Originally posted by Adds Just been on the Laser site and the Aura seems to have a very strange new name the Bahia. It also seems to have the best coloured jib ever!!

No rudder

I read that in the latest Y&Y ... I guess there must be some pretty decent club fleets now.

What clubs have gone for these?

Rick

Sunsail have 5 clubs; Minorca 1 ... don't know how many Laser have but even if they have 10 each that dosn't make much of a hole in 600 ...

Where are the rest?

Admittedly I have been sailing for a long time, although looking forward to it now I have a shiny new machine, but I have not seen any of these at all - when Laser refer to 600 being sold, are they talking in the UK, or worldwide.  Rick's right, there's no way that the sailing companies mentioned could make a dent in that number.

Giles

Not really ... all those so called "new sailors" are perhaps the future new members of clubs country wide ...

If new people to try the sport don't sail then the clubs have failed to embrace the new people who perhaps buy a boat after a holiday.

I'd say perhaps this was covered at the recent RYA conference ... or I'd hope it was ...

Getting holiday sailors to become regular club members must be key for the sport ...

Rick

Here we go again, Vago sl*gging, same old rubbish and this is a thread about the new Laser dinghy, which to be fair to Laser is aimed at Sailing Schools etc as a training boat, i.e. it isn't a 4000 replacement. 

The figure of 600 is worldwide.

Most Vago owners I have met and sailed with are more than happy with their dinghies, perhaps it is the people doing the sneering that have the problem!

I don't think TT was sl*gging of the Vago ...  just commenting on what their experince may be ...

Well said Sumo.

I have sailed a few boats, competatively as a crew and helm. Doing open meetings, nationals and europeans.

Is a Vago as good as a 4000, 800, cherub etc. not at all, it's slower, and some of the controls are harder to get to compared to lots of other boats. does it really matter? Not to me as a helm, I prefer to crew a 4000, but not helm it.

I prefer it to a 200 or a 400 though. The crewing position for the 200 seems designed to hurt your knees unless you get it exactly right, the kite is too small too. The 400 felt odd to me, but that was possibly due to not having enough weight for the wind speed.

The Vago is good fun, doesn't break in high winds or hasn't so far (that is 25 plus average speed, gusts to 40 knots) unlike the 200 where the mast bent in a big gust when going downwind (looked to be about 35 knots), but again that may have been partly my fault due to not pulling in the main enough.

I am not really a very good helm and the Vago is more than enough for me at the moment. I wouldn't be able to handle a 4000, 800 or silmilar in anything like the winds I can sail the Vago in.

I don't always want to be whizzing about at high speed either, sometimes a nice potter about in a boat you can sit in comfortably is good too. You can't do that in a 4000, 800 etc. they need to be actively sailed or they capsize.

So as a trainer type boat the Vago does all I need it to do, and it's a lot more fun then most others I have tried. Saying that it is a trainer type is undermining it a bit too, as it is a lot more than that.

Flying down wind with the hull out of the water to the centreboard with me as the helm is exciting enough for me at the moment thanks.

Deciding on the Vago came after quite a bit of thought. We had a 200 but sold that as our knees weren't up to the stresses of crewing it. The 3000 and 29er were just to cramped. The 400 too much of a big boys boat. The fast  asymetrics with more space 4000, 800, etc just too hard at my age. So what else was there for the price with an asymetric kite and a trapeze fo rme to helm? You don't have to answer that as it was a retorical question as far as I am concerned.

500 wasn't out at the time.

I had a long chat with Nick Peters when they were testing the prototype.

He said the 500 was designed as a youth boat for people who didn't want to or couldn't get into the 29er squad. It looked too cramped for us when we looked at it.

Also after having owned a 200 and seen the build quality of the new ones, a cheap glass boat didn't really hold much interest. 

I wasn't dissing RS either or at least not on purpose, most other glass boats except for the 4000 are fairly easy to break. Other things tend to break if you hit them or they hit you in a 4000. It is just the experience I have had so far.

Rotomoulded boats bounce unless hit by a sharp pointy bit.

Glass boats crunch and need repairing as I know to my cost.

plastic boats do break if they arent built right. the old feva hulls crack in the self drainage channels. this problem has been fixed on new hulls though.

and u dont have to hit them hard to dent them, loads of fevas on the cirsuit had dents in their bows from their road trolleys and you can seriously bend them by tying them down too hard.

contary to popular belief roto moulded boats arent unbreakable and if they do break they are a nightmare to get mended whereas glass boats can be mended by lots of people around the country. i bet a crack on a plastic boat (a proper crack, hull cracked right through) would be more expensive and more difficult to get fixed than a similar break on a glass boat.

I can't be bothered to respond to personal comments in any meaningful way.

How to put TT back in his place in one swift move

Don't take TT's comments personally dwh99, he'd say anything to get a laugh, that man... We've all been on the receiving end, one day or the other

we've got half a dozen picos as club boats , was quite shocked to see them upside down in storage last winter , hulls severely distorted , huge hollows etc , I expect roto moulding has improved , otherwise I pity anyone who has bought one for other than training .

When new they were ok apart from plastic being a bit sparse in places .

Curiously old toppers (and I mean much older ) seem to fair better.

It also sounds like from discriptions I've heard about Feva's, quite hard to repair Roto-moulded boats, so at least in some ways the mirrors had major plus points as you could easily repair the wood panels. The mirrors were also starting to fade after 20-25 years of use, wonder if the same could be said about roto-moulded boats in half that time span.

Unfortunately irony is quite hard to do with just text.
It was also that I had to leave so was unable to comment any further.

Just as an aside have you actually sailed a Vago or any of the plastic boats other than Toppers and Picos?

My experience of 200s was that they are quite fragile. A glancing blow to the area just under the gunwhale caused several hundred pounds worth of repair. The same type of collision in a plastic boat wouldn't cause anything like the damage done here. Someone else had their 200 cleaned and polished and the person doing the work leant on the hull and caused a fairly large crack. RS did repair this for free, but it shouldn't really have happened in the first place. We also chipped ours on the stones on the beach and by hitting it with the launching trolley. I have only hit one other boat so bumper cars is a bit of a exaggeration.

The plastic boats are difficult to repair. Someone with a Vago was hit by the bow of a flying 15 in the classic T boning port starboard incident. The hole in the Vago was about a 18" across and a foot vertically, through both skins. They got a new hull from laser as it was uneconomic to repair.  A new hull was about £2000. It was repairable as the boat was sailed for 2-3 weeks with temporary repairs, but these weren't permanent or to a particularly high standard. I think the person at fault bought the hull as an insurance right off and had it fixed for messing about in. This is in contrast to a similar incident with a Merlin Rocket hit in the same way. The hole was more like about a 3 foot circle. Not quite sure of the cost of that but it was very expensive I know. For that sort of thing I think I would personally prefer a new hull to a major structural repair, even if it meant a slightly higher insurance premium.

I owned the 200 for about 18 months 2 years before buying the Vago and to be honest I much prefer the Vago to the 200. I hate hiking as a crew so that was a big plus from my point of view. Vagos are quite slow upwind, a well sailed 200 is probably faster, but that might be that I am not very good, but the Vago is much faster downwind. I think the 1000 PY is only if you are a top class sailer and still possibly a bit low. 1050 for the XD is much more like it as far as I am concerned. I will still not win any of the big pursuit races we have even at 1050. The type of people, myself included, who sail the Vago will probably never be able to sail it to it's full potential. I started too late and don't practice enough being the biggest problems.

Once I can helm and my crew trapeze (we have swapped when using the Vago as we each want to try what the other was doing) to a reasonable standard we will probably be moving back to the 4000 fulltime, except when we want to potter about the harbour or take out friends who don't sail as it is much more comfortable for that sort of thing.

I remember what it was like learning to sail in the 4000, we went swimming all the time. The Vago is much more forgiving and stable.

I can see nothing but good coming from the easy to sail, general maintenance free plastic boats, whether they are Laser, Topper or RS built. There is something quite intimidating in going straight to the performance/race boats of whatever category.

You do get a lot of performance from the Vago for the money. They do perform very well in high winds too. We have raced in average 25 knots with gusts of 35-40 and the boat performed very well. With only a couple of boats having any breakages and these were due to an easily fixable design problem with the bolts on the rudder stock. 

As I said before after looking at all the options available the Vago was the best choice for us for what we wanted. After nearly a year of ownership it still is. I am more than happy with it. I do prefer the 4000 though, but not with me as a helm currently.

IMHO too many new designs are trying to be all things to all people. I don't know if this is customer lead or marketing think tank but it seems that boats like the Vago (and previously the Topaz )are trying to hook people with the promise of "fast as a 49er, easy to sail as a Mirror". This just isn't acheivable in the one boat and it is misleading of manufacturers to make it sound any other way. The majority of contributors on this forum sail high-performance boats but we all started on something simpler and slower and are probably the better sailors for it. Not that speed is everything or even the best thing - merely the preference of most who add their two-penneth to this forum.

As for the polyprop vs GRP debate. Rotomoulding offers real advantages over GRP with regard cost of manufacture as it can be automated BUT only if the batch size is large enough to make the tooling costs cost effective. Maintainance-free is something we were offered when we switched away from wooden boats. Was it true? Will it be true for the Vago or Aura? Doubt it. But I think this debate about construction is a red-herring.

Jo Richards seems to be repeatedly be given the same impossible brief by Laser design a high-performance, low maintanance family boat that is easy to sail. The irony is that Laser's most successful boat is the original Laser and it is successful because it doesn't try to be versatile.

TT, I hope you never had a chance to find out if the 200 was fragile - if so I want my money back

Loving it by the way, and the other half hasn't wanted to stop sailing despite chipping ice off the top cover at the weekend.

I sail my Vago when I want some fun, my other boat is a 59er which demands much more skill and agility from me to sail well and keep the right way up. I personally don't see any irony in enjoying the Vago whilst wanting the skill to be able to sail a more tricky boat well. Personally I have found that the Vago has some good points as a training boat for those wanting to sail a skiff, namely the hull shape means that flat is fast, something that a Rs200 won't teach you as well.

More accurately, flat means "feels" fast;  as sailing the boat seemed to me like a lot of effort for the amount of actual pace that comes out, hence the revised PY of around 1050 I guess.

.... but it could be an excellent beach boat from which to progress to a 29er, where only a little more balancing results in a much more impressive result!

On topic (!) the Aura could be a cheaper Stratos (good) or a heavy Stratos made wobbly in an effort to extract some performance (bad), we'll have to see and I'd be happy to try one out.  Love the jib.

Personally I sail a Pico when its REALLY windy .. and I'm not (that) ashamed to admit it!   So power to your elbow Sumo.

and any pre-teens who think I'm "gay" for liking colourful sails and the odd plastic boat  ... are wrong as it happens.

We actually own both a 4000 and a Vago, it used to be a 4000 and 200. the small one for me to learn to helm in. I haven't as yet helmed the 4000 in any races.

The Vago is faster than a Xenon, we have raced against one and easily beat it.

I did quite like the 200, but after a couple of things including some damage to mine and other boats, including seeing what happens if you run aground without a quick release cleat on the rudder, which is a big possibilty if you sail where I do, and not really enjoying the 200 open meetings like the 4000 ones. We thought it would be better to change to something that handles more like a 4000. The Vago is a lot of fun, and we do sail it when we wouldn't take the 4000 out because it is too windy. 

As I said I prefer the Vago for a number of reasons, but there are a few things that seem odd if you are used to a very stiff glass boat, but then it isn't designed as a high performance race boat. I would say it is a high performance play boat really. Good to get started with lots of sail options to try different types of sailing.

There aren't many boats that are designed so that you can easily put multiple sail shapes and sizes and also reef the sails, hike or trapeze quite easily. It is also quite easy to single hand, particularly if you can trapeze.