New boat choice

I sailed the 5000 for 8 years and I reckon the 49er gives both crew much more to do.

The self tacking jib is sorted by the helm in the 49er,the kite does go into a chute but is a lot bigger than the 5000 (and I thought the bag was easier in some respects!)

As you say, High performance dinghy racing in the Plymouth area is very restricted. There are enough boats at the clubs to generate the numbers for an assymetric fleet at a club like the Mayflower, however, its very rare to see many High Performance boats out on the water at the same time. We know of the active boats but from the top of my head, I can only think of about 6 different High Performance boats at Mount Batten which have been on the water at the same time as us, which is quite poor considering the Mount Batten dinghy park had a waiting list for spaces. We try and sail on a regular basis, at least once a week during term time, but with coursework piling up, haven't had as much time to recently.From our point of view, we really want to be racing down in Plymouth but if there is no club organising it and boats are just sitting in dinghy parks, it's a bit of an uphill struggle. We can't speak to owners of High Performance boats we've never met, so trying to organise racing is really hard, and as such we're trying to persuade students into certain classes to build a fleet then approach a sailing club to propose giving us a fleet start and a windward/leeward course.