Category: Racing sailing craft

The joy of small-boat sailing 95 years ago, by Jack London

Jack London

Jack London Jack London

Here’s a quote from a fiery, passionate piece Jack London wrote for the magazine Country Life in America in 1912:

‘Barring captains and mates of big ships, the small-boat sailor is the real sailor. He knows—he must know—how to make the wind carry his craft from one given point to another given point. He must know about tides and rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and day and night signals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built and rigged. He must know how to gentle her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to fill her on the other tack without deadening her way or allowing her to fall off too far.’

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Wooden boat day at Bewl Valley Sailing Club

BVSC

Jim Vandenbos with a well deserved special award
for bloody-mindedness in racing his sailing canoe
in a Force 5 wind

Like most sailing clubs, the club we belong to focuses strongly on racing modern boats. No doubt the racers have a lot of fun, and without them the club would have no officers to run it.

But this concentration on racing and modernity leads, as always, to great conformity, with fleets of practically identical boats. (Historians of boating say that one of the great examples of how racing leads to conformity is the development and improvement of the Thames barge through the latter half of the 19th century, by the way.)

Bewl Valley Sailing Club nevertheless has a small band of eccentrics who don’t quite fit the stereotype, either because they cruise and won’t race; choose to sail old class dinghies from the days when they were typically built from plywood; are weekend craftsmen, some of whom build their own traditional boats with great skill and care while others build in plywood and epoxy; and a very few both design and build.

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A celebration of the Mirror

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http://intheboatshed.net/2007/07/16/a-celebration-of-the-mirror/

Click on the small images for much bigger and clearer images.

Mirror

Mirror Mirror Mirror

Mirror Mirror

Bucknell sisters Margaret Palmer and Mary Ralph with
Andy Wyke; Mirror Dinghy building instructions; Mirror
on roof of Austin Mini; Barry Bucknell and sister sailing;
how we still think of the Mirror today

Copyrights: NMM; International Mirror Association; NMM &
Jack Holt; NMM; Turtle Photography

The Mirror is not everyone’s idea of a classic, but there’s no doubt that it has been a hugely influential design: it won huge numbers of people over to sailing as a pastime, and its influence on dinghy designers can still be seen today, not least because it was probably the first dinghy to be built using the stitch-and-glue technique; up to that time I gather only canoes had been built using the method.

And besides, like many people I have a certain slightly mixed-up affection for them: I built one with my father Brian Atkin when I was a kid, and more recently my partner Julie sails one.

The National Maritime Museum Cornwall recently received two very special visitors: the twin sisters of famous TV DIY expert and Mirror dinghy designer, Barry Bucknell.

The twin 93-year old sisters saw the first Mirror dinghy ever built on show at the Museum, and an original publicity film used to launch the class, including footage of their brother.

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Designed by Bucknell, together with Jack Holt in 1962, the Mirror dinghy was named after the Daily Mirror newspaper and was promoted as an affordable boat. Costing just 63s 11d when it first came onto the market, it did more than any previous design to make Read the rest of this post: Continue reading “A celebration of the Mirror”