At 20:36 25 June 2007, Ian wrote:
snip

As a parallel, I do a fair bit of sailing. When people
ask me how to
learn, I always tell them to start, even if just for
a few times, in a
dinghy rather than a yacht. Dinghy sailing teaches
fast responses and
attentiveness: it's easy to slow down things for a
keel boat but much
harder to go the other way. I still make a point of
hiring a Wayfarer
at a local sailing centre a couple of times a year,
preferably on a
good blowy day, to remind myself what it's like and
sharpen my
responses.

But there are dinghies and dinghies... Learning on
a Wayfarer is as much K21-like as any dinghy can be
- it demands a lot of provocation to capsize given
that most sailing schools have an armoury of small
sails that get hoisted on a faintly breezy day for
beginners. Of course if you put up the full sails
then it's livelier, but also physically a bit too demanding
for many beginners due to the size of the full rig.

Learning on a Laser with full rig would be far too
much for most beginners, as would Fireballs and many
other racing machines. OTOH a GP14 is a great dinghy
to learn in (IMHO) and so is a Heron. At school we
sailed Enterprises which can be a bit much (not to
mention a bit fragile) but we were teenagers, fit &
fearless.

However, I do agree that anyone wanting to learn to
sail should do so in dinghies whatever their ambitions,
not just on the grounds you mention, but also in terms
of safety, cost and accessability. Safety might seem
odd, but keel boats with their much larger sails, winches
and so on have an additional set of dangers not present
in dinghies.