hartwell Georgia.
The North-South Cat Dash, by Taylor & Darla Damonte and the North Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce, a two-day distance race off the beach with cash prizes.
The Seacats, based at Columbia Sailing Club in Columbia, SC, has worked hard to get a large catamaran fleet at the Outback Cup(Outback steaks!!!).