Asymmetric Anniversary

Did you know that dinghy sailing in the UK has just passed an important milestone? No, nor did I, until I started desperately looking back through some old copies of Yachts & Yachting for something sensible to write. Having enjoyed Rob Andrews' review of 2002 in his final Rolltacks column, it got me thinking about how the dinghy scene has changed in the past decade. And, when I stopped to think about it, the London Boat Show of 10 years ago marked the beginning of an incredible revolution, because it was there that Topper's Iso and the Laser 5000 were first revealed to the world.

It's funny to think that back then, these two boats were so seen as direct competitors to each other, but with the benefit of hindsight we now know it really didn't work out that way at all. Instead, what these two groundbreaking designs did was to open the floodgates to a whole new wave of modern, high-performance, low-maintenance dinghies that have now become the norm, in this country at least. The irony is that just a decade later, neither of those two pioneering dinghies are still being actively marketed, whilst some of the traditional classes that they threatened to drive into extinction - such as the Fireball, 505 and International 14 - are still going strong-ish.

One of the best things the Iso and 5000 did was to give the older classes a timely kick up the bum, and force them to get their acts together - or to wither and die. The Fireball rewrote its class rules so that it could be constructed more cheaply, and a decade later a new Fireball still costs less than it would have done at the beginning of the 1990s. I don't think that would have happened if the Iso hadn't come along at a ready-to-win price of £4,500.

But perhaps the reason why neither the Iso nor the 5000 are still going so strongly now is because they were hi-performance designs built from low-tech materials. Some of the lighter and faster boats that came along a few years later, such as the 49er and the RS800, have stolen their thunder even if their greater use of exotic materials like carbon and Kevlar made them a more expensive purchase. People were prepared to spend the extra thousand pounds on a boat that was a little bit quicker than its heavier counterparts. The result is that many of us are racing boats that are lighter, faster and in some cases cheaper than the boats of past decades, and sailing is all the richer for it.

So the Iso might not be the prettiest boat to have graced the seas, and the 5000 not the lightest boat to pull up the beach, but in my view they can both take credit for dragging dinghy sailing into the modern world. The bigger question, however, is whether sailing is actually any healthier as a sport than it was 10 years ago. Has the Nineties dinghy revolution put more bums on gunnels?

Hunting for answers

This was a question I put to Jim Hunt of Team Purple, the thriving chandlery business based in the West Midlands. As well as having worked in the business for a long time, and ruined his knees making sails for more boats than he would care to remember, Jim has won plenty of championships in new and old-tech classes, including the RS400, Enterprise and Solo. So he is well placed to offer some meaningful insight into the state of British dinghy sailing.

Unfortunately, he believes the sport is fighting an uphill battle against the trends of the times. "Ten years ago, people were prepared to pack the boat and the car up on a Thursday night, go to work on Friday and drive through the night to an open meeting venue, and sleep in the car until morning, when they went racing for Saturday and Sunday and drove back home knackered on a Sunday night. I used to do that, but I wouldn't bother now. Would you?" Er, no Jim, I probably wouldn't any more, but that's because I'm 10 years older and lazier than I was in 1993. I was sort of hoping the next generation of sailors would be prepared to do what we did then.

Catching the butterflies

But a report recently completed by management consultants McKinsey on behalf of the RYA supports what Jim sees from his own experience, that we are living in a "cash rich, time poor" world. It seems we have less time to devote to our hobbies than we did 10 or 20 years ago, and even less so for an all-consuming sport like sailing. Thirty years ago, you'd be reading this issue of Yachts & Yachting in between applying coats of varnish for your all-wood GP14, and getting an ear-bashing from your other half for clogging up the living room with your pride and joy. These days you're more likely to have a plastic RS400 sitting down at the sailing club through rain, sun or snow, and OK, it might have set you back six grand or so, but it least you don't have to sand it down and varnish it every winter.

So the advent of maintenance-free plastic boats has dealt with one part of the "time poor" problem, but the other issue is what the RYA's chief Rod Carr defines as the "butterfly approach" to leisure, where people want to spend their valuable time soaking up as many different experiences as possible, whether it be white-water rafting, a bit of skiing, or a parachute jump. It's hard to imagine how the sailing world can defend itself against such big socio-economic trends, but apparently this is something the RYA and the British Marine Federation are looking to address with the formation of a new working group called the Promotion of Sailing Task Force. Yachts & Yachting editor Gael Pawson is a member, so no doubt we'll be hearing more about their ideas over the next few months.

It's great to see the RYA addressing this issue as seriously as they appear to be. They've got the racing scene well and truly nailed - Rob Andrews' recent analysis of performances at last year's Olympic class world championships shows that the Brits are still streets ahead of the other nations at the serious end of the sport. And Volvo's close involvement with the RYA has done wonders for the youth programme, not to mention the sales of Volvo cars. I've heard it said that coach Jim Saltonstall is responsible for shifting more Volvos in a year than most Volvo main dealers, but then with up to 300 kids competing at some Optimist events, that's a lot of Oppie parents for Jim to work his charm on.

The young getting older

What's the problem, then, you might ask? Jim Hunt puts it pretty eloquently when he says of the Enterprise fleet: "Ten years ago, I was one of the young guys in the fleet, and 10 years later, I'm still one of the young guys in the fleet." No new blood coming through. While the youth classes are thriving more than ever, the adult fleets are just getting older. So the difficulty seems to arise when kids graduate from that time when their parents buy them their boats and pay for their sailing, to that time in their late teens/early twenties when they have to start forking out for their sailing out of their own pockets, along with paying the rent and running a car and all those other things that they've suddenly got to cope with.

Marketing experts say it is easier to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one, so perhaps we should be looking at ways of keeping more of those 300-odd Oppie sailors in sailing after they have moved on from youth sailing. That seems a good place to start. But beyond that, perhaps there is more we can do to attract new blood into the sport. Sailing surely has never enjoyed the profile that it is experiencing right now, what with five Olympic medals from Sydney, our first America's Cup challenge in 15 years, and the most famous British sailor since Horatio Nelson in the form of Ellen MacArthur. Seems like the perfect marketing platform for our beloved sport.

Making a bigger cake

So how do we take advantage of it? Well, aside from the encouraging moves that the RYA seems to be making at the moment, there are a number of things that could happen at a number of different levels. The manufacturers seem to have undergone a sea-change in their attitude to the market compared with five years ago. Whilst I'm a big fan of the dinghy revolution of the past decade, it seems like the big three - Laser, Topper and RS - spent a lot of time trying to steal the same bunch of established sailors from one class and get them to move into the next lookalike class. Now they seem far more interested in producing low-cost, entry-level boats such as Topper's Topaz, the RS Feva, and the Laser Pico. And Rooster Sailing is marketing the Oppi at a ready-to-sail price of £640. Not the sexiest boats we have seen in the last 10 years, but they offer a much better chance of attracting new people into the sport, rather than just churning the same bunch of sailors around from one boat to the next.

Assuming you've found the perfect boat, though, you need somewhere to sail it, and this is where the sailing clubs come in. Never having managed the accounts of a sailing club, I'm not really the best qualified person to comment on the structuring of membership fees, but I'd really like to know what 'joining fees' are all about. Yes, I know golf clubs have joining fees and you've got to be voted in by the committee, but they've also got waiting lists of people queuing up to join. When you're in a seller's market, then you can call the tune, but I can't think of too many sailing clubs that can claim to be in that sort of privileged position. Most are scrabbling for new members, so why make it twice as hard for them to join? I'm sure I'm missing something here, and I'm sure you'll put me right on that one, so I look forward to your answers.

Finally, though, I'd like to think about what we as individuals can do about encouraging more people into the sport, and really the answer is pretty simple. How many times in a year do people ask you how your sailing is going? You know they haven't got the first clue about what sailing is, and you can see their eyes beginning to glaze over when you try to explain, but it was nice of them to be interested. So instead, why not make it your new year's resolution to take just one of those people sailing this year? If we all did that, imagine what a difference it would make. The best thing is, this is a resolution you don't even have to think about for the next few months. Better to put this one off until the summer.

If you've got a great idea for getting more people into dinghy sailing, I'd love to hear from you, whether you're from the industry, a sailing club, or just an enthusiastic amateur. Just get in touch through the email address: rolltacks@yachtsandyachting.com.