Tower trapezing

Hey - I live within sight of the cheese rolling hill 

Umm... the 'Emsley Carr Mile' is run ever year and has been since 1953. And is a rather prestigious race.

When boats like the Contender were being developed, there was very little in the way of small singlehanded sailing craft that was faster.  Singlehanded cats were quite rare, perhaps because early cats had tacking issues and therefore designers tended to put jibs on them.  The A class as we know it came to being pretty much around the same time as the Contender, but were arguably more of a leap into the unknown.  As we all know there was also the IC, but that was a very small and low-profile class, which says something in itself about the priorities of dinghy sailing in its boomtime.

In contrast, today there are highly developed cats, foiling cats, kites and boards that are all arguably normally as fast or faster than any dinghy - perhaps even Moths.  So the dinghy is no longer, perhaps, the leading edge of sailing craft on water. Given that, trying to make the fastest dinghy may no longer be all that logical. If you want to go really fast in a small sailing craft then the kitefoiler may be the logical way to go, and even the Moth an also-ran.  So once you are giving up on the dream of leading-edge performance, it just makes sense to concentrate on the other qualities that dinghies do so well, like being fun in light winds and practical.  Chasing extremes like tower trapezing doesn't fit into that paradigm.

Yes, the Unicorn, Australis and others appeared in around 1967, but they seem to have been a very rapid and major leap forward from B-Lions and other earlier As.  A couple of years before that, Elvstrom had already shown raced the Trapez and David Thomas had raced the Unit.  I'm pretty damn sure that the pre-1967 cats were generally cruder and less evolved in many ways than the pre-1967 monos that people were familiar with. 

The point was that in 1967, many people were familiar with fairly well evolved monos but there were far fewer well evolved cats. A few As, a tiny number of Cs and some Bs were well on the way to becoming fantastic boats but they were a tiny minority. Some guys I knew who had Cs at that time (ie Crowther and Haines) spoke of them as being very undeveloped although a couple of them were better.

My father was an early cat sailor. If the boat he sailed wasn't a poor tacker (according to its very successful designer, Cunningham) he may have lived a lot longer, so the tacking of early cats is something I'm very aware of.  And I've been a clubmate of Steve Brewin and Andrew Landenberger who has you know have won more than one A worlds, but the fact is that while the As are wondrous creations they do tack slower than most monos.  Last season when Landy Jnr and Snr raced with us on our small inland lake, we had to give them a 16% yardstick reduction to make them competitive with the Lasers and Tasars and much of that was because they cannot tack as fast despite having world titles and an Olympic medal.