Intensity Sails Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats

Laser sailors are good people. You can lend a Laser sailor your boat, your car, or even your wife, and expect to get them back in hardly any worse condition than they were before.

But even so... I wouldn't just leave all my Laser gear on my boat overnight at a regatta in plain view. Someone might decide that they just had to take my mast top section to replace the one they broke today. Someone might think that some of my lines needed to be transferred to a more deserving home. Someone might forget to bring their buoyancy aid the next day and assume that it would be OK to "borrow" mine for the day. Etc. Etc.

Of course Laser sailors are good people. But there's no point in putting temptation in their way.

So if I'm at a multi-day regatta I have two choices. Take everything off my boat every night and pack it away in my car or the hotel room; or put a top cover on the boat to cover all my goodies from prying eyes and hope that this will persuade those "good people" Laser sailors to look for easier pickings elsewhere.

In general I prefer the option of putting the cover on. I'm too lazy for the other method.

If I've driven the boat to the regatta on my trailer this is no problem. I have my super heavy duty durable trailable road resistant top cover that I normally use. But if I've flown to the regatta and chartered a boat there is a problem. My usual top cover is way too bulky and way too heavy to pack in my luggage to carry on an airplane.

(I could write a whole post on the shenanigans I go through every time I fly to a regatta to pare my gear down to the airline's weight limits for baggage. But that's for another day.)

So what to do?

Riding to the rescue once again here comes Jim Myers of Intensity sails and his Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats.





Yes Tyvek. That stuff they put on buildings (at least in the USA.) It's water resistant. It's breathable. It's tough. Most important of all it hardly weighs anything at all and you can roll up the Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats into a very small volume and put it on your checked baggage. As with all of Jim's stuff the Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats is very well made with a bungie cord around the edge and reinforcement patches in all the right places.

Jim sent me a Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats to review last year and I took it to the Laser Masters Worlds in Spain in September. Oops. The charter boats in Roses all came with boat top covers provided so I didn't get a chance to try my Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats that I had transported all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

So a few months later I took my Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats to Australia for this year's Laser Masters Worlds in February. The weather was very rainy at the beginning of the week so the cover got a good test. It passed with flying colors. It kept my boat and gear dry, and nothing got nicked all week.

Yeah, Laser sailors are good people but I felt it only made sense to be careful in a country where many of the citizens celebrate the fact that their ancestors were convicts. Oh, I think that was a gaffe. I just accused all Australians of being potential thieves. Are the press here? OK. Just shoot me.

Where was I? Where am I? Oh yes. The Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats.

I found one slight problem with the cover. I came back to the boat one morning and took off the cover and found the cockpit of my boat full of tiny little shreds of shiny paper and some little brown balls that looked awfully like mouse droppings.



Hmmm. How did that happen? By the way do the they have mice in Australia or is there a marsupial that fills that ecological niche?

The next day... same problem. I investigated a bit further. Why is a mouse/marsupial/random rodent visiting my boat at night? What's the attraction? Then it dawned on me. I had left my PFD in the boat and in the pocket there was a used packet or two of the energy gels that I had been consuming on the water between races.



Obviously the nocturnally-boat-visiting mouse/marsupial/random rodent had been nibbling on the remains of my GU Gel and had been using my Laser cockpit as a toilet. Nice.

So I would give the Tyvek Regatta Deck Cover for Laser Sailboats 99 points out of a possible 100. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a light, durable cover that folds to a compact size. And if Jim would just treat the cover with a marsupial repellent I would give it 100 out of 100.