Opposite page: ‘This is what I mean!’ to quote Sebastien Vettel in his pomp. The Opti graduate looking on glumly as more fortunate friends step into 29ers and the like does have a choice but only if clubs can make that choice attractive enough. An older 505 (seen here) can be bought for as little as £1,500 at the bottom end to around £5,000 at the top… still less than half the price of a new 29er (and Mom, there’s no point unless I have a new boat, right?). Like the 29er, the Opti (left) serves its purpose very well but most kids quit the sport once they grow out of it, leaving Mum and Dad with a little box that cost them $8-10,000 at the sharp end… crazy. Other choices, and certainly today’s goal for youngsters who can only imagine the ‘pathway classes’ as their future: a new Moth (top left) which is a work of art but, at £30,000-£40,000 ready to win, is not for every family budget. Or a new 49er or 470 (above) starting at £25,000 and £20,000 respectively. It doesn’t have to be like this
including top and bottom covers and a roadworthy trolley-trailer. Now intrigued I soon found more ex-championship level dinghies for sale at and sometimes less than £1,500-£2,500. It got me thinking. I am not talking here about knackered
number is around $50,000. In both cases these are numbers that roughly represent each country’s national average wage… A 505 is an awesome racing dinghy,
furiously fast, huge old-school kite, demanding as hell to sail quickly but, importantly, just as much fun to take out for a blast during half-term when your mates are about and the breeze is up. Wind the clock back: in the 1980s Mark
Lindsay and Larry Tuttle were turning out incredible (and incredibly durable) 505s at around $3,500-4,500, which before you ask is $10,000 in today’s money. But please do not castigate your boatbuilder for profiteering. They are making no more profit than 20, 30 even 40 years ago. Fact is far fewer racing dinghies are now being built outside the manufacturer one-design classes, and far superior but far more expensive materials are now the norm. That boat has sailed (soz). If you want a more striking example of
what an elite, privileged activity the top level of small boat racing is in 2021, check out a fully loaded foiling Moth. If you
want a boat capable of winning the world championship you will be lucky to see change out of US$60,000 (not a typo). With an all-up weight of 30kg that’s a lot of bucks per kilogramme. So with even the most exciting non-
Olympic dinghies now priced through the stratosphere why should we ever expect a return to the big club fleets of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s? Yet without significant new growth more sailing clubs will go to the wall or, in my own experience, simply become too depressing to visit. Think tumbleweed, a rotting GP14 or
Enterprise or two, plus some straggly beards (pick your gender) propping up a grubby bar with a two-year-old sausage roll morphing seamlessly into penicillin inside a greasy food warmer.
Under your nose Perusing the lighter end of the world of sailing porn one evening I was surprised by an advert for a tidy ’90s Rondar 505 with good club-racing sails at an asking price ‘offers considered’ of £650 (US$950),
‘old shitters’*. Not at all. Garages across England, and no doubt elsewhere, are full of superb examples of fast trapeze and non-trapeze dinghies, past their competi- tive prime but still immaculate, dry as a bone without a hint of rot, and with plenty of still good sails sitting in the rafters. Think international Fireballs and 470s
and 505s as well as some more esoteric national classes, which in the UK include boats like the National 12 and Merlin Rocket… two classes that are also a joy to sail, fast in the light and an enjoyable handful in a breeze (and, for handicap racing purposes, both these designs also point like hell.) At face value such boats can surely be
interesting to some of our ‘ex-Olympic pathway’ youngsters? (In emerging sailing nations there are hoards of youngsters who’d bite your arm off to call such a boat their own.) Of course there is a ‘but’.
The two-tier solution But… to generate that interest, what we must do is make these affordable packages genuinely competitive.
SEAHORSE 61
MATIAS CAPIZZANO
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