Sam made a good point on the open forum. The time is ripe for establishing reginal divisions...perhaps along the same boundaries as the US Sailing regions? If we can get some roots established locally around the US, it might make us pretty strong.
Exactly! And as I added to his post, perhaps the existing officers would stay as NAMSA Division officers as well.., at least temporarily.
The iron is hot.., it is now the time to strike.
The good part is that Mary almost put out the next issue on Monday. But then the stuff hit the fan on Monday AM and we have been re-writing the issue. It should be hot and current.
So, to the rest of the Board Members! Come out of the closet -- multihull sailors need us and need us now.
RIck
Rick
Totally agree - the time is now, people are worked up and NAHCA fumbled. Our team was already suited up - let's play ball!
Ok, enough of of the analagy....
Seriously, personally I tried to downplay putting NAMSA head to head with NAHCA last year because I thought it would harm us to create enemies of some NAHCA members. However, I think doing that ignored the fuel that sparked NAMSA last year (at least for me). I'm playing a little more publicly the NAMSA/NAHCA card and the response to those I have spoken with has been great. I still think there are tons of different things NAMSA can do and we don't necessarily need to compete with NAHCA, but I think we can afford to take a little more competative stance with regard to the new Hobicentricy.
That said, I think we all need to probe leaders in various areas to see if we can find some people to head up NAMSA regions. I'll be glad to help here in SC (and I already have two or three people on board that will help too). I've asked Barry from Connecticut about NENSA and they are supposed to have some meeting in the coming weeks where NENSA will be offering the paper fleets in the region insurance through membership. I don't think NENSA has much desire to join NAMSA themselves. I'm quickly paraphrasing but he indicated that four of the five will probably join NENSA but that the fifth wants to join under NAMSA (I don't know who that fifth is). We also know that CRAM in the mid-west shares very little love for us. I think the way we win these guys over is after we have a successful point system going elsewhere. Please talk to the leaders in your or any other area you know and get a feel for where they stand and if they would like to take part in NAMSA. We've got great people on this board but I'm a little concerned that we can't handle the extra load if we don't get some more folks on the local scenes.
We should have another conference call or online chat sesion (somewhere) so we can discuss how to establish the various regional areas. Do we still have the capability of a group phone session? I'll start another thread of a 'to do list' or rather a 'goals list' later today. We can use this to base our phone conversation on.
Let's GO!