Fireballs Nationals

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the assy became standard first, and the symmetrical kite was developed later. One can think of many '90s ads speaking in breathless hype about the wonders of being able to sail directly to the leeward mark. Topper would have had huge headlines about how macho it was to handle a detachable pole, complete with heavily edited quotes about the joys of being able to sail tight reaches AND sneak out of the tide. Magazines would have been full of articles about the trendy new technique of sailing low, and sneers about those who insisted on reaching back and forth with assy kites.

Some of those of us whose first dinghy was an assy with a swivelling pole find the whole assy hype rather amusing. It's not that I don't like them, either - of our three kite boats, one has a sym, one has an assy that sometimes runs a swivelling pole, and the other has a standard assy. But the hypesters who ignore their downsides and denigrate sym kites are rather amusing.