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eric_c View Drop Down
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Posts: 382 		Direct Link To This Post Topic: 50S
    Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 6:20pm
Originally posted by fab100

.....

Oh, and anyone buying (or not) any boat on the basis of it’s PY needs to get a life, frankly. 

^^^This.

Except maybe, if a boat does well against its PY at your club, just perhaps that's telling you it's the right kind of boat for the venue in some way? Maybe its optimum wnd range suits the venue, or the courses your club sets or the hull is right for the waves etc etc.
Also you can look at boats like the RS400 and see it has a fast PY for its size/type compared to most of its SMOD contemporaries, and maybe that tells you it's a well designed boat? Which might suggest it will be pleasant/rewarding to sail?

   But most classes have so little data to base a PY on, it's a joke.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 6:20pm
Originally posted by davidyacht

Apart from Sailjuice events, the only benefit that I can see of PY is to truck up in an old (cheap) boat and be in with a shout for a good result, since few people bother to invest heavily in boats except for one design racing

I understand that you like OD racing, but you let your preference blind you to facts. There are many, many people who spend lots of money on boats that will race almost exclusively in handicap fleets. In my handicap fleet we have a National 18, some Finns, Aero’s, RS1/2/400s, Fireballs, Musto’s, Scorpions etc all of which probably cost more than the price of a new Laser.
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Posts: 1312 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 6:17pm
"Oh, and anyone buying (or not) any boat on the basis of it’s PY needs to get a life, frankly."

Absolutely, couldn't agree more, end of. 
 
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iGRF View Drop Down
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Posts: 6499 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 6:13pm
It's an interesting discussion, but it does just illustrate how closed minded and lacking in vision y'all are. As to making suggestions as to what I want, (just one dinghy designed so it had no stupid flaws would be cool, so far, there aint one, they all suck in one way or another). As to magazines I was helping a pal develop a kitemag with page turning software whilst you lot were still tearing your mags up to wipe your collective backsides on. I did actually even put the suggestion to him to expand into the void that is small performance boat sailing where the bastions of the past bore the world to tears, but as he put it, 'show me the money' and tbh I couldn't, there aint any, it's such a closed shop and I doubt could ever be opened up to modern commercialism and so it goes on slowly but ever so surely disappearing up its own transom.

Edited by iGRF - 14 Mar 22 at 6:16pm
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davidyacht View Drop Down
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Posts: 1345 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 6:06pm
Apart from Sailjuice events, the only benefit that I can see of PY is to truck up in an old (cheap) boat and be in with a shout for a good result, since few people bother to invest heavily in boats except for one design racing
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Posts: 1005 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 5:35pm
Theres are interesting contrast between sportsboats and dinghies here. Sportsboats seem to have a half-life of 2-3 years, which means writing off £100 grand every couple of years. An industry insider mate explained it thus; the rich corinthian guys get hacked off that the pros have got into their latest toys and taken all the fun out of it. So they collude and move on to the next big thing. The pros follow them (‘cos that's where the sales are to be made). Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

This is how iGRF would like dinghies to be. If he had Thanos’s bejewelled glove he’d click his fingers and every two years, every dinghy would pixellate and disappear and we’d all start again. But I’d wager 80% of dinghy owners spend more on their berthing fee every year than on their boat. And that half the boats in dinghy parks have not had £100 spent on them in the last five years. A big contrast to sports boats.

Dinghies are where there’s persistent class racing. Dinghies are where heritage and history bring cachet. Win the 505 Euros or Worlds and you have you name on the same trophy as Paul Elvstrom and many other sailing legends (no one cares that you don’t care about these things Graeme, most do and that’s what matters). This stuff creates virtuous circles for classes; the competition is hot, which attracts more top sailors But who gives a flying @#£& if you win an Alto championship in a field of 5?

That hypothetical finger-click would not result in everyone buying a replacement, even if presented with the cash to do so. And even if they did, Merlins and GPs and Solos and RS200s would blossom again. They all work well in their niche. So would 505s, not Altos. The Weekender/Laser/Kirby-Torch/ILCA, maybe not, but the *ero holds little if any greater attraction to me personally.

Oh, and anyone buying (or not) any boat on the basis of it’s PY needs to get a life, frankly. 
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Posts: 356 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 4:16pm
Yay, Davidyacht had it right! It isn't just that magazine's are 'so last century' but when one looks at what we can do now on Y&Y.com, where  we can add video, interviews and so much more, it just make sense to do it like this now. As a wordscribe who used to write for the magazines (plural), I'd get to 1,000 words and the editor was already saying "you can stop now".... grovel a bit and I might get 1,200 words but at the expense of pictures.  My 'Fear of Flying' or 'The Greed for Speed'  on this site ran to 4,000 words plus 20 pictures - so you get more of the story, the detail and the background.

But - it matters not if it was on line or in chopped up trees (let's face it, where the man from Kent hails from, marking a clay tablet with a papyrus reed is the hot technology) I see no point in putting together any form of test. I've always told it as I see it and have various boot prints on the anatomy to prove this, but even if I gave a well considered, thoughtful review of a boat - such as the Alto, it would be mocked for no other reason that an intelligent, value driven piece of writing doesn't chime in with an individual's (any individual) belief system.
Actually, the Alto is a good example. I've sailed it, been Race Officer for it and saw it evolve from the basic concept of a 'modern' 5o5 and thought all along that it was a clever idea.  It had a quality builder and if you ignore the PY rants then it had a pretty good start to life. So why isn't the Alto  now part of our mainstream dinghy scene? For a start there isn't anything of a causal link between the PY and the commercial success and the rabid rants, whilst interesting, have next to nothing in the way of context. Nor do  statements that are thrown out there  mean anything - after all, WTF does  "the Alto reached 90% of the efficiency of the 5o5" actually mean? It is a pointless soundbite - how do you measure what is quoted as a hard number...90% efficient...  unless you set out the criteria of how this is measured and calculated and then, just possibly, people might sit up and pay attention.
Sadly, the seeds of the downfall of the Alto are so easily sown! I was recently asked to comment on another possible project, but it was only when I started asking the questions that the backers of the Alto should have been asking, before they first took a saw to the donor FiveO hull, only to get that same lack of any meaningful response, that I realised that this too would go the same way.
As Jim C can tell you from his historical records, new classes came and went well before the PYAG and some of them were good boats. Why did they not make it, when others did...now if IGRF could answer that, then we'd forgive you everything else.....
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eric_c View Drop Down
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Posts: 382 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 4:05pm
PY is what it is.
Boat designers should well understand its limitations.

You really need to look at why people buy new boats in a new class.
How many are paying £10k or whatever to get serious about their PY results?
Anybody who's doing that needs to go and take up golf.

The proper way to start a new class is for a club to get 6 or more sailors to put their money up and task a designer with designing the boat. Unfortunately, that went out of fashion in about 1938.

The Icon was another underwhelming boat IMHO. A lot of sail area, a lot of hype, when seen on the water, I didn't really see 20 years of progress from the Tasar. Apart from a nicer mast. Where was the demand for a 2 person, 2 sail boat? What was it supposed to race against? I'm sure it would have been fine for team racing or fleet racing, in certain helm/crew weight/ wind strength constrainsts, but who asked for it?

Does the rest of the world race under PY? Which countries which don't have PY produce lots of vibrant new classes?
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Posts: 1345 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 2:07pm
Originally posted by iGRF



Finally as I'm in full rant, the other thing you, we, lack? A decent f**king magazine that calls it for us, tests boats, tells it as it is, not that one could ever exists since at some time or other all the advertisers would be peeved.

Magazines so last century ... 
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iGRF View Drop Down
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Posts: 6499 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: 14 Mar 22 at 10:39am
Originally posted by eric_c


The Alto was a long hull that should be fast in light airs, with pivoting sprit for dead runs. Should be a light air bandit if it's done well. The 926 PY being whined about seems very generous compared


Except it didn't get a number for a few years and then appeared I think in 2014 at 912 as an EN, and the following year 2015 it finally made the list also at 912 exactly the same number as the 505.

The boat was launched in 2008 so what's that 7 years later? I'd probably sold it by then and moved on, people die waiting for things to move in this sport.
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