I knew that accepting the offer to race a Musto Performance Skiff in the National Championships would be an exercise in humiliation, and I wasn't wrong. I'm not going to tell you where I finished, you'll have to look that up on the Musto Skiff website or in yachtsandyachting.com, but I will tell you that I didn't manage to get one result in the top 10.
 
Do I regret going? Not one bit. It was great fun. An excellent championship, well run by Lyme Regis Sailing Club, and it gave me the opportunity to experience the camaraderie of the Musto Skiff class at first hand. The class always keeps Roll Tacks well updated with its activities, but it was great to see it all in action. The fleet is thriving, despite the fact that it is not the cheapest high-performance singlehander. Even secondhand, you struggle to find a boat going for less than £5,000 - which says a lot about the health of the MPS class - although it does mean it's hard for teenagers and sailors in their cash-strapped twenties to get into the fleet.

What makes the class work is that firstly the boat is beautifully put together, and robust enough to put up with a good deal of punishment. It is a supreme boat to sail. But the clincher, the thing that really has the class buzzing, is that Paul Manning from Victor Boats is the nicest man you could hope to meet. Nothing is too much trouble for Paul, and you can see quite clearly that he has a boatpark full of happy customers.

Add to that the fact that the top sailors in the fleet, formidable husband and wife team Richard and Kit Stenhouse, along with people like class chairman Simon Reynolds and this year's national champion Rick Perkins, are only too keen to help any beginners get to grips with the boat.

I had driven over to Whitstable a fortnight earlier, to collect the demo boat but also to learn a few things from Rick, Simon and another local MPS sailor Barry Shotton. The breeze was virtually non-existent, so we lashed the boat down to the ground, and made it secure enough fore and aft and side to side, so that you could run around the boat and even get on and off the trapeze.

If you are learning to sail a high performance boat, I can't recommend a quicker way of getting to grips with it, than a bit of dry-land sailing. I watched Rick and Simon do some dry-land tacks, gybes, hoists and drops - the four fundamental manoeuvres that I was bound to find challenging. "No, don't stop there," Simon nagged me, as I ‘tacked'. "Keep on walking through the boat and don't turn round until you reach the new gunnel. Then you can turn round and sit your bum on the rack." Getting into the right habit straight away is a much better way than unlearning a bad habit first, and this was a great way to get me off on the right foot. And sailing a boat like a Musto Skiff is a lot to do with fancy footwork. Put your feet in the right place, and the rest will follow.

The next day, there was a bit more wind. Not much, but enough to go racing and discover the excruciating art of semi-trapezing a singlehanded asymmetric boat. No crew to yell at to move to somewhere that will allow you to straighten your aching legs. And no crew to yell at when you fail to respond to that small lull in the wind, as you feel the boat rolling on top of you, forlorn in the knowledge that you have left it too late to do anything about it. Ker-splosh.

As it would transpire, that light wind sailing at Whitstable would prove good practice for the Nationals. I had been anticipating a full-on Force 4 to 5 at Lyme Regis, with all the legendary rolling swell that goes with that. That wasn't to be, and there weren't many times over the four days when we got to fully stretch our legs, let along drop down on our trapeze adjusters. It was mostly light and... er, lovely... as the Olympic sailors have taught themselves to say in advance of racing at that lovely sailing venue Qingdao.

At least one consolation of the lighter winds would be that I wouldn't humiliate myself quite to the extent that I might have done if a gale had been raging across Lyme Bay. But I found other ways of humiliating myself instead, such as being desperately slow upwind despite some excellent, near-the-knuckle starts on my part. I figure you don't have much to lose when you've got no pace, so you might as well go for it. And I did at least console myself with starting my races well, even if they didn't finish so well.

Also, I noticed I had a canny knack of starting next to the person who would go on to win the race, so at least I had the right idea.... Or so I thought, until one wag reminded me of that excerpt from Dave Perry's excellent book, Winning in One-Designs, where he recounts the story of an average sailor who finds himself always starting next to the national champion. ‘Average sailor', like me, is proud of his start line positioning even if not of his position across the finish line. But then ‘average sailor' goes to a tactics seminar by ‘national champion', where ‘national champion' gives his top tip for great starting. "Pick a lemon, and start next to him. You'll be in clear air in no time." Yes, as my good friend was all too happy to point out, I was that Lyme Regis lemon, ripe for the picking.

Keen to know where the blame lay for my lack of upwind speed, I asked Paul Manning to look at my rig before the next day. It turned out it was a bit out of whack, and once he'd jiggled it around I was quite a bit quicker. Still not quick, but quicker. The rest of my speed I'd have to learn from changing my technique, and probably losing 10kg. I wasn't the only fatty struggling, however. Usually, Richard Stenhouse is the daddy of the fleet, the reigning World Champion and a supreme athlete. But he probably weighs in at around the early 90s, while eventual winner Rick Perkins is more around the 75kg mark. Sten did his best in conditions that really didn't suit his large frame, coming in 6th overall, beating his missus by a couple of places.

Aside from the weight range, there were some quite different ages at the front of the fleet too, with Rick Perkins signing in at a fit 40, with runner-up Dan Henderson coming in at just 16 years old. Sixteen? I could barely gybe a Topper at 16, let alone a Musto Skiff, if such things had been invented back then! There is no doubt, the Musto Skiff is a tricky boat to sail, but there are enough people doing it - as there are in the RS700 - to prove that it is quite doable. The sailing world has moved on so much over the past 20 years. I remember Mark Rushall saying that in the mid-80s you could capsize three or four times during a windy race at the Fireball Nationals, and still be in with a chance of winning it. These days I'd be surprised if anyone in the top 10 of the Fireballs capsizes once all week. The game really has moved on, and with foiling it's moving to yet another level.

Talking of foiling, I caught up with reigning Moth World Champion and Bladerider poster boy Rohan Veal, who has just been nominated for ISAF Rolex Sailor of the Year. By the beginning of September, hull no.70 was leaving the factory in China to be shipped off to some far flung corner. There are Bladeriders selling everywhere, and all kinds of people getting them. One guy in Japan is sailing one aged 68 - Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, eat your heart out - and even Ernesto Bertarelli has bought one. Maybe he's planning on racing it against BMW Oracle for the next America's Cup if rival billionaire Larry Ellison wins the impending court case against Alinghi in the New York Supreme Court.

The Bladerider is certainly getting foiling into the mainstream, and getting people back into sailing from other watersports like kiteboarding and windsurfing. And who knows? Maybe it will even go Olympic one day. The Bladerider lobby was hanging around the ISAF Annual Conference last year in Helsinki, although to my knowledge there is no active bid to get the Bladerider in for Weymouth 2012.
 
Which is just as well, because it's already going to be a blood bath in Estoril this November, with the International Olympic Committee requiring ISAF to cut 11 Olympic disciplines down to 10 for Weymouth. That will be tough enough, as the incumbent classes start hurling stones at each other. Then throw in two new pretenders, a women's skiff and women's match racing, which both want to be considered for selection. Indeed the RYA has already nominated a women's skiff as one of its eight favoured classes for 2012. It advocates for the men and women each: a singlehander, a doublehander, a skiff and a sailboard. So with eight places already nominated, that would leave a scrap for the final two places between the two keelboat classes, the men's heavyweight singlehander, and the catamaran.

Much has been said about the RYA's exclusion of the catamaran, including Jeremy Evans's piece in last fortnight's Yachts and Yachting. Much less has been said about the exclusion of the keelboats or the men's heavyweight singlehander. The view behind the scenes appears to be that the Star class is too well connected politically to have a serious chance of being thrown out. If that is the case, it is a terrible indictment of the selection process if politics prevails over practicality. On the other hand, the Yngling is said to be looking vulnerable (boo hoo).

What about the Finn though? The class that Ben Ainslie has made his own, the boat in which he could win a fourth (provided Qingdao goes to plan) Olympic title on home waters?

Poor old Ben must be feeling a little got at lately, what with the extended trial for the Finn class this time between him and Ed Wright, and now the threatened extinction of the Finn. Actually, I think the RYA deserves credit on both counts. As to the first, extending the trials, it would be very hard on Ed Wright if the trials weren't extended after he had just won Sail for Gold against a fleet that included reigning World Champion from Spain, Rafael Trujillo. Ed's standing-up downwind wave-surfing technique is something to behold, very dynamic, and devastatingly fast. It may not be the walkover that people are predicting for Ben, although I just can't see Ed getting the better of him, no matter how much you extend the selections.

As to the RYA's nomination of classes, it appears to me that they are acting in the best interests of the sport, rather than for pure self-interest. Otherwise (with Ben in mind) they would have nominated two men's singlehander categories. I have huge admiration for the way the whole world of cat sailing has come out in unison against the RYA's ‘anti-cat' stance, but right now in the Olympic world, the extravagantly priced Tornado Sport needs to get its house in order.

The pace of development has barely slowed since the twin-trapeze, asymmetric version was voted in seven years ago, and the on-the-water price for getting your campaign up and running is not far short of £40,000, development costs aside. No wonder the average age of the top of the fleet must be knocking around the late 30s or early 40s. Yes, we've got some young guys in the UK fleet, but that's largely due to the ample funding that goes with being part of Skandia Team GBR. Try funding a Tornado campaign from your own pocket in your early 20s.

One thing that we can be sure of when the sailing politicians descend on Portugal to debate the merits of dinghies versus keelboats versus cats, the fur is going to fly.