I know that some U.S. Buggy Powerkiters have been some what… Well, baffled watching the past 6 months of UK e-mails in relation to our Buggy race series! Well they are not the only ones?
To set the scene 10 months ago, in September 2002, the UK ParaKart Association (PKA) was preparing to host the European/World Parakart (Buggy) Championships at the Lytham Landyacht club beach site. (Between Liverpool & Blackpool)
In August 2002 a member of the public walking on Lytham beach was struck by a Landyacht and was killed. As to be expected, all land yacht and buggy use on the beach was suspended, pending an investigation by the Health & Safety Executive.
This was a tragic accident and the knock-on effect was that the Championships, planned to take place in less than 3 weeks, were cancelled!
By the end of October 2002 every English beach buggy site had a ban placed upon it by local government officials (Councils) as a knee-jerk / legal protection reaction. This threw the English buggy scene into total disarray!
Even before this event a group of PKA members including some PKA committee members were less than happy with the running of the PKA and had begun expressing their views to the senior PKA committee members. This had not been a comfortable time for all concerned, but some consensus was being reached, or so we thought. A ‘shadow committee’ was been prepared by this group, for presentation to the membership, when all hell let lose!
I need to declare my interest in this acrimonious affair, that being that I was one of the group negotiating for change within the PKA.
That said those of us ‘identified’ by the existing PKA senior committee members, whom we had previously been negotiating with, found ourselves in an e-mail slanging-match and being threatened with legal action if we continued to ‘undermine’ the senior PKA members!
As you can guess this took those in the group rather by surprise as we had been making some progress.
Steve Walt Webb
Ozone Friendly SkyDog!
www.flyozone.com
