Equip & Maintain

What is need? I start to look at all the possible things I could buy online and I quickly lose track of what I need and what I want takes over.

My club Laser fleet had a discussion this winter about whether we will allow “practice” sails (those made without Laser approval) to be used in club racing. The whole issue broke my heart.

I used to spend my winters working on my big boats. Winning meant having my boat’s bottom smoother and my sails fresher then anybody else. I spent all my spare time routing lines for most efficient use and installing better data readouts. Then I bought a Melges-24 and the sail makers broke my back. I couldn’t keep up with their deep pockets. I came to the Laser in part because it was strict One-Design.

Racing pushes your learning curve along like almost nothing else, so think carefully before you decide on a boat that doesn’t have an active group of racing sailors supporting it.

A Laser is easy to own.

I have owned twelve other boats beside my three Lasers, five small boats, three ocean cruising boats and a Melges 24. Nothing has been as easy to store, trailer, clean, rig or launch.

I met my first boat beside a busy residential street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There, on a small galvanized trailer with a “For Sale” sign leaning against it, sat a 16 foot long, pristinely-white, fiberglass hull with the most seductive hard chine I’d ever seen, and I didn’t even know that the molded angle in the hull was called a chine.