Lightwave395
Well-known member
Ben Ainslie wins all three of the first days racing in Sydney !
Got a couple of GPs sailing in my club.
Also a dentist and a Physio.
Ben Who?
Take a garden shed. Turn it upside down. Put a mast in it. You now have a GP14.
Just pulling your chain ;-)A bit brutal but certainly not the slickest boat across todays trendy RS whatevers.
However, it works for me with a bunch of 'not really sailors' grandchildren who I take out in the school holidays, they're pretty stable compared to an Enterprise and I don't want the hassle or cost of a much bigger and heavier Wayfarer. The kids enjoy a bit of sailing, rowing and motoring around with my O/B - mine did also cost me the princely sum of £30 including the trailer so I'm not complaining.
Having said that, they did rather well across a range of weather conditions in the 2019/2020 Sailjuice series - in the top 3 on handicap a couple of times in big fleets - not bad for an upside down shed !
The GP is known as a 'boat which doesn't even burn quickly', but being slow possibly helps give good racing for a variety of people.
It's still a class which attracts some good sailors and runs some decent opens and championships.
If speed was everything, we'd all be sailing cats.
But for me, the weight of a GP14 would be a problem on the beach at low tide.
Just pulling your chain ;-)
I bet Ben found the GP50's a bit of a big stable platform after spending time on the new monohull foilers.
Any one design is good racing, we used to get 20+ Sigma 33's out in the Solent back in the mid 90'sWhen I was a teenager our club had a class of about 30 GP14s & they used to turn up every week.. Speed is not everything ( only relative) when one can get really close class racing in those numbers every weekend
The biggest Sigma class startline I was on had 39, with 80 I would have expected them to divide the fleet, they used to do it sometimes with a lot less than that. We did not know how lucky we were back then, big fleet with nearly half of them competitive, close racing, great social scene and proper strict one design rules, no sail choices in those days.