Laser Whinging Thread

As an example, "instant gratification" is often said to be a Facebook generation ideal - but how "instant" is spending the years you need to spend to learn how to sail a high-performance skiff type???  In every way from rigging to actually learning how to sail around a course, the Laser type fits the instant gratification model better than a high-performance dinghy does.  

 I have no idea how old you are or how well connected you are to Facebook kids, but it's easy to see that for today's (often) less active kids, with their busy lives, it's easy to see that a simple craft can work better.  One of my nephews stopped racing his skiff trainer at the world's biggest Skiff club because he was sick of stuffing around through the complicated rigging process when he could instead by doing a whole lot of other things - why people assume that kids today have more time to spend rigging and training baffles me TBH.  

As an analogy, there's a lot of Facebook Generation guys riding around these days on simple, slow, retro fixed-gear bikes (=Laser??) and ignoring fast carbon TT bikes (= skiff??).  We've got one around at the moment, belonging to a random boyfriend (our daughter's boyfriend, that is, not mine).  As usual there's four teens in the place; our 21 year old, who has been coding at Google while on holidays from his comp sci scholarship, is living near uni and has attracted seed venture capital for his own social networking idea.  The idea that no one who favours Lasers knows the Facebook generation is a joke to those of us who have spent years bringing up these kids, and their friends, through all the tears and joys of their lives.

The class I ran until recently has now become 25% teens, including many of the top kids in the major training fleets for the Skiff clubs. This class is about as fast as a Laser Radial, yet it attracts many of the elite of the skiff juniors - that alone demonstrates that they are not all in favour of fast craft.

Just like the Cherub kids I spent the weekend racing against, they regularly strike me (and their parents) by how similar they are on the water to earlier generations - they just wanna have fun, and that can mean anything from blasting at speed to sticking five kids on a Cherub in a drifter.

If there was a drop-off in kids over the last 5 years, surely that tells us that the attempts to bring in youth Skiffs and youth cats (which came in around that period) have done nothing to lift numbers, therefore fast boats are not the key to youth retention.  Anyone who looks at some of the collapsing youth fleets in some Skiff clubs here could also say that.  Hell, the Moth fleet here lost about 10% of its members in a single year, does that mean that Moths are bad for kids?????

IMHO we can all sit here and theorise about what the Facebook generation wants in a boat - the plain and simple fact is that when the theorising stops, most kids end up sailing slow simple SMODs and it doesn't seem to be the youth where numbers are dropping off - the disappearing segment in dinghy sailing seems to be the adults in trap boats.

Basically, to assume that all modern kids are clones with the same desires in boats is seriously under-rating them, and assuming that they all want faster boats is a baseless assumption.  We've got a very good experiment going on down here where Skiff clubs promote and subsidise Skiff trainers and guess what - they have the same youth drop-off problem as conventional boats and every other sport.  

When someone says that anyone who doesn't agree with them has a psychiatric condition, you've got to doubt their sanity....

BTW, despite what James apparently thinks, recent science has discovered that this is not the first generation of teenagers to be interested in sex, drugs, music and technology....