The same clubs that were so enthusiastically set up on the wave of sailing as a mass sport are, realistically, no longer that open to the masses. Yes, they have programmes, club boats and they want to get more people involved but the ridiculous costs involved simply price out many who would love to sail. Furthermore, the focus of many clubs has become racing. Even the humble Mirror can cost an absolute fortune once the ‘financial arms race’ of adding technology starts. Yes, you can buy a second hand dinghy for £1200 – a reasonably good one at that and yes, you can buy a 1960s or 70s wooden Mirror for less but any second hand boat like this is going to have issues, they are also going to need maintenance and proper storage. Any major woodwork issues and the boat won’t be worth repairing. You could be lucky…but you could also be unlucky.
Additionally, the vast majority of dinghies out there are first and foremost racing dinghies. They aren’t the most comfortable places to be in the world and the design of the ones you could actually afford at that price are nigh on 30 years old. Whilst there is nothing wrong with that, per se. It does feel a bit of a compromise.
On top of this, getting a Mirror on the water back in the 60’s was a family project, the sails needed to be made, the boat painted and rigged. In the 1950s and 60s there was a huge movement in the idea of labour being recreation and what better project than to build a boat the family could enjoy?
So what about today? What about 2015? Is there a way modern families could get on the water with a simple, car topping planning dinghy that could be built for under £1200? This was the challenge and I’ve spent much of the last 12 months studying this. There are some criteria:
The Challenge:
Over the next few months we'll be taking a mildly incompetant at DIY middle aged Briton and he will build a family boat to be ready to launch next season (Late March/April in the UK). However, the build must meet the criteria specified below all of which the 1962 Mirror achieved with aplomb then, if not today:
1/ The budget is £1200 + paint (nothing fancy) which is what a Mirror kit cost in 1962 (inflation applied)
2/ The boat can be car topped easily by a modern family car – this means the spars must be realistically no longer than the boat
3/ the boat must take two adults and two kids and a dog OR two adults and 3 kids
4/ the boat must be fun and engaging to sail, it must be a planing dinghy and must be reasonably fast under sail
5/ the boat must be safe and stable
6/ it must be easy to sail
7/ it must be simple and quick to rig (quickly deployed from car to water)
8/ It must perform reasonably well under oars and take a small outboard or electric motor
9/ It must be highly buoyant
10/ It must …it MUST be able to be built by the sort of DIY incompetents that inhabit 2015
Yes, Mirror kits can still be bought but the basic kit costs £2100, once you have added rigging, sails, etc. you are looking at the best part of £3,500. We want the boat on the water, sails and everything for no more than £1200 + paint.
What followed was six months of looking at every option possible, studying designs. There are many low cost basic boat designs out there, some, like Welsford’s Saturday Night Special and Storer’s Goat Island Goose perform very well indeed. However, the more I worked on this and the more I spoke to landlubbers and novice sailors, the more I learned about the challenges of building boats at home (in the UK it is space and time), the more one design really began to hit a chord.
70.