The push-pull tiller lets the skipper sit up forward for best sailing trim. The regular tiller would be OK if you had a hefty bit of cargo or passenger up in the front half to balance out the skipper in the rear. Otherwise, too much weight in the stern with the skipper back there.

I think you will find the dory more like a race horse instead of a heavyset workhorse as I think those Blanchard Junior Knockabouts have 500 lbs iron keels, otherwise, plenty will translate.

   I can't speak for the NED, but I have the lug rig on my skerry and that's all the sail I need 99% of the time, if not too much.  The sloop rig would be a bit more weatherly.

I came to my skerry after racing my 30' keelboat for 15 years, though I learned ages ago on dinghies and Sailfish so I knew some of what I was getting into.  The NED will have much less momentum than the Knockabout, so the fine points of tacking it, especially in chop, will be different, but well known to dinghy sailors.  If you can, ask for a separate, personal session in one of their small boats if you want a jumpstart, but basically it's more important than in a keelboat to get speed going into a tack, bring it through irons quickly and bear off to get speed before settling on final course.  At the same time, you have to take care not to get too quick with the helm or you will stall out the rudder and lose speed and helm.  The basics of sail trim will not be terribly different on either sloop and with a small jib like the NED, it shouldn't be hard to handle.

The other thing is the NED (and the Skerry) are light boats for their size, but are NOT planing hulls.  That means that in a brisk breeze, if you bear offwind, the boat can accelerate to max hull speed very quickly and can get squirrelly if you try to jibe it while overpowered.  It can't pop up on a plane like a Laser and scoot downwind, relieving the apparent wind, so the sailpower loads up the hull and digs a hole in the water.  The motto is reef early, even more than in the Knockabout, because that extra power in the sail can knock you right over if you push it.

I like most of what mummichog says about sailing the NED, but I do have to quibble about a couple of small points. I sailed windsurfer longboards for about 20 years. I'm very confident that I was getting them up on a plane. I've also been sailing the NED for the past half dozen years. And I think that it, too, gets up on a plane. It certainly sails at more than twice its theoretical hull speed. If you look at the bottom panel of the NED, you'll see that it has about the dimensions of the bottom of a longboard windsurfer, so it's no surprise if the performance is similar. I do agree that the boat gets fairly unstable when sailing off the wind at high speed. But that's part of the fun. To make the best of it you want to sit fairly far back to get the nose up and reduce the tendency to broach. You also want to pull the dagger board pretty far out of the water to reduce drag. In those conditions the Dory sails like a bat out of hell. I'm pretty sure I'll never try to jibe the boat when I'm reaching downwind on a planing run, but apart from that it's just a lot of fun. My sail does not have reef points and I've never felt the need for them. But I do get off the water at times.

   Granted the NED has a bit more flat bottom than the Skerry, but I'd dare say that John wouldn't claim either to be intended as a real planing hull.  As you said it gets pretty twitchy.  Hulls like the Laser, or a Sunfish have a wide surface on the bottom, carried well aft to let the water lift the hull, reducing the wetted surface and allowing it to break free of the bow/stern wave trains and create a single wave train upon which it can ride.  With the rocker and taper that both boats have, they may lift intermittently in a high power situation but they'll fall off again.  The NED may do that a bit more, but I wouldn't advise pushing it too far until I had my PFD securely fastened.  The reef was an option on my lugsail when I bought it, though I think it is standard now, which is as it should be.  Learn to reef and you can smoothly cope with a much wider range of conditions with confidence.

  Hello.

I sail at CWB also where I have an annual pass. I'm considering building a SWD and would like to ask if you could take me sailing in your boat sometime. I'm curious about the discussion above and it makes me wonder how well the NWD handles in higher winds.

You can email me as peedublyou at gmail.

Paul