Hello,

Please forgive this intrusion. I am a fellow sailor that has created a website designed to get crew for racing sailboats, its a free service to the skippers and the crew, I am not trying to sell anything nor am I selling any of your information either, and in order to get the word out about the website I thought the best way to start would be to contact the officers at each Yacht Club or Association directly and let them get the information out to their members via the newsletters that most Yacht Clubs have.

I worked out all the bugs and I have expanded the site to encompass the entire United States.

The site now has the ability to schedule every Race Date in every Harbor Area in every Region of the United States, and some parts of Canada, as of March 15th 2006.

I have given you the users of the site the ability to "Suggest Races" and upload them to your own Harbor Areas Calendar, and if a mistake is made you the users of the site can Edit the data and have it re-uploaded to the schedule instead.

I have added a Forum/Bulletin Board for each specific Harbor Areas Use, as of March 15th 2006. Its a place to discuss rules, weather, PHRF ratings, seminars, training events, etc.

The site has free websites that I am giving away for each boat to schedule that boats specific race schedule, and practice schedule, and delivery schedule. You as the skipper can add your crew as users to your very own site and then your crew can show you their availability as compared to the boats schedule and so you will know ahead of time if you are short on crew on a particular date, and you can come to the bigger www.Steadycrew.com crew list to ask for a particular position skill that you are short on for that date.

I have also enabled what I call the "Low Tech" method of searching for crew, where if a crew member has said they don’t mind their data being browsed through, you can search a list of these crew members. This method does not indicate that a crew person is available on the day you need them (like the other method does), but you can call (or e-mail) and ask. The one thing that is different though about this list is that the site can tell if a user has not logged in for the past 3 months and so their data wont be shown on any list on the site. In this way the site is ensuring that the data is current and correct. Both of these features were just added as of March 7th.

The www.SteadyCrew.com website is undergoing constant development;

We are working on adding pictures to the skippers and crew peoples profile; you may not know the name but you may recognize the face of the person you see on these lists, because lets face it sailing is a small community. Look for this feature to be activated the last week of March 2006.

We are working on adding an online race scoring system for the yacht clubs to use in scoring the races, which would post the results of each race in real time to the internet. The Yacht Clubs can link there websites to their own results page on this website (which we will be providing at no charge), or they can download the results and upload them a second time on their own websites, or both. These results will remain posted on the Steadycrew website until the next running of each race the next year.

There is but one fatal flaw in the entire idea of creating the steadycrew website, and that is if it doesn’t get used.

If skippers don’t come to the site and tell the site that they have an available position on their boat, and if crew don’t come to the site and inform the site that they are available, the site cant create the list of availabilities to show each of you.

If you racers don’t fill out the Suggest a Race form for the races in the local Harbor Area calendars, well the races wont be shown in that calendar.

If you users of the site don’t come to the Forums that I have set up for you, well there wont be anything in the forums to talk about.

If you Skippers don’t come to the free websites I have created for your boats and add your crew to your personal crew lists and add events to your own boats schedule, upload some pictures of your boat and crew having fun on the water, well then there wont be much of a website for your boat.

Remember, this site is absolutely free to the skippers and the crew.

This is the most complex and comprehensive crewing website ever created. Give it a try like the other 4,000 people have this month. Use the new features of the site, so they wont go to waste.

I did not create this website for personal gain, I was just frustrated because I myself could not find crew on a consistent basis! Maybe you yourself are not having this problem but I bet you know of many many other skippers that are. I truly believe that there are plenty of crew or potential crew people that just need a way and a neutral place to come in order to find the opportunity to go sailing with you or one of the other boats. Can I please ask you to help me in these 3 ways?

If you like what I have done, ask your Yacht Club webmaster to create a link from your Yacht Clubs race specific web pages to this site.

If you like what I have done have the editor of your Yacht Clubs newsletter contact me and hopefully write some little article about this site for you and all of your members to read.

If you like what I have done tell me about some of the local newspapers/periodicals/magazines that are around in your marina, so I can contact them and have them write something up in their paper about the site and hopefully drum up more crew on this site for you to invite out on your boats.

Thank you for reading this lengthy message, I would greatly appreciate any input , criticism, direction that you can offer.

Cheers.