There is a magazine called "Small Craft Advisor".
It is an excellent magazine that covers small sailboats that are mostly overlooked by all the other printed sailing magazines.
Among the regular contributors is a guy named William (Bill) Mantis, and he seems to be the only guy that I (or any other puddle ducker) has ever met that doesn't like the PDRacer.
Most people can easily recognize the Puddle Duck Racer for what it is, a super simple & cheap to build boat that is small enough to be cute, but big enough to carry a couple of adults.
For we that build and sail them, they are an endless source of fun to both sail and tinker with.
For those that do not wish to, they atleast recognize the novelty of our hobby with it's simplistic nature.
Somehow Bill thinks that we have targeted sailing as a critical American value that we wish to drive to extinction, that we are a "subversive organization", we should be categorized as "nonmilitary combatants" and shipped off to Guantanamo.
His very strong and distasteful comments were printed in the May/June 2005 issue #33, which ironically featured an article by our most enthusiastic member and public relations specialist, Andrew Linn about a sailing trip in his PD to Klamath Lake, OR.
Hopefully that indicates that SCA doesn't share Bill's viewpoints, because I know that I enjoy all the other parts of that magazine.
An even more ironic aspect is that Bill wrote a book called The $50, 5 HOUR CANOE SAIL RIG By William C. Mantis ISBN 0-9673233-0-4(see MediterraneanAvenue.com) on how to convert a canoe into a sailboat using cheap homemade methods like what we do with the PD.
I read the book, it is basically the same as Boy Scout Canoe plans which are so old that their copyright has expired and the plans are featured all over the internet, including on our free plans page.
If you are interested in reading his book but don't want to pay for it, have your local library "Inter-Library-Loan" it, that is a free service that they provide and can get you just about any book on the planet.
I guess no matter what kind of fun you try to have, someone out there will dissaprove of it.
In our case, that one person is Bill Mantis.