Bob Telford’s first race sailing a dinghy with a standing lug

standing-lug-sail1

Standing lug sail from W P Stephens classic Canoe and
Boatbuilding for Amateurs

Bob Telford called by the yard currently restoring his impressive Maurice Griffiths-designed Idle Duck (type the word Idle Duck into the search box top left for more on this boat), only to find himself roped in to what sounded like an interesting round-the-buoys outing. Instead, though, it turned out to be a learning experience…

‘I knew something was afoot when I trundled into the inner sanctum known to some as Alan’s Community Center, for Retired Shipwrights, Dockyard Mateys and Associated Layabouts, and saw him and Peter look up, saying ’just the man…d’you fancy sailing in the Swale Match in me dinghy?

‘”Yes,” says I, without thinking.

‘The boat is a 10-ft lug rigged clinker job, so there I was, on my own, in a dinghy I had never rigged, let alone sailed, heading for the line for a race against four 16-ft fully crewed gaff-rigged dayboats.

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Read the rest of Bob’s story: Continue reading “Bob Telford’s first race sailing a dinghy with a standing lug”

Windward-sailing Barbary pirates

Xebec

Xebec pirate ship

!!This post now with added singing – see the bottom of this post!!Â

My canoe sailing and building pal Jim van den Bos sent me this link from The Times newspaper yesterday:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article1449736.ece

Here’s the TS Pelican’s website, which tells the story of her interesting rig; see also this article by Philip Goode, the designer involved in the TS Pelican project: http://www.weatherlysquareriggers.com

The whole thing led me to speculate how Continue reading “Windward-sailing Barbary pirates”

From dinghies to the Architectura Navalis and back

It’s funny how some things in life go round and round in one’s mind.

This morning over my porage I idly read a copy of Cruising & Ocean Racing by EG Martin and John Irving that I managed to buy for a song at the weekend. I turned to a chapter by John Irving about dinghies and their design, and found that he had some remarkably trenchant things to say about pram dinghies as tenders. He strongly dislikes them – so much so that one might think he was frightened by one at a young age.

Now the people who wrote that book could afford sizeable yachts, and could perhaps live with with tenders lashed to their decks that were long enough to have sharp bows – but that isn’t true for most of us. Prams can be a fact of life, so I was interested in what he had to say about what made a good and what made a bad pram. Continue reading “From dinghies to the Architectura Navalis and back”