Tag: racing dinghy

Pathé newsreel films – including the ‘red boats’ of Brixham, boat building on the Thames, and making the Firefly dinghy

The British Pathé website has some charming bits and pieces of old film, not least this one of the Brixham sailing trawlers racing in a regatta more than 80 years ago.

From 1950, here’s a great old clip about a boat building family on the Thames. Listen carefully, and you’ll learn the secret of British worldwide boat building supremacy. Yes, ladies and gentleman Britain led the world in just about everything, or so we were always being told. I think we’re a little more realistic today…

Here’s a splendid four-minute piece outlining the three-layer hot-moulding process used by Fairey to manufacture the Firefly racing dinghy and others. I hadn’t realised that it was a vacuum process, but it’s well worth understanding. Who’s that in the boat at the end I wonder? They found some suitably entertaining weather for the filming.

Moving still further from traditional timber-based boat building is this jolly newsreel about making fibreglass boats in 1958 – a time when glass and polyester resin with still being touted as a wonder material.

Ahoy you Landlubbers is a not terribly informative report from the 1959 London Boat Show. The producer was clearly hell-bent on a subject that no doubt interested him rather than the boats.

‘We are now very much in the age of the motor boat. Diesel optional, girls essential,’ says the voiceover as the camera turns to a couple of models toying with a giant ball, and chatting with contemporary racing driver Mike Hawthorn – this was likely to have been just days before his death in a car crash on the 22nd January that year.

‘The Rolls-Royce of the boat show is the 10-berth 36ft Bevinda, the hull of which is the biggest single reinforced resin moulding in the world,’ continues the voice from another age. ‘Top speed more than 30 knots.’

Its top speed may have been comparable to many modern luxury motorboats of a similar length, but I bet it needed significantly smaller engines to reach it.

Good Wood Boat clinker built dinghies at this year’s Beale Park Boat Show

Good Wood Boat Redwing

Good Wood Boat Tideway Good Wood Boat stripping varnish

Good Wood Boat will be showing two clinker built dinghies – a new National Redwing and a restored Tideway – at the 2011 Beale Park Boat Show.

Redwing R249 designed by Uffa Fox in 1938 was built by Good Wood Boat in 2009, and won the 2010 RYA Volvo Dinghy Show London ‘Concours d’Elegance’ trophy. She is being offered for sale at the show.

She was recently prepared for and exhibited at the 2011 RYA Volvo Dinghy Show in London and with her brand new, unused sails, she is in pristine condition and can be considered ‘as new’. She is offered for sale at an ex-demonstrator price of £14995 –  is £3000 less than the price of a new Good Wood Boat Redwing of this specification.

The boat is ready to race, and comes complete with measurement certificate, trapeze and buoyancy bags, and of course is race-measured.

Tideway TW233 recently restored by Good Wood Boat will also be on show to promote the company’s traditional wooden boat repair, restoration and refinishing services, which now include a clinker boat varnish stripping service.

Good Wood Boat Co is also licensed to build new wooden Tideway clinker dinghies.

Stephen Beresford of Good Wood Boat can bbe contacted at tel 07934 622013 and email  info@goodwoodboat.co.uk.

The Redwing sailing dinghy explained

Redwing dinghy scan

Redwing dinghy

Jeff Cole asked about the Redwing dinghy that featured in a post a couple of days ago. The Redwing is an Uffa Fox design created for sailing off the Cornish coast, and seems to have been designed for Looe Sailing Club.

‘Having enjoyed and endured the tumbling seas off the Cornish coast I was in full agreement with the Commodore of the Looe Sailing Club when he outlined the type of 14-footer he would like designed for their turbulent waters, and delighted at the prospect of designing such a boat,’ wrote Fox many years later in his book Sailing Boats.

What the good commodore got was a classic Fox hull with a clean run and a waterline stretched to the maximum, but with good freeboard, half-decked and with a substantial breakwater designed to cope with the rough and tumble of the local sea. In those days it also had a 132lb iron drop keel with a 5ft draught, though I gather that today it’s more likely to be of wood.

Renamed the West of England Redwing, the design became popular and was adopted as a national class by the RYA.

Not surprisingly, given its features and design aims, the boat gained a reputation for seaworthiness and for speed in strong wind conditions.

In the book Sailing Boats, Fox describes the results of the 1958 Cross-Channel Race which included a Redwing.

‘The Redwing Nimbus had sailed remarkably well. She had beaten boat for boat 16ft 6in Hornets, 17ft 6in Ospreys, all the Merlin Rockets except one, 16ft Snipes, 16ft 6in 5.0.5s, 15ft Finns, Albacores and Swordfish. She had sailed so well that world renowned sailor Beecher More was so impressed by the Redwing’s performance that he was certain that a mistake had been made, and when the committee re-checked their figures they found this was so and announced the Redwing Nimbus the winner… ‘

And finally he becomes completely misty-eyed about his handsome baby:

‘She is an outstandingly brave little boat, from which one can learn that the sea is to sail upon, in a boat in which we can enjoy the sea in all its moods and not fear it if there is a hatful of wind.’

For more posts featuring Uffa Fox, click here.

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