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”