Every year I'm reminded how soulless and overly commercialised the London Boat Show has become, and how the Dinghy Sailing Show is thankfully the complete opposite. Alexandra Palace is a pig of a place to get to, but once you're there it's heaven. A place of faded grandeur which has 10 times the charm of the big white box called ExCeL.

To be fair to ExCeL, though, it's not just about the buildings, it's about the people and the sense of enthusiasm which oozes out of the Dinghy Show. Of course there are plenty of purely commercial stands there that I'm sure do very nicely thank you from the visitors to the show, but the majority of class and club stands are run by well-meaning volunteers. Doing it for the pure love.

Normally I go to the Dinghy Show as just a journalist, microphone in hand to bag as many interviews as I can, and also to reacquaint myself with some old faces. This year, however, I got a taste of life at Ally Pally as an exhibitor, as the representative of the RS600FF, the RS600 on steroids and hydrofoils. I've been dying to tell you about this project for the past two years, ever since Weymouth boatbuilder Linton Jenkins rang me up and asked if I'd like a set of Moth foils on my battered old 600. However, that whole story will have to wait a while longer. Have no fear that at some point soon I will bore you silly with the whole foiling saga.

For now, it's back to the Show, and a look at the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. For most exhibitors, the preceding Friday is set-up day, with many people taking a day off work to get their class or club stand organised. In the RS600FF, the prototype had only recently reached the point where Linton was finally happy to go public with the launch of the boat, so we missed getting our own stand at the Show. Fortunately newly-weds and business partners Ian and Pippa Jubb of Sailboat Deliveries offered to accommodate the foiling 600 on their stand, where Pete Vincent was also running dinghy repair and renovation workshops throughout the weekend. Just what my tired old 600 needed.

While I was able to roll up Friday evening with just a boat, Ian and Pippa had been there all day delivering and setting up boats for various clients such as Laser and LDC Racing Sailboats, and Ally Pally was teeming with activity when I got there. Still, that wasn't a patch on the frenetic surge to get the hell out of there at 1700 hours on the Sunday afternoon. The moment the last visitor leaves the building, there is a mad rush to dismantle boats, retrieve trailers from round the back of the Palace and battle your way out of the car park and down the hill to get home. It's like the Bloody Mary all over again. Good fun, but all in all, a pretty exhausting 48 hours. Then again, I got away in good time, around an hour after the show closed. Poor old Ian and Pippa finally drove out of Ally Pally around midnight.

And so to the Show itself, where there were some great things to see. Probably the most spectacular boat there was the Bladerider one-design Moth on the Ronstan stand. Aussie foiling god Rohan Veal was there, and he had learnt from this previous visit two years earlier to bring a lot more posters with him, to autograph for his legion of foiling fans. Rohan introduced me to his wife Gin (before you ask, I think that's short for Virginia) whom he credited with being the creative brains behind the fantastic red and black look of the Bladerider. I'm sure some people will buy a Bladerider just because it looks so cool, even if they never learn to sail it. A bit like people who fall in love with their iPods but never actually listen to any music.

Projected sales of the Bladerider this year is 300 boats. Even as a mad-keen owner of my own foiler, the RS600FF, I'm still sceptical about foiling ever taking off (excuse the pun) as a mass-market part of the sport. It looks too difficult to most people - even if in my brief experience it isn't actually as hard as it looks. But if anything is going to break foiling into the mainstream, it is the Bladerider, a reasonably priced, beautifully presented, well marketed speed machine.

While the Bladerider was the most breathtaking boat at the Show, the one that seemed to be gathering the most attention was the Daemon Cherub on the Hartley Laminates stand. This is the Cherub we featured in Roll Tacks two weeks ago, and while I was pretty impressed hearing about the project over the phone, it was far more impressive to see such a beautifully finished boat in the flesh, with its price tag of £6995. Richard Taylor, the driving force behind the Daemon project, then showed me some of the other boats on display on the Hartley Laminates stand, and my jaw dropped when I saw the new Wayfarer.

Firstly the boat looked a lot sexier than a classic Wayfarer - she's still a big lady but definitely more Dawn French than Jo Brand. Secondly there was the price tag, £4995, which was gobsmacking. It's not even as though the boat is made in China, it's made in Derby along with the Daemon Cherub and all the other Hartley products. Apparently Richard Hartley has made his money in the automotive industry and, while he's certainly not running his marine business as a charity, he's not too fussed as long as the business washes its face and produces boats that people like.

Other impressively priced boats on the Hartley stand included the Supernova - not the most good-looking of singlehanders but hard to argue with a price tag of just £3495 -  and a trapeze doublehander so up to date that it was hardly recognisable as an Osprey. Priced at £7995 with the aluminium rig or with a carbon rig for an additional £756, it was no wonder I found RYA coach and former Osprey National Champion Adam Bowers drooling all over it.

There were other keenly-priced products on display for the first time at Ally Pally, and one that could have an enormous impact on the UK sailing scene is the brainchild of Steve Cockerill of Rooster Sailing. His Rooster 8.1 package takes a standard Laser and with the addition of a longer bottom section and a bigger sail, aims to appeal to the 90kg sailor who feels he (or she) has outgrown the Laser Standard rig. The competitive weight for the standard Laser rig (7.06 square metres) is about 80kg, so the Rooster 8.1 (no prizes for guessing a rig size of 8.1 square metres) opens the boat up to a previously untapped market for the Laser.

In weight terms the Rooster 8.1 poses competition against established classes like the Finn and the Phantom, which both enjoy strong UK circuit followings. But the chances are these two classes will retain their loyal fanbase and that the Rooster 8.1 will encourage dormant Laser sailors to get out of the house and go sailing again. Certainly this is Steve Cockerill's intention. "I think there are a lot of pond sailors out there who know they're too big for the Laser but like the convenience of the boat. The trouble is, they're always waiting for the next windy day when they might stand half a chance of doing alright in a race. With this rig, I'd like to think that every day could be a windy day!"

While designing a bigger rig for the Laser, Steve has also taken the opportunity to design a sail that should retain its competitive life for a good deal longer than the standard Laser sail. While the majority of the sail is constructed of Dacron similar to the official Laser sail, the highest-load area in the leech is made of Mylar and is built into a bi-radial design that means the sailshape does not distort too badly under load. When Steve has tested the sail in strong winds on the Solent, he reported two findings: firstly that the rudder was less loaded because the draft of the sail was not moving aft as much as on the more easily distorted standard sail; and secondly, he was surprised just how much quieter the sail was. "I wasn't until I got back ashore that I realised my ears weren't ringing from the leech constantly motoring," said Steve.

Now, you're probably thinking, he would say that, wouldn't he! After all, Steve is set to make money out of the whole project, and indeed he had taken 16 pre-orders before the Dinghy Show even opened for business. But my experience of Steve is that he's a straight talker and he tends to call a spade a spade. And having said that he's going to make money from the Rooster rig, he's not exactly charging the earth; £350 buys you the sail and the bottom section that you'll need to go with it, which is £29 less than the RRP for a standard Laser sail.

I asked Steve how long he expected the competitive life of the Mylar/Dacron combination sail would last, and conservatively he estimates a top-level life of 40 days compared with 10 days' life that you could expect to get with a standard cross-cut panel sail made purely of Dacron. Which begs the question, isn't it about time someone redesigned the standard Laser sail to last a bit longer? Steve says, to the class's credit, the Laser is dedicated to maintaining the purity of the one-design nature of the class. Which is very admirable, but surely when the competitive life of a sail at Olympic level is only 10 days, would it really destabilise the class for too long if a new sail design were to be produced for the standard Laser, and possibly the Radial and 4.7 rigs too? I'm sure there are plenty of sailmakers who reckon they could design a sail that lasted longer and made the boat nicer to sail, and it would take the sailors very little time to get up to speed with the new rig. Good, so that's settled. Shall we book the launch of the new rig in for say, September 2008, just after the Olympics? Lovely.

In the case of the Rooster 8.1 rig, Steve estimates the added materials cost of the Mylar leech and the added complexity of a biradial pattern probably added about £50 to the production cost compared with a bog-standard cross-cut Dacron sail. Even if a sail were to last only twice as long, and not the four times as long that Steve is claiming for his sail, would £50 extra be worth paying for that added longevity? I know how I'd vote, but I'm not a Laser sailor. What would you choose?

Now for you Cherub fans I know I promised last time to talk about the Carbonology GT60, but again I've run out of space so... back again in a fortnight.