The following note was e-mailed on 19Feb2011 to all Tanzer owners who were paid up members of the Class Association in 2009 or 2010. Many messages bounced back indicating we have some wrong e-mail addresses on file thus the note is also being posted on the web site.

The Association has been become steadily more inactive over the past several years. Membership has been in steady decline, submissions to Tanzer Talk trickled down to nothing (and the John Charters archives and memories, though vast, were not enough), regatta attendance dropped (very few racers wanted to travel), clubs lost interest in hosting regattas, etc.

The last burst of enthusiasm from your current executive was to head off an impending cash crunch by putting the association on-line and stopping the paper publishing of Tanzer Talk. As well, all past Tanzer Talks were made available in electronic form. Today, half the executive don’t even own Tanzers any more so the support enthusiasm has waned.

This week we reached out to all T22 owners in the Ottawa area, members or not, about 50 boats in all,  to see who had ideas on how the association might become of more value to them and to gauge our local interest level. The attendance results were underwhelming but the few that attended had some suggestions to make around marketing and a more interactive web presence. It is almost always a local enthusiast (the marketer) that makes things happen. We will look into adding an interactive face to our web site.

All that said, we feel that any rejuvenation of the Class Association will have to come from other clubs or regions. The two active centers I’m aware of are west of Montreal (Hudson and adjacent clubs) and Grand Lake, N.S. What we have decided is to provide a window of six months for other clubs/regions to take over the reins. That means coming up with a slate for the executive, which now includes the new function of web master. Of course there is no need that all the exec come from one club or region. We look forward to many positive replies.

In the interim we will stop taking membership dollars, as we have no need at this point for more money. We will also open the web site up to everyone as having a private area seems to no longer serve a purpose.  If there are no takers in the 6 month window than we will look at how to put the association into hibernation.

With Regards,