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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

When we go to the beach twice a day for a surf - who can afford to pay for parking? Plus the jog to the beach is good for you.

And some people what to look like a surfer. I am a surfer who wants to look like a normal person.

Who buys a new board if they don't have to? Madness. I choose my equipment carefully, it has to match my style. Standing on some clever foam out in the middle of the ocean is tricky and very personal.

I wouldn't say it's part of the culture, it's just being normal. I don't upgrade my PC to stay on trend. I don't upgrade my surfboard to stay on trend. They are tools.

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Do you think propensity to spend is perfectly equal across all hobbies? Is it possible that surfers spend less relative to something like photography or sailing?

By saying it's "just being normal", you're signaling that sensible frugality is normal to you. It's possible that value has some correlation with your identity as a surfer, no?

Sailing is a big set of categories. Folks how have a Laser and work that into the ground are rather like surfers. Lasers are all the same. Get out there and sail. When you have worn out your sail, grudgingly buy a new one. Patch the fiberglass in your deck when it needs it.

Folks who have wooden keelboats are about as into working on the boat as they are into sailing the boat. They spend money, but it's not on flashy gear. It's on another five gallons of bottom paint and another box of sandpaper because that varnish has to be redone again. Marketing and brand doesn't really help you sell these or increase margins on them, because a bunch of ratty guys are on the dock comparing how long they had to go between repainting the bottom with that manufacturer versus this one.

Folks who have big glitzy boats as a status symbol spend money, but generally you're not selling to them. You're selling to a designer or to workmen. And all the life jackets are still the same orange ones off the shelf from West Marine or the like.

> Lasers are all the same.

It's interesting you chose that specific boat given the dust-up between the trademark owner and the builders over the past year, and the recent controversy in the 2024 Olympic selection committee. I've only barely followed it, but at least some of the controversy seems to be about the lack of innovation in the class.

I haven't even heard about the dustup, and one of the reasons that I pick the Laser is that the world of Laser sailing is so large that the Olympics are a tiny, tiny fraction of it. There are very few Olympic classes for which that is the case.

Much of the attraction of the class is the lack of innovation. Innovation in racing sailboats tends to sacrifice other qualities like seakindliness, survivability, and versatility. Look at the Americas Cup boats for extreme examples. They're amazingly fast, but useless for anything but that one task. Having a boat that has persisted as a first choice for Olympic racing and taking your kids out for daysail means that it is happens to have been an incredibly good design, and allowing innovation in the class is more likely to end up with reducing that versatility, rather the way the American Kennel Club's focus on conformation has destroyed dog breeds.

The dust up is actually about one of the manufacturers continually refusing to play the game nicely and abusing the de-facto monopoly they're granted in the regions they supply by the class governing body and generally trying to push everyone around.

It all came to a head because someone made a complaint to the EU that the way that Olympic sailing equipment is supplied is anti-competitive. World Sailing chooses equipment for some of the events which has a single or limited number of suppliers because the rules for that class require trademarks owned by those suppliers to appear on the equipment (true for the Laser, RS-X Windsurfer, Nacra 17).

All Olympic classes are having to change their model to allow anyone to become a builder/supplier of that equipment. The Laser builder who holds the trademark in the EU, Americas and most of Asia didn't play ball so the class rules were changed to remove the requirement for the trademark that they hold to appear on the boats and sails. At the same time they were in breach of a contract that they have with the class association to do with factory inspections and other governance matters relating to the supply of equipment and they have now been kicked out.

Not exactly the free and easy relaxing image that you might associate with sailing!

Interesting fact: Although lasers all look like they're all the same, the manufacturing tolerances are such that they're definitely not when it comes to the top level of competition, and the top sailors have to expend large amounts of effort to avoid duff boats and other equipment.

Source: I'm someone who sails a Laser competitively and has skin in this game.

> Interesting fact: Although lasers all look like they're all the same, the manufacturing tolerances are such that they're definitely not when it comes to the top level of competition, and the top sailors have to expend large amounts of effort to avoid duff boats and other equipment.

That's really interesting. How annoying. Is there some tribal knowledge about what manufacturers are solid and what are not?

There is... but one of the problems with the sport of sailing is that there are so many variables and working out what's chance and what's a trend is incredibly difficult.

It's been well known for the last 10 years that the Australian manufacturer builds notionally "better" boats (stay stiff for longer, less likely to leak or crack etc), but there are still variances in key measurements which you need to look out for. The biggest ones are hull weight and mast rake (how upright the mast is in the boat fore and aft which has a critical effect on how the rig is tuned and the performance characteristics of the boat).

Boats come off the production line with fittings in slightly different places, different amounts of material in the layup, key parts of the hull not quite aligned the same etc.

There's significant variance between masts as well. The sections are extruded aluminium and over the lifetime of the extrusion die they go from having slightly thinner walls to slightly thicker ones. Mast manufacturers seem to end up with slightly different grades of aluminium as well. This affects the stiffness, a very important factor when it comes to how powerful the rig is with lighter sailors preferring thinner masts and heavier sailors thicker masts.

Competitive sailors will try and measure everything they ever use to keep track of what they think works for them, and then select carefully when they purchase something new.

All this goes against the ethos and values of the class, which is that there's no equipment advantage possible and it's all about the sailor. This is dealt with at the Olympics (and at World Championships for the Olympic categories) by having mandatory supplied equipment which hopefully has been selected so that it's all as identical as possible. For all the competitions you need to succeed at in order to get to the Olympics however, it's the wild west!

The two hobbies you suggested get easier the more you spend. Surfing has a cap pretty quick in that if you spend more you aren't going to be suddenly amazing or get a huge leg up in the competition. You can catch some waves quicker with better gear, but experience is how you get good at it. It is only getting into the water and practicing that gets you better at surfing. Photography has many things that will allow you to take better pictures. Sailing gets expensive at the start and continues as you go. Surfing is a 1 to 4 items purchase sport that is relatively cheap to keep at since you don't need to upgrade.

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