V Twin

Grumpf, I have to agree about the need to make the sport user-friendly, but that's not going to achieved by burning all the old boats and forcing people into 16k GBP/$25,000 US or AUS carbon lightweights.

The lightest dinghies around (for their size) are the Moths, the 12 Foot Skiffs and the NZ R Class. They are lighter for size than boards and extremely expensive because there is no minimum weight (apart from the 12s which are about 45kg and heavily loaded). The 12 Foot Skiff bare hull costs over $20k AUS/US, which is thousands more than the 16' 505 hull, and 505s are hardly a low tech boat for poor people. It's fantasy to say that dropping minimum weights would not make boats extremely expensive - a 20,000 US dollar bare hull is not exactly cheap for a 12 foot boat!

If the "4 mtr craft that are thirty years old weigh under 18 kilos and quite capable of being run up the beach" are boards, as I suspect they are, then they are a totally different kettle of fish. Boards are inherently smaller and more lightly loaded and that lets them work despite construction that is inferior in many ways.... that's not better construction, it's basic physics.

My longboard fleet includes two customs built by Rick Naish and Harold Iggy for Robby; the bronze-medal winning Lechner from Barcelona, and two German built Mistrals. They are top class examples of board construction, and yet not one of them could take the loads imposed by a boat's rigging. They are not better than boats!

You can't ignore the factor of size and squaring rules. Take the IMCO and its dimensions of 3720 x 630 x approx 200, 235 L and 15kg. Compare it to the Laser, 4200 x1390 x approx 320, 840l volume (very, very roughly) and 57kg.... turns out that the Laser is about only 7% heavier for its size despite being a couple of decades older, and more durable in use.

You can't compare boards to boats any more than you can compare the weight of a car to the weight of a motorbike. A Pro Stock drag bike has a similar wheelbase (counting bars) to a Formula 1 car but only weighs 40% as much - does that mean that F1 technology is crud? No, it just means that one thing is inherently skinnier and lower and therefore weighs less.

I can't find any reason to say that boats are inferior in terms of things like rig technology. The fact that you are complaining about mast bend v luff curve is, to be blunt, ridiculous, because boat sailors often spend many hours working on those factors on and off the water, whereas boardsailors just tend to buy what they are told and crank it to the recommended settings no matter what the conditions. FWIW I reckon board rigs have gone backwards in terms of user-friendliness and wind range in some ways over the decades - they are certainly very heavy compared to what they could be.

Funny thing, y'know....when I was looking up the length of drag racing motorbikes I noticed how tight the rules are - in many ways, much tighter and more restrictive than in many sailing classes. Some sailors keep complaining that sailors have restrictions against development, but I have yet to find a sport with equipment of comparable cost that has such an excellent range of restrictions, from almost unlimited classes to very tight ones. And guess which end of the scale actually gets the sailors....