The proliferation of new classes over the past decade has been a double-edged sword for dinghy sailing in this country. Many of us are enjoying sailing in boats that are either faster, easier to sail or easier to maintain than some of the older, more traditional classes. But is the quality of our racing any better? The advantage - and the problem - with the ‘free market' economy that operates in the UK, is that we are free to sail and race whatever boat we want to. Well of course we are, you might reply, is there any other way?

Well in other countries such as Germany, sailing clubs are much more prescriptive about what classes you're allowed to race. Many of the newer dinghies are not welcome at Germany sailing clubs, because if you want to race you must race in one of the established fleets. It is why the 505 and the Flying Dutchman, the high performance boats of yesteryear, continue to thrive as the medium-performance dinghies of today.

In France, the emphasis is very much on sailing in state-owned boats rather than private ownership, which is the overriding trend in the UK. Just as we like to own our own houses, we also like to own our own boats. We don't want to be told that we must sail a Hobie 16 or a 420, just because that is what the local club has got. We're prepared to spend our own hard-earned pennies on exactly the boat that we want.

So we end up buying boats for very personal and individual reasons, and hopefully the vast majority of us are very pleased with our purchases. However, the problem of the past decade has been a dilution of the racing population into more and more fleets of fewer and fewer boats. Actually, that's not quite true in all cases, as numbers in all manner of youth classes seem to be going up in harmony with each other, as the  National Championships Attendance Table indicates on www.Yachtsandyachting.com.

But in the senior classes, where there is less new blood coming into the sport, one class rarely profits without causing a loss to another. This is especially the case in niche parts of the sport, and it doesn't get much more niche than singlehanded trapeze sailing. In the olden days, it just used to the Contender. Then just over 10 years ago, along came the RS600, a Contender for the modern age - with a rotating carbon mast, a fully-battened sail and a lightweight hull construction. The RS600 produced a thrilling ride upwind, but downwind in less than a Force 4 it was a bit of a plodder.

So sailors began to experiment with the notion of having a gennaker to haul the boat downhill. The trouble is, you really need three hands for this, one for to steer, one for the mainsail and one for the gennaker. Nevertheless, people persevered with the idea and so the RS700 and the Musto Skiff were born, almost simultaneously. As these classes have grown, the RS600 has withered, with second-hand prices reaching rock-bottom levels. Sailors are now discovering that you can sail a singlehanded gennaker boat with just two hands, after all. The RS700 and Musto Skiff provide all the thrills and spills you could possibly want. The shame of it is that there is so little to choose between the two, that there might as well be only one. So it begs the question, would joint open meetings for these two classes be beyond the bounds of possibility?

Well in a way, it happened just the other day at the Holt Tide Ride, when RS700s and Musto Skiffs started off the same line, producing the biggest turnout of gennaker-powered trapeze singlehanders yet seen. In the boat park before the first race, you could almost hear the revving of engines - James Dean style - and some ‘mine-is-better-than-yours' banter between the sailors. But out on the water the Musto Skiffs generally had a better run of it, proving faster in a variety of conditions. That said, the boats were still close enough to enjoy some good interclass racing, and the RS700 could well get on level terms with the Musto Skiff if it were to remove the lead corrector weights for the weight equalisation system, and set the wing bars to the same width as the non-weight equalised Musto.

Of course if we were in Germany then we'd all be racing the same class, as either one boat or the other would have got the nod. But then again it probably wouldn't be the RS700 or the Musto Skiff because they're both too new. That's the trouble with the German system, because there is so much inertia that it's hard for new classes to get a foot in the door. So on balance, I'll take the UK's free market economy any day, if it means we get to race exciting new boats. But at the same time, let's see a few more fleets doubling or tripling up for open meetings and championships.

It is certainly a growing trend, what with FastSail's Asymmetric Grand Prix, which has brought together a number of high-performance spinnaker-powered doublehanders together for their annual regatta. And more recently we're seeing it with the Scottish Skiff Racing Grand Prix series, which has proven a great success in its first year.

Former Contender World Champion Ian Renilson professed to have lost interest in the sport until he bought his Musto Skiff a year or so ago. The thing is, he didn't want to make the weekend slog down South to find competition, so he was keen to see competition develop North of the border instead. Having seen the format prove successful in Scotland, with 64 skiffs of different shapes and sizes turning out for the five-event series, he wonders if a skiff racing series would have merits in the rest of the UK. He sent me a letter recently where he commented: "I believe that lessons could be learnt from this [the Scottish Skiff Series] for UK sailing - we should stop being so parochial about our own specific classes and get together with similar types of boats. For many years new classes have come and gone, resulting in a weakening of our sport. Traditional handicap racing between diverse classes is a total waste of time with the results being determined more by conditions and courses than by the ability of the sailors.

"The traditional thing (in Scotland, at least), is that if you get six boats at a regatta then you are ‘rewarded' with a class start. But starts and races with six boats do not prepare you for big regattas, and as soon as a class does not regularly achieve six boats it loses its ‘critical mass' and evaporates - and the sailors and organisation mechanism for that class are often lost to sailing.

"If we create groups of similar classes, then the handicap system can work (at least to some extent), and the umbrella organisation can be used as a stable and strong mechanism under which different classes can flourish, to be replaced by others as new classes evolve. There is still room for the minor classes to compete so the sailors are not lost, but they will naturally tend to migrate to the dominant classes.

"We also have training events at which we encourage the different classes to learn from each other - this non-competitive interaction between the classes probably helps us to get along together.

"I can imagine this happening for various categories of sailing dinghies, such as:

  • Fast Asymmetrics - (‘skiffs')
  • Slow Asymmetrics
  • Sitting-out Singlehanders
  • Trapezing Singlehanders
  • Fast Symmetrics
  • Slow Symmetrics
  • Multihulls

"It seems to be working in Scotland for the Skiffs - but then we've only been going for less than a year." Ian asked me what I thought, and I think it's a great idea. FastSail is already effectively providing this service for one of Ian's suggested categories, Fast Symmetrics, and there is no reason why it couldn't exist for the other divisions.

To me, Ian's suggestion is the best remedy to the problems of our ‘free market' - that of too many classes and not enough people. Pure handicap racing, such as we see at most sailing clubs every weekend and in big events like the Bloody Mary, is good fun but it doesn't always reward the best sailors. As Ian points out, whoever wins out of a 420 or an Optimist is as much down to the luck of the wind as it is to good sailing. In a way, that's the appeal of this type of racing, that every dog has its day, but it we want to test ourselves properly then we really should be pitting like against like - say, 505s against Fireballs, Ospreys, Javelins and so on, or 49ers against RS800s, International 14s and Laser 4000s.

Who knows, such a circuit might even encourage people to dust off the cobwebs on their Laser 5000s and other classes that have seen their best days, and come and have another go. There are some great boats out there, with not much money being asked for them. The trouble is circuits like the Laser 5000 - one of the best of the 90s - has now virtually died. But if there was a skiff circuit out there prepared to attract all comers, it might actually be worth shelling out a couple of grand for an old but perfectly raceable 5000, or its old rival from Topper, the Boss.

Of course this is exactly what goes on in keelboat racing all the time, where racing under handicap systems like IRC is the norm rather than the exception. While I'd always prefer to race in a fleet of identical Farr 40s or Swan 45s for some really close one-design racing, handicap racing is the next best thing - provided you don't stretch the handicap rule across boats that are too diverse. This is what Ian Renilson is suggesting, is that provided we don't ask the impossible of the Portsmouth Yardstick system, we can enjoy some near-one-design racing in boats of a similar ilk. A great idea worth further exploration.