At Clinton Lake, our entire fleet has bought into the importance of fleet building. Sailing is more fun and enjoyable with more boats and more friends. We don't need to tug at anyone's heartstrings to convince them to support our cause because fleet building does not feel like volunteer work.
Working together as a team has given everyone ownership of our success. One of the biggest challenges to this success was convincing sailors to change the way we do things.
Sailors have been doing things the same way for decades. Somewhere along this path, the sellers started to outnumber the buyers by a large margin. When I started sailing at Clinton Lake in , I was excited to join a fleet with 7 other boats.
I volunteered to register names at our open house the next year and nobody showed up. By the end of , there were only 5 other boats in the fleet only 4 active because there weren't any local buyers. Thankfully, we had a very positive Fleet Captain in Deb Aronson.
Deb twisted my arm and convinced me to travel to regattas so I travelled to Ephraim in and then sailed at the NAC. It was fun to imagine what it would be like to have a thriving Flying Scot fleet like Ephraim. Together, with her husband Ben and my dad Rod, we decided to put some of those ideas into practice. In , we hope to surpass 20 local boat owners. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to fleet building, I'm sharing the details of our program in hopes it might inspire some ideas that might work at your club.
