Now that the immediate furore over boats that look like the Starship Enterprise, are 200 feet long, etc. has largely died away, it’s time to go basck to looking at what we want a Footy to be and why.
To me as a reasonably serious minded designer Footys are things that I can design and either build myself or persude a mug to build at little financial or other risk. This means that in principle I can try out many more or less wild ideas that would otherwise never see the light of day. I am not afraid of advanced technologies where they will help the boat go faster, but I do not want to see costs escalate too much, since this would cut the market for new designs (by the way, as a matter of policy, all my designs are available free of charge).
Since I have spent a very high proportion of my life doodling monohull racing yachts, the class would loose a great deal of interest for me if the dominant type were to be a multihull.
For others a Footy is something much simpler. It is a little boat that can be put together very simply and quickly from very simple materials and sailed for the pure hell of it. It has a cheeky sheerline, a rather antique looking bowsprit and could generally be described as cute.
For others again, the very open nature of the Footy rule is an invitation to unbridled ingenuity: the game is purely and simply to stuff the fastest possible boat into the box, no holds barred. The people in the ‘cute boat’ brigade will tend to dismiss these people as rule cheaters while the ‘monohull development on the cheap’ mob will sniff at them. It could, however, be argued that these people are the only ones who actually embody the spirit of the rule - a vehicle for the exercise of ingenuity.
This is most definitely not an official request or statement but I as one of the people entrusted with administering and interpreting the rule would very much welcome feedback from owners (and prospective owners) of Footys on their vision of what the Footy of five years time should be like and which way in general rule interpretations should go in cases of genuine doubt - toward progress or toward conservatism.
As you are probably aware from my various maunderings ,one of the great tragedies in yachting (full size or medl) was in my view the fate of the late and largely unlamented International Offshore Rule (IOR). This started life as an excellent concept but over time degenerated under pessure from a small band of super-enthusiastic owners first into producing boats that nobody but the super-enthusiastic owners wanted to sail and ultimately into producing ones that not even they wanted. The dream of a rule under which virtually all offshore boats in the world from grand prix hotshots to family cruiser racers could race on level terms died.
I am determined that this should not happen to the Footy class. Where do you, the ‘customers’ want things to go?
