1) Maxi 1050 finishes 7th in 2009 ARC

A French owned Maxi 1050, “Minimaxi”, finished 7th overall in the Cruiser Section & 1st in her Class in the 2009 ARC.

Her blog can be viewed at http://blog.mailasail.com/minimaxi and can be read in English using Google’s Translate toolbar.  Hearty congratulations to “Minimaxi” from the M-O-A!!

This is the second Maxi (that we know of!) that has participated successfully in the ARC.  The other one was a Maxi 33 ‘Kjempekjekk’ back in 2003.

2) More on Maxi Yachts, AGM and Rallies, and web project!

The Maxi 1300 has been exhibited at both the recent Hamburg and Düsseldorf boat shows, with an order already placed for a French customer.  We have just heard the new Maxi 1060 is already at the Gothenburg Boat Show which opens tomorrow until the 14th Feb.  A string of new agents are being established across Europe, with Turkey, Slovenia and Croatia joining those already signed in Italy, France and Holland and starting their own marketing activities.  We now look forward to seeing similar progress in the UK, historically one of the most important markets for Maxi Yachts.

M-O-A members will be pleased to see dates announced in the members area for this year’s AGM and our popular Solent Rallies.  The AGM venue will be announced as soon as possible, together with further details on the Rally programme.

We have been quietly working on a new web project to replace our FrontPage-based web (which has become somewhat cumbersome) with a more interactive Web 2.0 CMS offering far better user functionality for both public and members-only.  It is too early to make firm promises as the new project (which will be based on Joomla 1.5/1.6) depends solely on volunteer effort but we are learning fast!  We are looking for a new webmaster from within the membership to administer and manage our new Joomla web.  We hope their task will be less time consuming than our current FrontPage web because various committee and other members will contribute or update their own items directly from any web browser.  So the inevitable plea of “help!” to our members – can you help us finalise our web project, or would you consider volunteering as our new web master?

          Chris