Devotti Single Hander

Originally posted by italian laser s sailed the d one in torblole,strong winds,boat fast,really nice to sail and monuover,beatiful lines and design, no dangerous and stupid shrouds to hurt yourself once capsizez, easy to sail and safe,looked at the rs 100 , looks like a boat good for sailing schools but not to race sailing.....ciao

ROTFLMAO...
Italian laser rushes through the door, kicks everyone in the nads, and rushes out again.

I agree with you wholeheartedly tickler, forums are the same in any walk
of life, bikes, kites, boards, snow, it's generally a narrow group of
frequent posters that can monopolise opinion.

But in the short time I've been visiting this one, I think generally the
opinions here have broadened, the average age of the posters has
increased a bit, when I first turned up it was schoolboy central and
cherub club.

We have supernovas funny you mention them and I've raced on
occasionally, can't say I know enough about the boat to express a serious
opinion though.

As to the forum ten or twenty times the number of posters however do
visit the place and read and hopefully between the lines as well, it is a
great modern day asset. I've learned stacks on here, I wouldn't be owning
the boat I do had it not been for this place and I bet a lot of the decision
making concerning new boats to come may well get formed around the
sort of conversations that take place here, so whilst it has plenty of faults,
it's still a lot better world with this group than without it imho.

Originally posted by tickler This forum has a terrible habit of groups of people expressing views from their own small groups, if you see what I mean. Little comment ever comes from outside these groups.

I'm sure you're right Tickler, but what are we supposed to do about it ?   It's not like I can go back to my club and
force the (huge) Solo and Flying Fifteen fleets to get active on this forum.

And I'm not at all convinced that manufacturers 'see the big picture'. If I was a big manufacturer of Finns, I might
well design something that looked like a Finn for the Noughties, without too much regard for what everyone else in the
world was up to. I might then be a bit surprised that some unflattering comments came my way. The bottom line here is
that we give our opinions as best we can and (hopefully) without bias, which is not something that the manufacturers
can do.

It's nice that GRF agrees with me, last time he recommended my termination!  Re Supernova and build issues, we do have one Hartley built boat which creaks a bit but its been doing that for 3 hard years (at least you can hear it coming!) but what fairly low volume boat does not?  Even the mighty RS are not perfect.

Certainly can't see any facts to back up the claim that the Finn Masters is
bigger than the Laser Masters.

The Finn Masters Worlds, sailed in the heartland of Europe, got 229
entries, but the last couple of Laser worlds were RESTRICTED to 370 and
450 or so. The last Laser Masters reached the limit of 370 entries within 4
1/2 days of opening entry. The next Masters worlds will require pre-
qualification and has a 450 boat (approx) limit.

It looks like about 125 German sailors (Junior , Open and Master) turned
up to one or more Finn events last year. We got the same number of Laser
Masters to a single local regatta in my home town.