Colin, dunno if this helps with your Mark Foy question but does give
some historical insight......
Mark Foy
The birth of 18ft Skiff Racing as we know it today occurred on Sydney
Harbour on 26 January 1892. The father was Mark Foy.
Foy was a local businessman who loved sailing and believed Sydney
Harbour to be the world's best aquatic playground, and was
disappointed that, unlike many other sports, sailing attracted
practically no public interest.
He was quick to realise that the sailors themselves were responsible
for this lack of interest as they made no attempt to cater for the
public.
* They raced over a 12-mile course and were out of sight for up to
two hours.
* A complicated handicap system caused a further delay while the
winner was being determined later in the clubhouse.
* There was no attempt to entertain spectators while the boats were
out of sight.
Determined to change this situation, he discussed the matter with a
few close friends and came up with a series of initiatives which he
believed would popularise sailing as an exciting spectator sport.
His plan was split into three simple steps:
1. Racing must be exciting and faster.
2. Boats had to be more colourful and more easily identified than by
a number on the Sails.
3. Race winner should be decided on a first-past-the-post basis.
The major problem with Foy's plan was producing a faster racer, but
he solved this with the first of the 18-footers, which was an open,
centreboard boat with a very light hull, an 8-foot (2.4m) beam and
only 30 inches (76cm) amidships. It carried a crew of 14 (compared to
the previous boats with 25 crew) and had a huge spread of sail which
gave it a sensational aquaplaning speed downwind.
Foy's original idea of having striped sails to identify each boat had
to be abandoned due to the excessive cost of manufacturing varying
designs for registration.
His alternative was for each boat to have a colourful emblem on its
mainsail - a tradition which continues to this day, although the
colourful emblem is now almost exclusively the logo of a corporate
sponsor.
When Foy tried to enter his boats with the Anniversary Regatta
Committee of 1892, they were rejected as the committee believed
that "such badges were not in keeping with the dignity of the oldest
regatta in the southern hemisphere".
Foy was furious and announced "we'll run our own regatta on
Anniversary Day. I'll pay for it and we'll give the public what it
wants".
High-pressure publicity given to Foy's plans paid big dividends. On
regatta day, Clark Island (Sydney Harbour) was packed to capacity,
while moored ferries and jetties provided additional accomodation -
as did every vantage point along the foreshores of Sydney Harbour.
The crowd was without precedent in Australian yacht racing although
most of these spectators knew little about the sport. The vast
majority were there to thrill to the excitement that Foy had promised.
A triangular three miles course was plotted and a "staggered" start
introduced (where the best boats started after the slower boats) to
bunch the fleet for a spectacular, downwind run to the finish at
Clark Island.
At the start there had been less than three minutes between all boats
in the fleet. At the finish there were a dozen boats racing for the
line in a bow-to-bow finish.
The public got its moneys worth and the coloured badges of the 18-
footers were an instant success.
Foy had demonstrated that 18-footer racing was the most exciting
sport ever seen on Sydney Harbour - a status that has never been
seriously challenged.
--- In sailwave@y..., "Colin Jenkins" <colinjenkins@t...> wrote:
Hi,
I've uploaded another 37 beta (6). Functionally this'll be it, so
I would
be extremely grateful if you could give it a whirl while I update
the
documentation, including how to write publishing templates and
publishing
styles - and how it all fits together; I hope you don't mind use of
the SUG
for this purpose...
For those of you interested in the Sailwave HTML templates &
styles; here's
a summary... The Publish menu is now generated dynamically from
the HTML
'templates' in sailwave/templates. Styles can then be applied to
any of
these templates with the style list being dynamically generated
from the
files in sailwave/templates/styles. This means that you can add new
templates with your standard headers or even ASP code etc and write
your own
styles. I'll publish the CSS style tags that Sailwave assumes
soon. If
your templates include the style info you can decline to pick a
style at
publish time. It's the starting point for completely user-definable
results; presently Sailwave write whole chunks of HTML but I'll
gradually
break it down as time goes by.
Note that Sailwave will overwrite the templates and styles that
come with a
standard installation from install to install so it's better to
copy, rename
and tweak rather then just tweak.
Regards,
Colin
PS: Can somebody educate me - does "Mark Foy" equate to pursuit
racing or is
···
there more to it than that...?
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