Sensible boats?

As ever, I was hoping for a simple answer on this question, but of course life’s not like that.

A friend of mine used to sail Moths, then a Canoe, a Hurricane and an Iso (you know who you are!), but then decided to take it easy and bought an Albacore. Within months he found that his perception of difficult or worrying conditions had changed so that the doddle of an Albacore now started sprouting horns of its own. He’d got used to the extra stability, taken it for granted and then found there were still limits.

But I guess you’ll be testing the limits much more often and in less wind in some boats than others. If there’s a conclusion I can draw from the discussion so far, it is that if you’re not prepared to persist then don’t buy yourself a twin-wire skiffy thing, but if you possess dogged determination and are prepared to hang in there, give it a try.

The problem I’m still left with is that many people will feel they ought to be giving it a try and will initially believe they will persist but in fact won’t. The danger then is that they will have a sense of failure when stepping ‘back’ into a Fireball or Contender, and that they’ll regard those boats as second best, and maybe just give up.

I think we can all relate to NickA’s story about the Pico being as much fun as the Laser 2 in heaps of wind, the question is, how do we keep our self-respect when ‘trading down’ (already the wrong way of looking at it)? I guess it would help if we didn’t get up ourselves over the fact that we sail ‘quite a hairy sort of boat, actually’ (even thought it secretly scares the life out of us).

The fact is that every class has its appeal: I’ve a spreadsheet with over 150 classes on it, and each of them has something the others don’t have - whether you want it at present is another matter, but I think we need to get away from the heirachy thing that assumes the fast handicap are inevitably ‘better sailors’ than the Wayfarers etc., and take the pressure off ourselves.