Ease of Handling Grading...

If you were to be asked purely on ease of handling, not on difficulty of doing very well, how would you grade the dinghies you have experience of on a 1 to 10 scale, with say the Laser as a Standard set in the middle at 5?

Good question, but 'easy' to handle is not the same thing as 'wonderful' to handle. And what do you mean by handle - gybing and roll tacking, or not tipping over in gusts?

Waterline width and a low centre of gravity and key to reducing twitchiness, but one persons twitchy is another persons 'responsive' with good feedback. It is my opinion that the metacentric height http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacentric_height is an under-appreciated thing in dinghies. I've been estimating and researching values for some dinghies, and think that there probably is an optimum value for racing dinghies, which is neither big nor small, but somewhere in the middle.

Then of course, there are a myriad other things like does the rig yield nicely (a topic in its own right), height under the boom, how easy the toe straps are to locate, what sort of sheeting arrangement there is, do the foils stall, etc, etc...

Personally, I remember trying a Byte (tin rig version) when I sailed Toppers and thought it was horribly over responsive. Don't know if I'd think that way now, but based on that distant memory I'd score the Byte at about a 2. The Blaze is much more stable than a Laser, but it is much slower to tack (maybe I just don't have the right technique).

Many years ago, when the Blaze first came out, I went up to Datchet and had a test sail of Blaze and Byte. It was horribly gusty, and I must have put the Byte in 1/2 a dozen times. The Blaze, despite being more powerful, and having the original fully battened sail, was much more forgiving.

However, does that mean I'd put the Byte as a harder boat to sail on GRF's list? I don't think so. I'd probably put the Blaze as a 4 and the Byte as a 6.

Other than that - Lightning, 6, Minisail 7, Tera 10, Vareo 4, British Moth 7, Firefly 8, Laser EPS 4, Mirror 15, Prout Puffin 2 (like trying to make a coracle sail upwind...), RS800 -7.

Of course, the fact that I have sailed Fireflies all my life and an RS800 twice on holiday might have something to do with my gradings! Well, and that one of them is very silly.

The Blaze is wonderful in a gale, but painful and difficult to use in a F2 (IMO).  You can't get the transom out of the water (a la Phantom) without standing on the bow, you can't roll tack it, it's difficult to heel to windward or leeward to without digging a rack in, when you hit a wind hole you're so far out from the centre line you need cat-like reflexes to get back in the middle and prevent a backwards roll into the water.

I can forgive all that though for those rare days when it's blowing a hooly.  Definitely scores somewhere around a 3-4 for ease of handling in my opinion.