420

It was just a comment I heard regarding the slightly older boats (I guess older meaning well used 15yr+). The main reason was that I dident have a reliable crew of my own age and that just wouldent work if I was wanting to go off traverling. But I can see your point that you can get a verry well set up boat for little money, the tanks are just something to look out for.  

I had a problem working that out (how to start a new topic)    

Edited by doeywizard - 29 Apr 11 at 6:06pm

Hi all sorry if this is wrong place Im new and cant work out how to start new question I have just bought rs feva but no road trailer and cant afford new Can anyone advise what I need to  look for second hand eg does trailer neeed to be specific to feva or are they more interchangeable than that
Any help appreciated
thanks so much

Originally posted by EmmyC Thank you for that very valuable advice. The 4th boat on that ApolloDuck page was the one I had my eye on anyway. It's cheap, and local. I have also seen a pair for sale in Cambridge for £200 each which seem in quite good condition. I have been sailing for 4 years now so I have sailed a lot of Toppers and Topazes etc so I do have a fair amount of experience.

Emmy, I'm glad that was helpful!  If you've been sailing for four years, you should be more than ready to try something more advanced.  I'm sure you know that it will involve a bit of a learning curve, and you'll probably get very wet a few times ... but if you want the challenge, then geting your own 420 will be a great way to do it.

Do remember that a 420 won't fit on top of a car, so you'll need a trailer to move it. If you're going to keep it at a sailing club, then you can probably borrow a trailer to get it home.

My 420 was an old and battered one (it had actually been abandoned at sea!), which I bought at about your age to fix up.  I learnt the hard way that if you are buying an old and tired boat is to figure out not just how much it'll cost you to buy it, but how much it'll cost you to get it sailing with working gear.

If you aren't used to rigging a 420, it'd be a good idea to view the boat with someone who knows that sort of boat (not necessarily somebody who knows 420s, but somebody who is used to rigging boats a bit more complicated than a Topper!).  It's important to rig the boat and see what gear is working, and what's missing ... 'cos anything you need to buy separately could work out expensive.

Look around some of the chandlery websites, and you'll see that even rope isn't cheap, and bit like new jam cleats all add up. Big bits are a lot more: a brand new mainsail will cost about £400, a new mast about the same, and a spinnaker pole about £60.  You could get a lot of bits secondhand on Ebay, but it'll still add up ... so make sure you do your sums!

Go for it, and have lots of fun! 

Originally posted by TwoLegged 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 learnt 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

Thank you for that very valuable advice. The 4th boat on that ApolloDuck page was the one I had my eye on anyway. It's cheap, and local. I have also seen a pair for sale in Cambridge for £200 each which seem in quite good condition. I have been sailing for 4 years now so I have sailed a lot of Toppers and Topazes etc so I do have a fair amount of experience.