it is that time of year 

https://www.rya.org.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/technical/Web%20Documents/PY%20Documentation/PN_List_2021.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1L7t5vmR1y4anAA4y2Fw0P727b2taiKjzb64V5iJkqAc7DuGrJ0OgFi_c" rel="nofollow - https://www.rya.org.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/technical/Web%20Documents/PY%20Documentation/PN_List_2021.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1L7t5vmR1y4anAA4y2Fw0P727b2taiKjzb64V5iJkqAc7DuGrJ0OgFi_c

Though why does it say change from 2019?

You conveniently forgot to mention that the 2nd one is a Vareo which, TBF, does not have a reputation as a thoroughbred racing machine...

Anyway, my 'tail end Charlie' antics in the Blaze are paying off, +6 this year... 

The best sort of error 

Wayfarers can have a very wide range of performance ; a new IV or a down to weight woodie with two big sailors who hike like beasts is in a different league to a portly part time cruiser with a medium crew who pretend hike.

However the above is the case albeit perhaps less so for most classes.

Having said that I am happy to see the Lightning loose a few points!

I think that most of the discontent  is where the complainant confuses Portsmouth Handicap for Personal Handicap, which probably has its place in today’s world, particularly if it can encourage more people on the water.

If you don’t like PY, find yourself a decent one design fleet.

He was a very good sailor but what I'm getting at is,  it shouldn't beat a 200 on the water by 3 minutes and then have an extra 20 minutes on handicap too. 

What goes around comes around 

Never seen a carbon top mast, lots of very old boats with 1970s kickers and ropes discarded as mooring lines off super tankers. The sails only last one decent blow,

The majority of club returns will be from under par boats. 

I think iGRF it’s time you tried a session in a Laser.

In my experience yes, there is so much training and traveler events the hotshots rarely lower themselves and join in in club races. 

And more clubs have fleet racing in Lasers than any other class so if you are good but not 'A list' you'll still be fleet racing at club level.

Hi MrEF,  have you looked at the 'UK Europe Sailors' Facebook page yet? We've got loads of really good resources on there, especially for owners of older boats (as most of the fleet are!).  Whereabouts do you sail?  It'd be great to see if there's an Open near you this year....

A Laser is less than 14', 13' 9" LOA and only 12' 6" LWL (which is what matters)?

Hi MrEF,  have you looked at the 'UK Europe Sailors' Facebook page yet? We've got loads of really good resources on there, especially for owners of older boats (as most of the fleet are!).  Whereabouts do you sail?  It'd be great to see if there's an Open near you this year....

I keep an eye on the Europe FB page, I have asked a few questions and always get good replies. It's great to be part of the Europe class - very friendly and helpful. I intend to come to some events this year, I will learn a lot. Rather hoping that the Cotswold Open is on in April.

I keep an eye on the Europe FB page, I have asked a few questions and always get good replies. It's great to be part of the Europe class - very friendly and helpful. I intend to come to some events this year, I will learn a lot. Rather hoping that the Cotswold Open is on in April.

Excellent!!!!  Just making sure that a fellow Europista was in touch with the Class

Hopefully we'll be able to confirm Cotswolds soon, especially as POSH is now delayed.

From Wikipedia, not the most reliable source TBF but getting a number for a Laser's LWL is difficult. www.lasersailingtips.com gives the tigers as LOA 4.23/13' 10.5" LWL 3.82/12' 6" which agrees with your memory and makes me happier with the LWL being accurate. 

OTOH World Sailing describe the Laser (on their "The Laser - A History Lesson page) as a "4.19m long, 56.7kg hiking dinghy". LOA is easy to measure, LWL is probably something only known to BK. Either way it's a hell of a lot less than 14' (so WTF can't I keep up with the buggers in the Blaze )

For all the detractors, Laser do seem to be very efficient over a wide wind range. Non wiring flat water I'm level pegging them on the Contender.

I'm not getting into PY because I don't care anymore, especially since COVID layoff. I simply want to go sailing again and put all the bike miles leg and cardio fitness  I've done from home to good use.

 .

Yes, most probably, though a fair degree of incompetence slips in there too...

The Laser hull is a good shape, let down for me by the horrible ergonomics (for us short ar53s) and the not so stellar rig.

That and if you sail on restricted water the Laser is far more manoeuvrable than the Blaze. I found when I had mine that if the wind wasn't too shifty I would leave them far behind. if it got shifty they could tack on every shift whereas the Blaze was much slower to tack you often lost more than you would gain.

In a blow there was no contest, you just don't get the same sensation of speed being up on the rack though until you blow past something like it is going backwards.

I'll take the D-Zero over both though, the nimbleness of the Laser with the extra speed of the Blaze.

Yup, agreed on all points (except the sensation of speed when up on the rack). I also think the Blaze, unsurprisingly, scores in marginal planing conditions and reaching courses. TBF the Laser is no slouch in a blow if reasonably well sailed.

If I only sailed on the lake I'd probably have a D-Zero or Solution but on open water the Blaze is just so good...

Bruce Kirby told me in writing that the Laser was designed to have a waterline of 12'6", which he felt to be the minimum for good performance.

Mark Bethwaite, a multi-millionaire who could afford to buy any number of sails, used the same sail to win three of his world Masters titles.  My brother made it inside the top 25 of the open worlds and only ever owned one sail.  World champs Brett Bayer, Michael Blackburn and Krystal Weir also get far more use out of their sails than "one decent blow".

If the world champions can use the same sail for repeated championships then those who blame their results on a sail that "only lasts one decent blow" are just looking for an excuse.

Sigh..... I'd better go away again, and stop replying to this sort of stuff.

Probably 2” of gunwale, fore and aft (so 4”), leaving 12” of bow rake, sounds about right.

Bob Miller had a design for a single hander, a hard chine brute of a boat that  in his own words was described as "it sucks". But - he was caught out by timescales, as to get a boat to the second set of Trials, he had to get something made - and quick. He was sailing FDs at the time and simply 'borrowed the shape'. Keith Paul, who sailed both Contenders and FDs, had one of each with his famous red hull with a white boot topping - he also had a very long garden.

If you put the FD at the bottom of the lawn and the Contender 1/3 of the way towards the house, the perspective made them look the same size - and well nigh impossible to tell apart.

As for the similarity with the Laser - I've even got this in a photo! When the IYRU chose the Contender, they created a 'launch committee' to get the boat out there on a proper footing. The list of those who were on the committee is interesting - Jack Knights.... Al Santos and... Bruce Kirby - so he was personally involved with the class from the outset.

Dougal

D

Am loving these dinghy history reviews and anecdotes :-)  More please.

(nothing beats the 5o5 though ;-)   )

D

There's certainly lots of valuable input from development classes, but some boats seem to do well without any direct lineage of the sort, particularly if they are from outside the UK. The standouts would probably be the OK, Optimist, Sunfish and Snipe on an international level.  In other major sailing countries like the USA, Germany, Australia and NZ there's a very significant number of successful one designs that seem to have no such heritage (ie Sabots, Sabres, Zephyrs, Sunbursts, O Jolle, Seggerlings, Impulses, Lightnings, Butterflys, X Boats, etc). 

That's what I thought, particularly because Bruce had been a fairly early exponent of moving to more Ud sections forward, but Bruce said that if there was any such inspiration it must have been subconscious.  

Obviously there is subconscious and semi-conscious transfer of design ideas that no designer could, or should, escape.

But in light of the previous posters, I don't think you need to be a championship winning sailor to become de rigueur in development classes, but you do need to design boats that attract the right kind of attention.  You also need to do the miles, since the first iteration of your work probably needs refinement to the mark two.  And you need to be around long enough to be around when builders or owners are looking for an alternative.  To be frank most of the designers in these classes do not look to dinghies to pay the bills.

In the glory days of the 70's the demand for dinghies, but more importantly the ton class keelboats provided a much better platform for young designers to get a foothold in the industry.  And in keelboats the advent of Velocity Prediction programmes and CAD have spelt the end of the adventurous owner/designer partnership, I think Rob Humphreys said something along the lines of "you only found out how fast a boat was when you sailed it up from Lymington to Cowes"

My understanding is that Paul Bieker was never front of the fleet good in dinghies, but I think he is a great designer / engineer who I think got into AC late(er) in his career after beginning doing "proper" commercial work on fishing boats etc whilst tooling around in i14s for fun. There is a good article or two in professional boatbuilder from 2003ish.

Regarding Jim C's point above, a generation or two ago, I think that the Richards / Morrisons etc cut their teeth in develpment classes for their own amusement prinicpally, rather than professionally at least at first. These were the breeding grounds for the best and most successful sailors at the time who in many cases crossed over into Olympic classes and had no issue with the technical ones such as FD as they were good at the hands on having designed and built their own N12s / Merlins / I14 back when all of those classes were attracting hundreds of the great and the good at nationals etc.

Nowadays its a bit different with the sausage factory of the RYA system and SMOD olympic classes. I guess that so many of the hot shots (who have the cash) dabble in moths almost takes us back towards the tinkering sensibility.

I think that no entity is going to invest in a product by a  person who can show pretty renders alone, so even now, to get into dinghy design you must have been responsible for something with merit of some sort yourself to be able to get a foothold.

Most dev classes are either heavily invested, productionised and developed to the point where any gains are going to be small, so that is not a route in that many have successfuly taken.

I did something a bit different with the Punk dinghy in 2008 which by a very circuitous route means that I don't struggle to get dinghy design gigs. Then I did a development class boat later. Another way of doing it is per Paul Handley, who I think made a bit of money as a naval architect, and then himself bankrolled the productionisation of a little rotormould (RS Tera) which was eventually sold to a certain well known Romsey based sailing boat vendor. That went well and I think it meant he got the 8S100 gig, then did the K1 independantly. I think he is a decent sailor and wins most of the K1 nationals but was not a household name. 

I've seen a few dinghies by (otherwise great) yacht designers that were lacking because they didn't have that extra insight into ergonomics and technique that end use gives you. Sometimes the guy doing PM for one of those projects can fill in the dinghy specific gaps.

But to cut a long story short, to start a career in yacht design, you get a job in a design office (I think) but to do anything commercially in dinghy design, I think one needs to have designed and or built at least one dinghy of some sort of merit. Nowadays I think product design ability is also important, but that can be subcontracted in as I think Mr Richards does.

The other side of the coin is the strength of the 'in-breed' conservatism that exists in the restricted development fleets (but I would argue also exists in the one-designs that aren't really one design) as this too plays a big part. This impacts not only on the designer on the outside, trying to achieve a break through, but often an inside and accepted designer who tries something different - better even, only to find that the 'fleet' ignore it. I've documented a number of new designs that were commissioned and would be been a step along the  path of progress, only for things to go wrong. It is not often a front runner who breaks ranks, so you get someone who may not have the best skillset but who fancies a punt at innovation - doesn't get it quite right first time (very few do) with the result that the idea, however good it might have been - sinks from sight. It just so happens that this is a 'hot' topic for me right now.... but I can't right it up yet! The interesting debate on the wider subject suggests that my 'Rock family trees for sailing' idea has just moved up the rankings from a may do to a 'must do' - now planned for a Christmas special! 

Hope to see you out afloat soon...

Dougal

and..............

not being pedantic but the Howlett Ibs were not made at Hamble, but at 'The Shed' (the sailing equivalent of the Skunk works in more ways than one) aka Unit 6b at Bury Farm, Burridge. That isn't like calling it weymouth when it is actually Portland, or even Salcombe when it is Kingsbridge but a whole order of magnitude worse! There were some boats that came off that mould - Damon's Stealth boat....Russell Peter's PoW winner, Septic Slug, Little Rooster,  Perfect Sister - the clear green all kevlar boat..... happy days!

D

I'm trying to insert a pic of the Howlett...so much fun and today you can pick them up for peanuts and have a lot of fun!

You know more than I about Grace, but always considered her to be something quite special, though was probably the start of an arms race that moved the class away from the off the shelf Parker’s and Rondars.

Did Malcom Jacques Cherub Lemon Drop come before the Howlet 1b. My memory says it was a Howlet design he had built with the aim of winning the light wind nationals at dabchicks.

Jim C may know as he is into Cherubs.

I sailed a Grace copy for many years, very fast upwind but slower down against the Kerwoods and later Rondars from Pauls era.

 

Should do ok in my Salcombe Yawl ... 50 points for a main mast, boom, mizzen, mizzen boom and bowsprit 

Looking forward to seeing her back at Hunts Pat