“Man with two boats never goes to sea” — Confucius

Last year I bought a 60 year old river launch and only this September have got back to rigging my dory. As well as the launch I still have a Redwing I can’t sell, and an unfinished Hina catamaran in the back garden. I suppose a 20’ x 5’ launch disqualifies me from the DCA, although it’s open and slow and I sleep in it. With a Seagull tucked down a well it travels at an ear-splitting 3 mph. The motor needed one or two modifications to make it work in a confined space, but supplied with clean air from a snorkel it is very reliable. When I bought her she was called Solt because the Thames at Twickenham is almost salt, and the owner only had a short plank on which to carve the name. This jeu de mot was quickly dropped. It’s remarkable that boats can last so long. Once you get acquainted with her you realise she has one buttock higher than the other — I suppose it happens to all of us in the end but otherwise there’s nothing a bit of carpentry can’t take care of.

Boats of this kind were common between the wars. Now everyone wants cabins. Retiring to a cabin makes me feel like a child sent to bed too early, cut off from all the interesting things still going on outside. And cabins have all the comforts laid on, but camping you have to flatten out your own corner like a dog — much more fascinating! I have a favourite deserted garden I like to moor up against. On that side there’s only you and the ducks reaching up to catch spiders. You put up the paraffin riding lamp, open a bottle of wine and watch the night coming on. Or you can lie on the floor boards watching the lightning playing on the blue awning and wonder idly what would happen if you were struck. Then you wake to the dawn chorus and a bit of nude swimming before the joggers arrive. The epic voyages I had planned for this year never took place, but the barbeques under the willows were superb!

As for the dory — last year I had got as far as a single loose-footed sprit sail. I had read all the books and it seemed a sprit sail was the most sensible rig to have. In practice I found otherwise. Putting it up was awkward unless you hoist mast, sail and sprit altogether, which is also awkward, and it whips about unpleasantly on a run, though a boom steadies it up. A boom is necessary anyway for close-hauled work on a narrow boat, so that’s another pole to carry, but the chief objection to a sprit is finding somewhere to put its 14ft when the wind blows up and it has to come down. Back to the books once more.

I was attracted to a high peaked standing lug, but since I wanted to fit overlapping jibs, I thought it would close the slot up too much, so finally opted for a rig I don’t like — a gunter. I always feel that two spars close together must create a lot of turbulence, but I hope to do something about this by hoisting the yard in a sleeve. A gunter rig was also the simplest way of modifying the sail. I have, in effect, sewn on 8 ft² of topsail and installed a full length batten where the yard would be — looks a bit like a Merlin Rocket. I haven’t yet completed this modification, but it raises the sail’s centre of effort by 18 inches, which might not be good.

Still looking for more speed I made a jib of about 20 ft² which works well. A yacht modeller suggested a boomed jib with the downhaul offset from the luff, thus giving a downward pull on the leech. The jib can be controlled by one rope led through a fairlead on the centreline. It’s self-tacking and tidier. With jib and main I was a bit deficient in weather helm and decided to try a mizzen of about 12 ft². First I tried a junk rig, but this was a failure; there was so much friction in all the blocks that the sail hardly moved off the centreline. So I fitted a standing lug which works a lot better. It must be inefficient to split the sail area into three, but it’s very convenient. I can now sail balanced without the mainsail, and I only need to haul in on the mizzen sheet to spin the boat up into the wind. With a bit of practice it should be possible to go about without a rudder.

I now have about 100 ft² of sail which, with a 5 knot wind will take me to windward in smooth water at about 1½ knots, tacking through 120º — I think. I arrived at this from fighting a current of about ¾ of a knot for an hour and getting nowhere. Of course, if the tide was only ½ knot, then my average was only 1 knot, but that includes going about every 90 sec. so probably 1½ is about right. When the wind reaches about 10 knots the mainsail comes down (I haven’t fitted reef points) and we’re a bit under-canvassed until the wind gets up to about 15 knots, when it performs very nicely under jib and mizzen. But once the wind gets up to 20 knots it’s going to be difficult to set enough sail to make any decent progress to windward. There is a lot of windage in those high ends. I have managed to row against a 20 knot wind — but only just. I begin to think about stability and ballast.

The question of stability is something I’ve thought about since reading Eric’s article. The dory will fill at 38°, which isn’t too good, but more important is how it would behave if flung sideways. Better than a conventional hard chine dinghy, I think, but it’s really unpredictable. It might even plane on its flat side, giving a dynamic righting moment. Just as long as I’m not there if it does! Adding ballast means that it will fill at a lower angle of heel, but, of course, is less likely to heel. By adding 150 lbs. of ballast I can increase the righting moment by about 30% at the most. This sounds good until you start working out how much longer you will be able to hold on to your sail as the wind increases. A 7 knot wind is a 30% increase of pressure on a 6 knot wind; 18 knots is a 30% increase on 15 knots; and 28 knots a similar increase on 24 knots. In other words, ballast is only of use in the higher wind speeds. To compensate for the loss of speed due to fitting ballast and calculating on the ratio Sail Area/D2/3, I would have to add another 14 ft² of sail. Water ballast would seem the most flexible solution, but 150 lbs. is nearly 2½ ft³. I’m not much of a mathematician, but if these shirt cuff calculations are wrong I hope someone will correct me.

And that’s not the end of the problems. I could do with pointing higher and had wondered about putting all my faith in large jibs with a vestigial mainsail. I could do with cutting down leeway, and I am not sure whether that is a function of the sprit sail, the windage of the hull, or too small a dagger board which extends, at present, about 2’ 6” below the hull. There’s nothing lost, of course, in making a bigger dagger board, but it will increase heeling, and so back to ballast, and so we go on.

The rudder is difficult to get at; it is completely out of sight under the sloping transom and, with the mizzen mast up, quite impossible to reach. Equally it is now impossible to mount an outboard, and never was easy. This calls for some sort of trunk forward of the mizzen which will either accommodate the outboard or the rudder. A box holding the rudder would drop into the well, which would otherwise be occupied by the outboard, so that there would be no turbulence under sail.

This gives me enough work to get me into the spring. And there are some leaks in the launch to do something about. And I still haven’t sold the Redwing.