420

I'll let you know next week, I'm crewing on one on Sunday. The girly helm loves her 420.

Well I wouldn't be racing against any other 420s, but I probably wouldn't use the spinnaker or trapeze straight away anyway, so it wouldn't matter who I'd be racing really.

I'm not a 420 sailor, but as a 2 handed boat for light weight people, who may well move onto trap and spinny when ready, I'd say it would be a great choice. Once you get confident, you'd find the class has a much higher % of young people than the average to spend time at events with. I've no idea what the social life is like at events (sometimes too many squaddies can be a bad thing) but it is probebly better than most others for teens.
I'm assuming you are young - it might be your 65th birthday you are waiting for!

Having sailed a friends one many times on the Orwell, I think they are generally a good boat.

Emmy, I probably wouldn't recommend a 420 as your very first boat.  However, if you've got a good grasp of the basics in a Mirror a Topper or something like that, then it's a great next step.  It'd be a good idea to try before you buy, but basically they are good boat for the intermediate learner.

I sailed a 420 when I was teenager (sometime before Noah took up boating).  It was a fun boat: stable, reasonably light, quite free of handling vices, and reasonably fast.  The flared topsides keep it quite dry.

I leant a lot from sailing mine, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I took to single-handing it with all 3 sails in modest winds, when it flew along ... and with a crew I took it out in some very heavy weather and learnt an awful lot about boat-handling.

However, the 420 is a very old design, from the days before designers understood how to use fibreglass, and as a result the hulls have large swatches of fairly flat unsupported fibreglass which flexes a lot.  This means that the hulls get floppy quite quickly, so the race-winners tended to get a new hull every season. Staying at the front of the class is an expensive option, but it doesn't sound like you want to do that anyway

The old design also meant that the gear was not as well thought out as on newer boats, so some of the controls (kicker, cunningham etc) are not as accessible as you may be used to ... but

So I'd strongly suggest that if you buy a 420, buy a cheap and old one, and have lots of fun with it while you learn how to handle a reasonably fast boat, recover from capsizes and practice spinnaker and trapeze.  You don't need the latest and greatest boat to learn, and there are plenty of battered 420s for sale at less than £500:  http://tinyurl.com/6e7x7pt