Dinghy Show??

Which is more than can be said for the Contender Emo's who were standing around moaning and self harming after their joyful handicap news, it's so bad they're offering to give one away to some youf, so we sent Demolition Dan over to them, but he'd heard at the end of the period you get a bill for restoring it to it's current condition which there's no way he could ever afford to finance, himself sailing a boat in retrospect.

I got conned by buying one of those alleged 'bargain cut offs' which I now hear are a dealer con that they mark up high in order to pretend they're off cuts to then mark down. I also heard the story of the sail for my V2, it was 1164, who by chance was on the Vortex stand, he told me he'd sent it back to Hyde because it was a dud, they exchanged it and I ended up with the dud, no wonder I'd thought it was crap, that whole sorry saga is best forgotten. Then this crap dealer Jimmy something or other, with the elastic and the blokes on sailboats.co.uk who hadn't the first idea what the ropes did on their solo, so unprofessional.

The Alto stand was shielded by a wall RS had erected which wouldn't be allowed in a lot of shows we exhibit at, but it didn't dent their enthusiasm, and it's nice to hear of all the new boats cropping up here and there. Then we had a great demonstration of the Merlin single action rig rake device, that was mind boggling.

The Aardvark Rocket gets my vote as boat of the show and the OK best ornamental furniture prize, there's also an impressive veneer on the side of a bigish yacht delivery adboat as you go in. The feature is a little lame this year 50 or is it 60 years of the Mirror? Who cares? and there was some other boat proclaiming that 60 was the new 40, think it was either a Javlin or an Osprey, both irrelevant to modern sailing.

Shame there was no Parker 505 I'd hoped to see that in the flesh, everyone thinks I should get a Fireball and there were quite a few of them as were there lots of Solo's, we spent far to much time looking at both, but I had to humour the boys. The Ovington stand never fails to impress and this year it was the rig on the FX that did the job and a rumour of something else they have in the pipeline but Chris got dragged away before he could enlighten us about.

Every time I see that Solution I wish i could get a go in it and wonder why such a lovely boat doesn't have more support down south, the other 'improver of the year' has to be the Supernova, there's a very nicely tricked out version up there. I dropped in on the Blaze, bothered the Boon boat boys about their solo, admired the jib stick thing on the Ki and the dangly pole on the icon, then we left, there were a few other things that I've already forgotten, but an enjoyable show worth the trip as usual. Missed mark this year and a few other regulars, but caught up with others, and tomorrow I'm back on the water with my elastic jock strap none the wiser as to how some character called Charlie Company who is a hot shot in the Solo's apparently makes his work, but I'll work it out.