After sailing a Laser, anything else feels like a tub

Lots of boats are faster than a Laser But sailing the Laser in a hiked out position, you are very close to the water, which makes it feel very fast. For a 14 ft. boat, it is fast.
 
I enjoy how quickly they can be maneuvered and how cheap (comparitively) it is to competitively campaign a laser. There's no other one design i've found that i can be competitive with on my budget.

AND... in 20 knts of breeze on a close reach and not being able to see past the spray as the boat is planing away. Yea... It feels pretty fast
 
the cost and ease of things is all that i miss ill give it that. but everything is slow. my favourite thing about lases is still that you get good talented big fleets. that and now im missing the simplicity.
 
Well, I'm a Prindle 18 cat sailor, looking to return to the Laser world. (geez, if I could just find a flippin' boat already).

I owned a Laser for 8 years before cats. As a single handed mono, it rocks. I never found another similiar boat that can go as fast and planes as well. As mentioned above, some of this is also the illusion of speed. Your head a foot above the water in a screaming reach is a heck of a rush. At the same speed, a cat feels slow due to the smoothness of the hulls cutting through the water.

Speaking of slow...try a P-18 in under 10 knots of air.....a dog! However the Laser will still perform and would come pretty close to passing me in ultra light breezes.

My biggest concern in moving back to Lasers is whether I'll still get the speed rush. After watching a few videos on Youtube lately, I'm betting I will.

The laser ain't no tubster.
 
as far as performance goes lasers are not very high on the list but speed is relative. its all about getting yourself faster then the people your racing agaisnt.
 
Krycek said:
OK Shatty... what do YOU sail?
Click to expand...

Take it easy there, brah.

I do sail Lasers.

But, I'm not foolish enough to deny the fact that they are outdated tubs. I'm not talking about the class, or the level of racing. Simply the boat.

The boat is a tub. Aluminum masts? Dacron sails?
 
Shatty007 said:
Take it easy there, brah.

I do sail Lasers.

But, I'm not foolish enough to deny the fact that they are outdated tubs. I'm not talking about the class, or the level of racing. Simply the boat.

The boat is a tub. Aluminum masts? Dacron sails?
Click to expand...

And how much more would a "modern" boat with Kevlar sails and carbon spars cost? I like my tub.
 
Everyone always stresses speed. The most important things are the strength of the one design and how many boats are sailing. The Laser beats any class in either of those. I was thinking about selling my Laser last summer and getting a 49er. I'm glade I didn't because over the winter I did frostbiting for the first time and learn so much about racing in general. If I had the 49er I wouldn't have had any competition to sail with and I wouldn't have learned how to race in a fleet of 30 plus boats locally at a reasonable cost. Also with classes like 49er, moth, and 18 foot skiff, they're developmental classes and are always updating the design making older rigs, hulls, and sails useless.
 
Unfortunately, there are a lot of windsurfers who launch and sail at the same place I do.... I'll feel like I'm tearing along at a million miles per hour and then a windsurfer whooshes by at 2x my speed and I'm all :(
 
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