Racing Sailboards v Racing Sailboats

Grumpf that website you linked is funny, its the reasons i dont golf!!!  Like the cheaky git oon the end though!! look at his hand!!

Originally posted by G.R.F. Edit; I've just noticed, he plays golf,

When you get to golf, which I hear won't be long now... do you think you'll give Tiger Woods a good run for his money ...?

GRF has got some points that I agree with (and many that I think are wide of the mark).  Certainly windsurfing has produced some cracking sailors who have gone on to race succesfully in boats... Yves Loday, Ben Oakley, etc...  but I seem to remember quite a lot of good windsurfers back in the day having had a grounding in dinghies (Mark Woods, now back sailing in F15s at HISC) and Tushingham, Noble et al.

So it goes both ways which I think is kind of the point he was making.  But his really interesting thought is this...

"What does wind me up though is that in order to have any credibility
placed in ones opinion it is necessary to be a front runner, when in reality
the folk who create the majority of the market are us beginners to mid
fleet types, yet our views are ignored, by the charge being lead from the
front as the demand for ever increasingly unstable craft bolster other
fragile egos in the pursuit of what? "

Now I have a fragile ego which needs regular boosting and I sail a Musto, but I can't ignore the fact that as the boats have changed so has the whole sailing scene.

When I first started sailing in the 80s, on a little gravel pit in the Thames Valley, the main club fleet was the Enterprise, which would normally get between 10-20 entries for a Sunday morning race.  The crews were mainly male-female, husband-wife, father-son, and the competition was serious. The nature of the racing drew many people into the sport as the boats themselves were easy to sail badly, but to win races you had to sail them well.  It was a 'sport for all' scenario which is disappearing as the large club fleets of stable two man raicng dinghies at club level diminishes.  I think if we as a family came to dinghy sailing now we would be unlikley to get quite as absorbed as we did back then.  Racing in stable boats draws people in, and makes them want to stay.  That's why I also sail a Firefly.