Christmas has been taking up a lot of my time of late, but I did want to return to this topic.
Comments seem to be spread between those who believe that nothing can be done, and those who believe that something should be done - though no one is sure just what might be possible or useful.
For those who believe that nothing can be done, I suggest that they consider how best to preserve information about the hobby for future generations. Plans, manuals, memorabilia, reminiscences and anecdotes are all things which are worth preserving in some way. Model Boats runs a very useful 'Flotsam and Jetsam' series which is ideal for that - I am sure that it would welcome more input.
In the 'something can be done' camp there is some feeling that the representative bodies for the hobby are rather inward looking. If we want to attract more people to the hobby we need to look outside - at people who have no exposure to it, rather than people who already attend model boating events - this was Phil Parker's point.
ChrisF also made the point about the increasing lack of suitable water - without some weight behind the request it is hard to argue with local councils when suitable sites are converted to nature reserves...
Several people spoke about about the decrease in manual skills in schools, and I think that there is a change beginning in the education field. Quite why the country needs 50% of its young people to have academic university degrees escapes me, and I see that there are growing numbers of vocational trainming establishments such as St Edmunds in Norwich - these should be much more responsive to participating in manual hobbies such as ours - but again an individual has less weight than a body representing a larger number of modellers...
One of the things my web site was set up to do was to provide resources for just such activity. As I said earlier, I am now moving more into the area of providing both CNC cutting files and 3-D printing files, to enable educational establishments (and those of us who have appropriately equipped workshops!) to create comprehensive 'virtual kits' in an easy to make up format. It would be nice for such services to be part of a wider initiative rather than being individual instances...
