Pete Baker’s Blog

Has my first taste, today, of the Laser dinghy. I’ve been itching to have a proper go at one of these for a while, but the winter weather has never been quite calm enough to risk taking one out – after all, in stronger wind, if you make a mistake in one of these things, you can find yourself catapulted into the water rather quickly. And yes, I mean catapulted, I have seen it happen to people, flailing arms and legs and all!!

Last year I had a couple of goes of the class underneath the Laser Standard – the Laser Pico. It’s basically a totally different boat, but the design principle and handling characteristics are very similar – a simple, tough, performance design, and sh*t loads of fun. Unfortunately, the Pico was really designed with children in mind, so me, being 13 stone and 5 foot 10, found the cockpit rather cramped. I also cultivated a rather nice collection of bumps on my head, due to the over-affectionate and extremely low boom, and a bit of a twisted knee, due to the various gymnastics I was performing to avoid cranial contact with aforementioned extremely low boom.

So I was very happy today to wake up to a bright, warm day, and a nice ‘calm but not too calm’ Beaufort Force 3, perfect for learning how not to drown myself capsizing a full Standard Laser! I got some brief instruction on how to rig one of the club Lasers (dead simple!), and with a bit of trepidation, off I set.

So basically, the Laser Standard is probably the most fun and simultaneously the simplest boat I have ever sailed. It is just awesome. It accelerates very quickly, has very responsive handling, and all the controls are in totally the right place. The wind was just strong enough to get the old adrenalin flowing, but not too strong to be totally scary.

Some of the guys at the club have set up a ‘Winter Racing’ series, so I took part in a couple of races, and yes I was pretty bad, but towards the end of the session I had improved a lot. I think that racing is probably the best way to improve your sailing skills and increase familiarity with the boat, simply because you can watch what everyone else is doing, what lines they are taking, how they have set their sails, and how they handle the controls, and then try to copy them. If you can handle the humiliation of coming last a few times, that is!

Anyway, overall pretty amazing for a 37 year old design! On top of all this, you can buy second hand Lasers normally for less than a grand. Seriously thinking about buying one of my own now, but I’d have to investigate storage in one of the boatyards near Millwall Dock.

It’s been a couple of months since I last wrote anything… partying and then going away over Christmas kind of got in the way, and I’ve also had a very busy January at work. Added to this, I’ve had two friends ask me to help them move house in the past month (you know who you are! ), so this is probably the first genuinely free Sunday I’ve had for about… um… 8 weeks?

Anyways, looking forward to 2008 now… biggest thing that’s going to happen to me this year is probably going to be my niece / nephew who is due sometime in June… yep I’m going to be Uncle Pete!! And yes, I plan to spend as much time as possible in Andalusia ‘babysitting’ for my sis and my brother in law, what a shame!!

Gah… I also have Ive’s stag doo to plan this year, not to mention a best mans speech.. Lol. Need to get motoring on the stag do plans, only 3 months away…

In terms of New Years resolutions, I think the only one I’ve really made was ’sail as much as possible this year’ … already been out a couple of times at Millwall dock, and bloody hell the water is cold this time of year, even with a wetsuit!!