Hello “gang” also, please let me say some words, I have been at this event for all 4 days (as from the beginning):
1<sup>st</sup>: Everybody has to know that the complete club members (MSC HANSA Heilbronn) are not professionals, they all are amateurs. They have some experience sampled since the last 15 years, but persons have changed.
In Germany the commercial situation is worse than the news are telling so most of the working people here have to work hard and they have 2 or even more jobs to get enough money. Result: time is going down.
Maybe same situation than in US. That means that the president Martin has problems to find enough members to help. Or in other words: people who are willing to help / work are difficult to find, this was very bad this year. I know that some club members think a bit different than others, but this item is an internal club issue and they have to solve it, I do not want to comment this here.
2<sup>nd</sup>: in Germany the laws, regulations and rules became and become stronger & stronger with the result that the preparation work costs more and more capacity. I think this situation is better in US.
3<sup>rd</sup>: in the past I have been the “pond boss” so it was very easy for me and the participants to follow a given time schedule. Now I have been only the speaker, there was no timing set, everything was “free running”.
Result: a lot of willing drivers did not know what is happening and decided not to run their boats. And for me it made no sense to be all the time at the pond. Please note: I am not a member of this club but I know all of them and have always helped in the past and are willing to do that in the future (until the Big Boss will stop that).
4<sup>th</sup>: big boats with very nice paint jobs (= very expensive, some paint jobs have costed more than 1000 Euros)
have been displayed, but due to the not existing timing the owners decided not to run those. Due to the fact that mostly small single cylinder boats were running. Or in other words: nobody knew, when the water was crowdy and when empty. And the owners of these smaller boats (Dutch people, some Germans, like the Berlin guys) did not have the same fear of crashes than the owners of the big boats, this was shown by their driving style.
5<sup>th</sup>: the weather was terrific, we had about 15 degrees Centigrate here and mostly cloudy, some rain also. So the motivation of a lot of guests was not so high to come (here in Europe the motivation to drive hundreds of miles to any event is not so high as in US, as I think, especially if the weather is worse than bad)
6<sup>th</sup>: this weekend was the starting weekend of the holiday season for the southern counties in Germany, so a lot of former participants have to go to holiday with their families
7<sup>th</sup>: in the last years the event was growing and growing and some modelers do not like these kind of “mass events”
8<sup>th</sup>: the hip of the turbines was going down, indeed. Main reason: costs and driveability, no way to rework any broken turbine by the modeller if anything bad has happened. In this case the turbine has to be shipped to the company (Jet Cat) for reworking and this sucks a lot of Euros.
9<sup>th</sup>: for the selling companies / dealers the situation was very bad, the competition of the internet (Asia, US) is very high so sales are going dramatically down. That means: buyers compare prices not inside Germany / Europe, they compare world wide, and Germany is an expensive country, indeed. Only hard to get items like special engines, gearboxes, driveline parts could be sold, mass production items: extremely difficult. Overall the hobby sector, especially boats, is going down here year by year. One reason: people – especially younger people - spend more time with internet, TV and cellular phones (let’s say electronic stuff) than to stay in the hobby room and construct any model, the average age increases.
I have had a conversation with the club leaders Sunday afternoon and I hope we will get a better event in 2012. The date should be optimized, direction more to the beginning of July, and I will perform the time schedule as I have did this in the past and will discuss this draft with the club and the German board weeks before the event will be held. Result (hopefully): better organization, more participants, better weather.
……Just look and wonder…….