Building a New Melges 24 Fleet

As you will have gathered from our recent news reports the Melges 24 Class is experiencing a growth spurt at the moment with a number of new classes being formed across Europe and the Asia Pacific region as well as excellent growth in the USA.

The IMCA team is constantly at work behind the scenes helping these new classes as they become established and we frequently call upon the established national classes to help support the new countries as they find their feet. IMCA Chairman Günter Tzeschlock was recently in correspondence with the Arne Anderson of the Norwegian Class and asked him what he thinks has been the secret to the amazing growth in the Norwegian Class specifically and the Nordic regions generally in the past couple of years.

Arne's answer makes fascinating reading for any of you trying to get a new fleet off the ground or breath new life into an existing inactive fleet:

Hi Günter

Well of course there are a lot of factors in achieving fleet growth:

1.Very active website, with news every day in the season and 2-3 every week off season.
a.We are 5 people writing
b.We update other sailnews websites with important news

2.Melges is one of top 3 classes in numbers in Norway.
a.This gives us publicity
b.Draws people from other classes like 11meter and Hboat etc that do have a negative trend

3.Almost all the best sailors we have, not thinking the Olympic team, do sail Melges

4.We poke a lot. Meaning, we call every sailor for the 2 biggest events, Hankø Race Week and Norwegian Championship. These is to show Norway we are many boats.

5.The Norwegian Agent for Devotti and Melges spare parts have invested
in 6 boats to be used in a cup, where teams rent it to be part of it.

6.We are very open minded and help all new sailors, and we will always give them a warm welcome.

7.We do have some great parties and events like Skiyachting

8.We arrange tune up weekends with professional coaches and practice Tuesday before Wednesday racing

9.We have one boat called MÅS that are given a youth team each year, for a fixed, but reasonable cost.

10.We have 2 different rankings, one for the 3 big events (open waters) and one that counts every regatta.

11.We have a wonderful and motivated guy, Petrus Eide, who spends lots of time promoting the class to all sailor he meets.

Hope that gives you some ideas, and off course, luck has lots to do with the growing class, we had a dip just 3 years ago, and now growing, will always draw new sailors.

Arne David-Andersen
Melges NOR 560 Lycke II