Remind me someone, which actor in the famous film ‘Jaws’ spoke that immortal line – it’s become one of the most used lines among sailors, in fact I had a sailing friend called Jaws who actually used that line for real when the boat he was then working on wasn’t considered big enough or long enough to take the challenge of sailing around the world in less than 80 days.
My use of the line is simply that my little CLC Passagemaker dinghy really is on the small side for some of the things I would like to do with it and I really feel that something a bit larger would do the trick – what I am thinking about is something around 14 feet rather than the almost 12 feet of the Passagemaker. That boat is about the same size as the venerable Mirror class dinghy and more than one of those has done excellent service as a cruising boat : DCA (Dinghy Cruising Association) member Mary Dooley used to regularly turn up with hers on DCA meets and somehow managed to set it up to sleep in. That said Mary is a petite lady and i’m a hulking great bloke who is not only large but overweight.
In my boat blog a regular thread of mine was that I used to consider what could be done with X amount of money : I started with a number, tried halving it, halving it again and eventually playing around with the base idea of ‘only’ having a total budget of one thousand pounds. With the minimal outlay for the hull and foils of my CLC dinghy and then adding to that the cost of a secondhand trailer and a new sail I was pretty near that number : my challenge became to see if I could work to the same number with a ‘bigger boat’.
I always had this mad notion of taking an old racing dinghy and reducing it’s rig to make something more suitable to go cruising in, call me utterly bonkers but I always like the radical looks of the old Merlin Rocket class and wondered if I could start with an old and race retired one as a starting point….. maybe the class association would just have me lynched !
Now, while you’re trying to compute the variables here : Merlin Rocket dinghy, big flat bloke who has had at least 2 strokes and one thousand pound budget, I’ll try to explain my thinking a bit – blame the strokes if you will.
I would like to have longer range and longer range usually means having a bit more hull speed – that’s why I have a base idea of starting with a 14 foot hull. My physical problems post stroke are that I have lost a lot of my former strength which is why the 17 foot and some 600 pounds plus heavy trailer are too much for me to handle at home. I bought the CLC dinghy specifically because I would be able to move it around at home or in a dinghy park by hand and on my own ; so far so good. I would like to be able to sleep in the boat when conditions and situation don’t really allow me to get ashore and camp – it would also give me a bit more space and freedom in my choice of kit. The final reason is that I always liked the look of the Merlin Rocket class compared to other, maybe more suitable, boats.
I know a sailing couple who cruise in an ex racing dinghy over on the east coast of the UK, their boat is an ex Osprey class racing dinghy at 17 feet but still quite a light boat – I owned an old one for another project that I had in mind at the time and found that I could move that one by hand.
My friend’s Osprey dinghy sails with a reduced rig : their chosen rig is the sails from a National 12 dinghy which is a small boat with a very big rig for it’s size and strangely enough it looks right on the Osprey. I suspect that they are a very capable sailing couple as they work together in the sailing industry and they seem to have a lot of fun in the big old racing dinghy in it’s detuned form.
My one time ambition was to refit a racing dinghy to stuff into a 20 foot container and have it shipped across to Florida for me to then sail in the Everglades Challenge – a 300 mile event from Tampa bay to Key Largo and one of it’s main rules is that the boat has to be first launched off the beach by it’s own crew. I used to have it that there was a crew limit of two people but I haven’t followed the event for several years and it may have changed. As ideas go, certainly as my ideas go, it wasn’t a wild and wacky one – iv’e had far far worse !
I tried to make it happen, I found an old and second or third hand Osprey dinghy and brought it home to start working on it. My problems began when I started the actual rebuild and refit of the boat when the old wooden hull started to peel apart at it’s seams as I worked on it. Just a morning’s worth of close investigation revealed how far gone the hull was and how much work it would have been to make coastal seaworthy – whatever, it was beyond me and all I could do was break up the hull and give the spars away for someone else’s project.
This potential project has already started with me searching around for a suitable donor boat and so far the Merlin owners and class secretary haven’t threatened me with a dire end for wanting to take a boat out of class ; it seems that there are enough of then around that an old and non competitive one wouldn’t be missed that much.
The main objection to the project is that the Merlin Dinghy would be too quick and tippy for an old and damaged sailor to sail as a cruising boat. The best objection to the idea of retired race boats being used as cruising dinghies come from cruising dinghy designer John Welsford. He designs competent and seaworthy cruising dinghies that are exactly the kind of craft that is capable of being taken on expedition – my Pathfinder dinghy build project being but one of many. One thing that John says is that while potentially fast ,exciting and responsive to sail a racing dinghy is only suitable for a short thrash around the race course with a crew that doesn’t mind getting wet ; that kid of boat becomes rapidly uncomfortable and unforgiving after a few hours of intense concentration.
A better personal objection is that although the basic idea of a slightly larger boat is still a good idea, trying to force an old race boat into that role maybe isn’t the best idea that I could come up with : even I have a better idea of how to reach the same end but with dropping one of my base parameters.
Not great as ideas go and not terrible as a certain nuclear reactor engineer once said.
The thing about all of my slightly ‘out there’ ideas is that one moment i’m saying ‘what if we’ and in the next i’m planning out the details of a retired Merlin Rocket with twin asymmetric daggerboards, a lug rig, a space to sleep……..and so on, The other thing about most of my ideas is that are, at least partially, a bit stupid, and there’s a far better one just lurking until I try to get to sleep when it goes ‘what if we ?’ and there I am thinking until sparrowfart again !
The basic problem with the Merlin class is that they have been slowly developed into ever more extreme shapes – limited by length most of them are wide at deck height while staying slim at the waterline which makes for a quick responding and unstable shape. Because of their extreme shape they are also poor rowing boats and this project is very much based on a sail and oar concept – so why would I want to start off with something that is never going to great under oar power ?
Time to go back to first principles…….what am I trying to do here ?
First then I seem to need a project to work on – mainly to occupy my mind and then use the small amount of woodworking skill I developed over 3 years during the Pathfinder project.
Second, I need to end up with a boat that actually works well in the conditions that I normally sail and row in – it needs to be as good a rowing boat as it is a sailing boat and it needs to have about the same capacity for carrying weight. In short it needs to be a ‘sweet’ boat that is long enough to make inshore and coastal passages in, not scare me but rather to do the job in as unfussy a manner as possible. Latterly I was also wondering if I could use the same rig as I have built for the little Passagemaker and equally use the same trailer – a few ideas are forming and I hope practical seamanlike ideas rather then pipe dreams.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 