I have spent the winter restoring a plywood Merlin Rocket. This has led me to consider wooden racing dinghies, their qualities and their demise from top level competition.
It is often said that there is something special about wooden boats, that they somehow seem 'right' on the water, and are considered more beautiful than plastic sister ships by virtue of being wooden. This idealisation of wood must be partly down to the nostalgia industry, wooden boats commonly feature on tea towels and postcards, and are identified with a non-existent 'golden age' when people who are old now were young. I will try to avoid falling into the trap of romance and nostalgia, although their powers are strong, and examine wooden dinghies for what they are, and how modern materials have changed the sport of sailing.
Features of wood
Wood is a natural material used in boat building for its malleability and its relative cheapness. Boats made of wood sit well against the background of the 'natural' environment. The material responds to its surroundings of rivers and trees, seas and beaches, mud and sand. Wood is an organic material, and dinghies made of wood are not permanent objects. Without care and attention wood rots, and the boat disappears. In this sense, wooden dinghies can be seen as an inheritance passed down from builder, to owner, to owner. The current owner has a duty to respect the craftsmanship of the builder, and the care paid by former owners. The current owner is only the custodian, it is their responsibly to keep the water out and keep this accumulated care in.
This may sound rather dull, extolling the virtues of honour and responsibility. However, the sense of pride and ownership that is generated over the course of a winter of sanding, painting, varnishing and tuning adds to the sailing experience, as Ian Proctor writes in his classic Racing Dinghy Maintenance, "By no means least amongst the joys of racing dinghies is the thrill of ownership of a boat in perfect condition, which reflects not only skill and patient care, but good sense and sound seamanship". The cold winter hours spent massaging a hull may make you less likely to enjoy planing around in 30 knot winds, but wooden boats teach us that there is far more to sailing than adrenaline.
The craftsmanship of high quality wooden boats is more visible than in plastic boats. Of course, plastic hulls are well designed. The recent thought given to ergonomics in plastic boats has improved the dinghy sailing experience (especially for crews), and the efficiency of a high quality plastic hull can be very impressive. However, the attention to detail possible in wooden boats, especially in planking and joints, can take a wooden hull up a notch above anything plastic can achieve.
One of the attractions of wooden boats is the combined sense of accumulated care and the transient nature of the material. When these factors align they give wooden boats a sense of potential, of nostalgia, of memory, which modern materials cannot match. A wooden boat, when given enough attention, has the potential to be great, but any great wooden boat, however loved, has the potential to rot and sink and die. A boat is only a boat if it floats (unless it is a submarine). When a wooden boat reaches a certain point when it will never float again, it ceases to be a boat, it loses all identity, it becomes a pile of bones. The sadness of a rotting hull, of wooden ribs standing emaciated in the mud, of discarded hulls with no history, is a specific form of sadness that must have its own word in German. The sense of loss is so palpable that these former boats feature in thousands of amateur photographs, smothering pictures with nostalgia.
It is possible to repair a wooden hull. Up to a certain point, wood offers the potential that time and attention could restore a dinghy to something like its original condition. Second-hand wooden dinghies are attractive to those willing to put the hours in. In fact, the abandonment of wooden dinghies by top end sailors has flooded the secondhand market with cheap, wooden, high performance racing dinghies from the peak of plywood craftsmanship. Plywood Merlin Rockets and National 12s from the 70s and 80s are available for less than their original price, not accounting for inflation! These boats offer great 'bang for your buck', and give club racers a great introduction to the classes. However, these boats will never compete at championship level as modern materials have made them obsolete at that level.
Wood, as a boat building material, is cheap. It fueled the dinghy revolution of the 50s and 60s with kit boats and home builds. Sailors with ideas and garages could build their own boats and win races. In the development and restricted dinghy classes, wood (especially plywood) allowed the adventurous to challenge orthodox designs, to take design risks without taking financial risks, and, when the boat was good enough, to win national championships.
Some boats did more than just win. National 12 #3012 Punkarella, famously built by Nigel Waller following a discussion in the pub which featured a beer mat as the original model, became a classic. Wide and flat, it won four Burton Cups between 1978 and 1982 and changed National 12s forever.
Plywood dinghies are now spoken of as the "backbone of the class". Thousands of plywood dinghies exist but are no longer fit for their original purpose, winning. They have been made obsolete by modern materials. Expensive new boats have severed dinghy classes from their history.
Modern materials
Modern materials and their performance benefits have made wooden boats obsolete at top end racing. Bendy carbon rigs have given lighter crews control over more sail area, allowing them to go faster and sail in more conditions than before. Epoxy foam sandwich hulls are incredibly stiff and responsive. These are obviously positive developments, but these changes have also damaged development and restricted class racing by homogenising design and stifling development.
The cost of construction have also limited the number of boats built. Without home builds and kit boats, the increase in sail numbers has stalled. In the first 30 years of the Merlin Rocket class 3000 boats were built, in the next 34 years 700 boats have been built, correlating with the introduction of GRP hulls around 1980. This statistic begs the question, what has happened to all those old boats? A portion must have rotted away, and some will still be racing at club level, but not all of them. There are thousands of dinghies left purposeless by the development of materials.
Modern materials have effectively reduced the proportion of boats which can win, and have made winning more expensive. This must have an impact on participation, how long will sailors compete in races they know they cannot win?
The expense of modern materials, especially the capital outlay required to tool a workshop, has turned once thriving development classes into de facto one-designs. Of the top 30 Merlin Rockets at Salcombe Week in 2009, 24 were based on the Canterbury Tales design and built by Winder. The fleet tends to follow the leaders choice in equipment, but the Canterbury Tales was designed in 1988! The majority of restricted and development class boats challenging for national championships are of the same design, built by the same boat builder, with sails from a couple of lofts, and identical parts available cut-to-size from P&B. This homogenisation has stagnated hull design. The problem is not that the boats are bad, they are excellent, but that because they are not tested against other designs we do not know if they are the best they could be.
Modern materials have also changed one design classes. Old designs with attractive handicaps have been revitalised by new materials. The Phantom has become a large class with a nationwide presence as new boats with carbon masts and epoxy foam sandwich hulls are racing on a Portsmouth Yardstick handicap which lags behind the fastest, newest boats. This discrepancy has allowed new Vandercraft Phantoms to dominate handicap events. However, now that 90% of Phantoms sailed are Vandercraft built, the handicap is catching up with the fastest boats, and the class may contract when Phantoms cease to offer the same handicap advantage.
Conclusion
Modern racing dinghies are awesome machines. The development of rig, sail and hull materials has made boats faster and easier to manage. The dominance of the new boats is proof enough that the boats are better. Modern materials have also made the previously impossible possible with the spectacle of the foiling Moth. However, this does not mean the sport of sailing has been improved. The financial barrier to win a race is greater than ever before. Those who can afford new boats build with modern materials dominate both national championships and club handicap racing.
However, if wooden dinghies provide us with one lesson, it is that speed doesn't always win. There are other joys to sailing, including the sense of ownership offered by caring for a wooden boat. Plywood dinghies allowed sailing to expand beyond the upper classes, the history of nearly all dinghy classes is built in wood. Wood allows sailors to connect with this history in a way that plastic cannot. However, on a competitive level, wood is now history and, although the boats are better, the sport may be worse off.
