Galilee

The Sydney Opera house isn't, I'm told, very good for Opera. But who cares? It's still one hell of an occasion to go there, eight jumbo jets can sit wing tip to wing tip on the site, and the place is so legendary that it has even had it's own opera written about it.

(Eighth Wonder)

The Sydney Opera house is therefore a perfect example of the occasion being the most important thing, not the perfection.

And we should think about that as a class as we strive for the purest way to decide who is the World Champion to the exclusion of anything else.. We can't control nature and so we cannot be certain about what will happen. Dreadfully dull Weymouth was a good example of that, as was Switzerland where you lost your image rights and all feeling in your hands within 20 minutes of arrival, and at the same time so was Belmont where 10 percent less main foil really just meant ten percent less weed.

The Mothfest however already has 40 entrants and there you don't have to race at all! I think that's wonderful and a signal for all who are in the unpleasant position of having to organise a Championship to take note of. If I'm honest the only really competitive event I'm looking forward to is the 2012 World Championships in Lake Garda. Sure we have the Europeans in the meantime, and I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt, but last time I was at Travamunde my tent blew away and a small hurricane destroyed a caravan park.. No, Garda it is.

And to the purists who say that we must have 20 knots every day largely to cater for the ever increasing girth of the average moth sailor, or perfect GPS laid windward marks, which mean you spend so much time waiting for the race officer to move it 5 metres to the left, then to the right, then to the left...that you are buggered before the race starts. An irrelevance when you can't see the fuckin thing anyway.

Perhaps therefore we should think differently and I recognise this is a possibility only realisable if the class pays for a resource who can take this on.

And if we had that, would it, do you think, be possible for us to approach a venue like say The Bitter End Yacht Club and take the whole circus there? Do we really need a Yacht Club to sail from? Oh and 19 races? Do we really need that? Even the most blindly enthusiastic puppy like Moth sailors in Belmont must have been thinking 'Oh for fucks sake, not again..'

The only vocational race course I can think of, where someone else long before us rose above the water, would be the sea of Galilee. Now that would be cool.

Just a thought, My thought on a cold day where I'd dearly like to be somewhere nice .