Another What Boat Thread

Originally posted by Graemef No, its not a wind up. Perfectly Genuine request, obviously a bit premature for RS500 sailors, thought there would be more. As for that other conversation. Hi Graeme what you riding these days? Oh I'm messing about sitting down more nowadays. Really what on? A Cherub. Get out of town...

.........not saying a thing.........

Anyway isn't the sensible and most logical thing to do is to crew for someone with a High Performance Boat to learn the ropes and then move back to the MPS when you have built your confidence. Would save yourself a lot of hassle and at least £4000 if you are currently planning to buy a 500 and in the process you'd be picking up skills naturally from someone more experienced instead of struggling to piece everything together by yourself. Boats like the MPS need to be tuned well appropriately to the conditions and if you don't do this, they do handle like dogs, it's not a design flaw, it's optimising the boat to go fast in all conditions. To put it simply, when it rains, you don't change the tyres on say a Ford Escort to deal with the conditions as the design and performance of the car does not demand it but the Formula 1 racing Teams do put wet tyres on their cars becuase otherwise they wouldn't perform.......The MPS like the F1 car has to be set up for the conditions appropriately unlike simpler designs. Suprises me you bought an MPS if you don't think cats are too tactical because in almost most circumstances, the tactics used on cats go really well on skiffs due to the relative high speeds involved with the boats. You lose out on skiffs by tacking on shifts very much like cats, noticed it on the race-course first hand and its pretty well documented in quite a few publications, probably best explained in High Performance Sailing by Frank Bethwaite.

Please, please please please, please don't encourage this man to buy a cherub.

All our modern hulled boats are hand-crafted, highly desirable works of high-tec engineering. It would be a travesty to sail one off a shingle beach with a shore dump.

I know that we are a development class and that he could fit a centerboard within the rules, and sail it twin or single wire, with whatever soft or battened sail plan he wanted, and that it would be light enough to carry up the beach without a trolley but I fear that even the kevlar boats might not cope in the conditions he describes.

I can't think of a boat that fit's his wish list, but I  would advise a cherub