The Cormorant is a 12ft dinghy with a beam of 5ft 7in (a real tub), a sail area of 88sq ft and a weight of 350lbs. She is ‘cat-rigged’, that is she has a single high-peaked gaff sail, with the unstayed mast stepped right forward. Cornish Crabbers build the boats, which live up to the company’s reputation for good workmanship and strong designs.

The rig has a great deal to recommend it, quite apart from its good looks. It is easily handled but powerful and close-winded. A Cormorant can point as high as a Laser and is no slouch once the wind gets up to about a force 3 (I once passed a Laser going downwind — and I had two passengers on board! Mind you, it was during the 6-hour race, so it may not have been the helm’s own boat). When the wind gets higher, a reef can be tucked in a couple of minutes, thanks to slab reefing, reefing lines and a topping lift: you need hardly lose way. In a really nasty squall, you can ‘scandalise’ the sail to ride it out; that is, you take the weight of the boom on the topping lift and drop the peak of the gaff by slackening the peak halliard (gaff sails have two halliards, one for the peak, one for the throat). This leaves you with about a third of the sail area in a triangle formed by the tack, the clew and the throat; enough to keep you going nicely until the squall has passed.

The cockpit is roomy and comfortable; three adults fit in easily, four would not be too cramped. One of the delights of the Cormorant is being able to anchor, lower the sail while using the topping lift to hold the boom above sitting head height, and stretch out full length on the side seat (not the side deck!) for a nap. The boat heels about five degrees when I do this. I have a boom tent but so far haven’t tried it out; I doubt if it would be suitable for more than over-night camping, though. In theory you could sleep two on a Cormorant, but you’d have to be good friends.

There is a great deal of stowage space under the foredeck, including a special bracket for a 2hp Mariner outboard. However, there is no locker with a lid, which is one criticism I have of the design. Another criticism is that there is no attachment specifically for a painter, so you have to make use of the anchor fairleads. I suppose you could argue that you are not likely to need both anchor and painter at the same time, but I found it a bit odd that there were two deck eyes at the stern ‘in case you need them’ but nothing similar up front.

Rigging is quite easy, but there is rather a lot of lacing to be done. The sail is loose-footed but it has to be laced to the gaff and the luff has to be laced to the mast. With practice, you might get rigging time down to about fifteen to twenty minutes. If the boat is left in a dinghy park it would be more convenient to leave the sail attached to the spars and use a sail cover.

Now to sailing the vessel. She is very easy to handle, being stable and only having one sail, but the technique is a little different to that needed for a conventional two-sailed boat. Tacking is easy; she will even tack with the centreplate up, though a bit reluctantly. She is slower about it than your racing dinghy but I’ve never yet been caught in irons. In spite of the length of the boom, gybing is also easy, although I wouldn’t want to get in the way of the boom when gybing in a strong wind: it comes over with a bit of a wallop.

Being rather heavy and beamy, acceleration is not the Cormorant’s strong point. When the wind is coming and going, it can be a little frustrating to watch other boats starting to move past you while you continue to drift, but once the wind gets up to force 2 or 3 you will realise that there is enough power to make sailing fun. Going to windward in a blow can get quite exhilarating as the spray starts to fly. There are no toe straps for the crew, though, so if the crew needs to sit out, it is better for them to do so face downwards or even to lie on the side deck ‘Star boat fashion’. The other point that seems strange at first is the need to sit well back rather than forward. No need for you to get the transom out of the water, the rig sees to that.

Off the wind, gaff rig comes into its own; Bermudan rigs can’t compete! It’s even more important to sit well back when running in a strong wind, to prevent her burying her nose, but once you realise this, runs hold no terrors. Broad reaches in a force 4 are great, even though I doubt if you would actually get planing!

As the centreplate works through the foredeck, it is a bit of a stretch for the helmsman to reach it. Someone with short arms would need a longer tiller extension than the one provided. The kicking strap, too, is a long way away, but it is not necessary to make continual adjustments to this — it serves mainly to control the boom; it doesn’t bend the mast or do much to alter sail shape. Other controls are easily reached, but there aren’t many of those, only the clew outhaul, reefing lines and topping lift. The born sail-tweaker will find very little to occupy him in a Cormorant, but the boat was not designed with the sail-tweaker in mind.

There are two other Cormorants at my sailing club in Reading; their views may differ from mine, especially as I have no experience of sailing my boat on an estuary. I hope they would agree with my summing up which is that the Cormorant makes a really first-class family boat or boat for the lone cruiser, and that its traditional good looks are coupled with enough power and speed to give genuinely interesting sailing. And there’s plenty of room for the hamper, the wine box and a couple of congenial companions.