Fireballs Nationals

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the assy became standard first, and the symmetrical kite was developed later. One can think of many '90s ads speaking in breathless hype about the wonders of being able to sail directly to the leeward mark. Topper would have had huge headlines about how macho it was to handle a detachable pole, complete with heavily edited quotes about the joys of being able to sail tight reaches AND sneak out of the tide. Magazines would have been full of articles about the trendy new technique of sailing low, and sneers about those who insisted on reaching back and forth with assy kites.

Some of those of us whose first dinghy was an assy with a swivelling pole find the whole assy hype rather amusing. It's not that I don't like them, either - of our three kite boats, one has a sym, one has an assy that sometimes runs a swivelling pole, and the other has a standard assy. But the hypesters who ignore their downsides and denigrate sym kites are rather amusing.

Some interesting thoughts here and for once a quite sensible dialogue.... that issue of accessibility is something that was/is worth exploring. Just as Dinghy Mag expired, we were working on a project that would  see me sailing at the Merlin and RS 400 Championships with a 'new' crew - someone reasonably new to the sport but who was keen to get involved.

Back then we liked multi-part articles so this was going to come in 4 linked pieces; Preparation, the two events and a wrap up with conclusions. The Merlin, with the twin pole set up is probably easier than maybe the Fireball, which was still tied to a single pole set up.

Sadly, getting this sort of writing into print was hard then and is even harder now, yet it is just exactly where the media could play a role. But that inbreed, class specific tribalism that dominates current thinking works against any form of more informative writing.

But accessibility IS an issue - I saw a great example being played out at the weekend, a sailor out in the wrong boat because that was what he had been told was  the 'hot' class to be in....

D/Isle of Wight