A Cautionary Tale of Ultralightweight Production Dinghies

I have been keeping up with Tillerman's excellent posts about his new love, the RS Aero singlehander. RS intends to build the Aero hull to a 30 kg. (66 lbs.) hull weight. This is a very, very ambitious target for a production dinghy. When I read of such super-lightweight numbers for the hull, especially for a dinghy designed for mass-market appeal, it reminds me of a cautionary tale from my days as a young blood, not quite 40 years ago.

In the 1970's Ian Bruce followed up the Laser with the two man Tasar, a very early, ambitious attempt to reset dinghy technology. The Tasar, designed by Frank Bethwaite, was a larger version of the Northbridge Senior, a 14' two person hiking development class in Australia. The NS 14 was built at that time, in plywood to 100 lbs hull weight. Ian and Frank figured they could build the larger Tasar to 140 lbs. hull weight in foam/glass, a good 50 lbs. lighter than the Windmill class, which, here in the United States, we considered lightweight. The prototype Tasar, which I got to sail, was beautifully built in Montreal using Kevlar skins over foam core and polyester resin. Testing of the prototype showed no problems.

However, when Performance Sailcraft switched the Tasar to the production phase, economics dictated that the Kevlar skins be jettisoned and very thin glass skins substituted to keep the hull weight at 140 lbs.. When the first production boats came out, it quickly became obvious that the thin glass skins had nowhere near the dent resistance of the prototype's Kevlar skins. Treating early production Tasars over the space of several months with, what we considered normal Laser-type usage in the seventies, (dollies were mostly non-existent) quarter size dents appeared over the bottom of the production Tasar hull, giving the hull an appearance of surviving a hailstorm. Occasionally a stray protruding nail head on a dock would actually puncture the outer skin. This fragility would doom the Tasar in North America. It would not be another best-seller for Performance Sailcraft. In his next attempt at the market, Ian Bruce stepped back and did a more Laser-like two-hander, the Laser II.

Granted, in forty years, today's material technologies for building production dinghies have improved and RS is using all the modern wrinkles to create the Aero. Epoxy resin is better than polyester. There are better fabrics. Still, thin outer skins over foam construction are more damage prone. Two or three years ago I was on the lawn at West River Sailing Club at the end of a day of racing. The A-Cat catamarans (which use similar thin skin construction to keep weight to a minimum - though they use carbon skins throughout) had been racing and I watched a fellow maneuver his A around the various boats strewn on the lawn to reach the water hose at the side of the club. In the process of turning, he smacked one of his hulls against the corner of the club house, leaving a nice dent about 6 inches from the transom. To an A-Cat skipper, this type of damage is part and parcel of owning a very lightweight, very high-performance sailboat. I'm not sure, given the intended market RS has envisioned for the Aero, that this constant danger of small contact becoming a visual blemish, lump, dent, or hollow on the hull is what an RS Aero skipper is buying into. It will be interesting to see how the introduction of the RS Aero plays out. And, I will be the first to admit, many times my predictions have been wrong.

Click here for some previous Earwigoagin posts that have featured the Tasar.

Click here for some previous Earwigoagin posts that have featured the RS Aero.

Ian Bruce - A Lifetime of Experiments and Achievements in Sailing

Ian Bruce's memorial was early May at Royal St. Lawrence Y.C. I knew Ian, mostly through a work connection, but we also bonded over a love of the now Classic International 14 (although Ian had retired from 14's when I was racing them). In the late 1970's I saw him about twice a year when he was in Annapolis, and in the later years I touched base when he was up for the Annapolis Sailboat Show. Most of what has been written about Ian centers on the Laser; "Father of the Laser" being the typical moniker bestowed on Ian, but the Laser was only one part of what Ian, the designer, and Ian, the engineer worked at throughout his career.

Ian embraced emerging technologies to make the Laser a true one-design.

When Ian sold a bucketful of Laser's at the first New York Boat Show, he knew he had a winner but he wasn't satisfied. Ian set to work to make this class a true one-design, in every aspect. He wrote a very detailed construction manual so there was no leeway on how international manufacturers were to build the Laser (and this construction manual seems to be the only recognized IP in the current dispute between Bruce Kirby and Laser Performance). Ian didn't like the variation in the Laser sails so he, Steve Haarstick, and Jack Lynch formed Chesapeake Cutters, which was the first company to computer cut sails (using the Gerber Cutter and this is where I come in; I was production manager of the cutter operation). Ian didn't like the variation in the wood blades for the Laser so he developed, with an English company, a method to make them from expanded, self-skinning urethane foam using bronze molds with steel rods as reinforcement. When it came to making parts for the Laser more reproducible consistently, Ian was an early adopter of emerging technologies. The current term, SMOD, Single Manufacturer One-Design, came well after introduction of the Laser but credit to Ian Bruce in his drive to keep seeking out and then implementing the manufacturing technology needed to achieve identical dinghies.

Ian was a project guy.

Ian was happiest when he was up to his elbows in a project and the projects he chose were usually pushing the limits. In the 1970's nobody had built a production two-man dinghy at 64 kg (140 lbs.) in glass; the lightest dinghy going before the Tasar was around 90 kg. (The Tasar was designed from the Aussie NS-14 which was built in plywood at that time.) Ian went with full foam core and light skins, a relatively new technology, to achieve the very lightweight Tasar. When Ian did a keelboat, the Laser 28, he decided to build it using resin infusion (which uses a vacuum to pull the resin through the cloth) in order to have a tighter control over the laminate. Problem was, at that time, no one had done a part as big as a 28-foot boat using resin infusion. The last time I saw Ian, in 2012, he had his latest project, an all-electric runabout that he was aiming to get to 30 knots. Ian was more than a boat-builder, even more than an industrial designer, he was, using U.K slang, a true "boffin".

After the Laser, Ian set the lofty goal to bring high performance dinghies to the World.

Once Ian had set the Laser onto the path for international success, he set out with another goal, to introduce the World to the Antipodean high-performance dinghy. Ian felt that the North American and English dinghy classes, compared to the Australian and New Zealand dinghies, were too heavy and too slow. So he partnered, first with Australian designer Frank Bethwaite to produce the Tasar and the Laser II, and then with New Zealander Bruce Farr to produce the Laser 28 and the singlehander MegaByte. Having a conversation with Ian Bruce in the late 1970's you knew you were in the presence of a true believer in the Australian/New Zealand lightweight, overpowered dinghy. Did he succeed? Yes and no. Certainly the classes mentioned, the Tasar, Laser II, Laser 28, and Megabyte never gained traction as big international classes with staying power but, by bringing the Antipodean designers, and their boats front and center to the sailboat world, Ian paved the way for Bethwaite Olympic class, the 49'er and helped push the International 14 into the Aussie skiff camp. In many ways the current crop of lightweight singlehanders coming to market, the RS Aero, the D Zero, the Melges 14 and others owe a large debt to Ian Bruce's pioneering efforts to introduce these type of dinghies 40 years ago.

Mention must be made of two other people that were an integral partners in Ian's success; Ward McKimm, the "money man" who had complete faith in Ian Bruce and was a major force behind the scenes, and Peter Bjorn, the "right-hand man" who was with Ian through both Laser Performance days and the Byte days.

And then there is an entire history of early Ian Bruce and the International 14's but that needs to be told in another post.

Here they come; 60th year birthday parties

I attended my first 60th birthday party of one of my friends. I have plenty of friends that are over 60 years in age, but all of them, being the humble sort, declined to have a party to mark that milestone. It seems the wives are the ones that feel there should be a need to throw a party for this occasion (which is perfectly fine as I run into Bob very infrequently and I need a party to sit down and catch up).

Well, Bob Brannan, had his 60th party last weekend. We met in our 20's, the age when most friendships that sprout seem to last over a lifetime. We lived in the same batchelor house, caroused in Eastport, swilled the pitchers of beer at Marmaduke's and we sailed dinghies together... not constantly; Bob was usually the skilled pickup crew you got at the last minute. We did enough regattas to have accumulated those shared sea stories we tell over and over again when we get together.

Bob crewed with me in the International 14 (way back when I sailed doublehanders) There was one memorable Essex, Connecticut Regatta with numerous disasters in the blue Kirby V "Babe, the Blue Ox" (which became "Life during Wartime" with a subsequent owner). I digress. The only photos I can find of Bob is when we did the first Tasar regatta held in North America. Late 1970's and what I remember is Frank Bethawaite doing a clinic in the morning (the regatta was out of Mantoloking YC, Barnegat Bay, NJ) where he went into carefully trimming the main so the twist would get all the telltales streaming. We promptly went out in the 8-10 knot breeze and found that you went higher and faster if you just sheeted the main really tight and never, ever looked up at the telltales.

Bob, some 30 odd years ago...........................


My future wife took this picture of us sailing the Tasar out to the course............



Bob Brannan and Tom Price go all the way, I mean all the way back to fourth grade. Now those two can tell some stories. I'll see if I can get one to write at least one of them up.

Bob, Congrats on the 60th !

The Jester Dinghy: The Known and the Unknown

Of late, I've been inexorably sucked into a tale of the two Jester Dinghies, one known, one unknown.

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The known Jester:

When doing a Google search, the Jester Dinghy that pops up is a 8' dink designed by Santa Cruz ULDB designer George Olson, and built by Ron Moore in the 1970's. The Jesters raced out of the Santa Cruz, harbor; a cramped short harbor, the shoreline packed full of boats and docks, the north harbor and south harbor split by a bridge. The Jester has the reputation as one of the scariest boats to sail in a breeze, probably because the short hull features the fine ends of a rowing dink combined with a large, high aspect ratio rig, stepped right at the bow. This must amp up the bow-down power downwind to uncontrollable levels. Reference this quote from Latitude 38 magazine, July 2018, page 86:

"Skip [Allan] says the only way to jibe [a Jester] when it's windy is, "You run it into the beach, turn it around, and hop back in."

Although I've passed through Santa Cruz a couple of times in my travels, I have never seen this Jester in the flesh.

The previous header photo, plucked from the Internet, shows Jesters racing in an expansive body of water; which is obviously not the Santa Cruz harbor. You can make out the very fine, wineglass transom which suggests the Jester was more designed for rowing than sailing.

Racing in the Santa Cruz Harbor. If the sail numbers are correct, it looks like the class made it to 200 boats.

I do like the stylized logo of this Jester.

Famed naval architect, Paul Bieker, (International 14 boffin with success in that class rivaling fellow North American Bruce Kirby) put together a modified Jester for his son. (It appears the molds for the Jester have ended up in Northwest Washington State.) He has designed a gaff rig for his Jester, similar to the one he introduced on his high performance PT Dinghy, a Tasar-killer 14 foot design.

Paul had a sail made out of Tyvek which lasted a good five years.

The Santa Cruz Jester based on a generic East Coast Dinghy?

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The unknown Jester:

The last two years, on my walkabouts around my hometown of Annapolis, I had noticed a mystery dinghy tied up to the floating dock of St. John's College. It obviously was a main and jib dinghy, the length was shorter than 14 feet (4.26 meters), the design had high freeboard and she was very simply rigged. Despite staring at it for a while, I could not ID this class. I shrugged. One of those unknowns.

But it was not to be left at that. Over the summer, my good friend Mike Waters, became the latest St. John's sailing coach/boatshop manager. I gave him a hand at an Intro to Sailing event he ran at the beginning of the school year. I was taking groups out in this very same dinghy I had been pondering over. It was slow but commodious for it's size with some nice bench seats. It was then I learned that this dinghy that had been donated to the St. John's program was a different Jester class dinghy; American built, but otherwise origins unknown.

Since then Mike has hauled the Jester out to have the bottom scraped of a healthy growth of barnacles and to get some paint on her. With the hull flipped over, the hull design is very interesting; a flat bottom forward with a circular transom. This is definitely not a rerun design of Uffa Fox's formulaic deep forefoot with straight flat aft sections.

Mike with the sanded Jester on the trailer.

Flat U-sections forward. Max rocker amidships. The little data we were to glean from the Internet has the Jester at 12 foot (3.6 meters) length and 5 foot (1.5 meters) beam. Both Mike and I feel the Jester has potential in a college program like St. John's (where racing isn't the priority and the waters on College Creek are very cramped.). We are just wondering who designed her and who built her. (Again, the Internet seems to point to Ohio, but who knows.)

The Jester logo on the sail.

The rudder has the more modern rectangular shape. We are guessing a 1970's build time frame for the St. John's Jester. Anyone that has come across this Jester class in their sailing lifetime, please leave a comment.

Mike Waters in front of the St. John's boat house doors. The college has a sizeable fleet of crew shells as well as sailboats.

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Bingo, We now have the designer of the St. John's Jester Dinghy. From a comment:

The Jester was designed and built by Cleveland, OH Sailboat dealer Jack Butte. Jack sold primarily one design daysailers, and saw an opportunity to use the influence of the Thistle, Flying Scot, and Rhodes Bantam to design a 12’ dinghy... My parents sailed with Jack Butte at Edgewater Yacht Club, and I sailed with his daughter as part of the junior sailing program

Ian Bruce

I was walking down the pier at the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft festival this year and passed one of those varnished Classic look-alike repro Chris-Craft runabouts. I made a mental note that this was an odd duck at this event; I'd never seen a classic motor boat at MASCF, there already being a surfeit of other events that cater to the Classic runabout crowd (the big one is the Antique Boat Museum event at Clayton NY at the beginning of August). Pushing this anomaly out of my mind, I kept ambling along to the end of the pier, perusing all wide variety of paddling, rowing and sailing craft. After fifteen minutes stepping in an around the small boats scattered on the floating dock, I looked back toward the Museum and spotted what looked like a familiar figure standing on the pier next to the Chris Craft. Hard to tell at this distance but it looked like Ian Bruce, the one man responsible for launching the greatest number of fiberglass sailboats in the history of mankind (the Laser first comes to mind, then the Laser II, the Tasar, the Byte, the Megabyte, the Laser 28, and before all that, about 150 International 14's). If it was Ian Bruce, then the reproduction Chris Craft started to make sense. It took me some time to make my way back up the pier and, sure enough, there, standing in the cockpit, was Ian Bruce.

I had heard Ian was developing an all-electric Classic runabout, something that could do 30 knots, an unheard of speed in the all-electric world and here was the boat in the flesh. Ian had brought the boat down from Canada to do the Wye Island Electric Boat Marathon the weekend before (just up the river from St. Michaels) and decided to attend MASCF. Ian had a water pump pack it in the day before the Wye Island race which he and his friend Jack Lynch fixed with some local hardware parts (not sure what needs water cooling in Ian's electric setup on the Chris-Craft look alike). This severely curtailed the top speed to about 9 knots and put him out of the running. His intent is to return next year, fully operational, and smash the record for the 24 mile course. A YouTube video on the Wye Island Marathon (including Ian's Classique Bateaux - Ian has always lived in French speaking Quebec) shows these electric powered craft making good speed around the course.





After producing fiberglass sailboats since the late 1960's, Ian is no longer in the sailboat production business, having sold the Byte and Megabyte lines to Zim in May of 2011. This E-boat project has got Ian's considerable creative talents going full bore and his focus is on making this all-electric Classic runabout a success.

The bulk of our five minute discussion wasn't electric boats, or the state of sailboat manufacturing but reminiscing about Classic International 14's. I consider Ian one of the greatest living International 14 champions. I hope to catch him again in 2013 on his return to racing on the Maryland Eastern shore.

Header Photo: Australian NS 14 Down the Mine

The previous header photo was the Australian, two-man, NS 14 dinghy "going down the mine" off of Anderson's Inlet, South Gippsland Yacht Club, Inverloch, Victoria.

The NS 14 is an indigenous Australian development class; a two person hiking, no spinnaker class. It is 4.27 meters (14') long and 1.8 meters (just under 6') wide. Those who have read Frank Bethwaite's High Performance Sailing know that Frank's first forays into dinghy design experimentation were in the NS 14 class and that his successful NS 14 designs were the basis for his one-design Tasar.

The 1960's NS 14 fleet.

Six older NS 14's were imported into the San Diego area around the new millennium and when that effort of fleet building stalled, one or two were brought east, specifically to the West River Sailing Club, with transplanted Aussie, Tony Arends owning one. Sadly I was never around the club when they showed up and missed the chance to take one out for a spin. West River SC already had a fleet of Jet 14's so the NS 14 was again a non-starter in the United States. I'm not sure what happened to the boats.

Some more photos culled from the Internet:

The somewhat smallish 9.3 sq. meter sail plans features the now de rigueur square-top (or nearly a square-top) main. The fleet uses a very deep over-rotating mast for more power.

The NS 14 has the modern, double bottom, full draining interior.

To save weight the reverse sheer profile is very "humpy", aggressively turning down at the stern.

Our impressive duo from the header photo, après pitchpoling.

Video: Aussie Dinghy Compliation

GoPro video of several Aussie dinghy classes featuring the Frank Bethawaite designed Tasar, the ubiquitous Laser, what looks like a Holt Pacer but has an NV logo on the sail, and the whoop-it-up Cherub dinghy.



ADFASC Promo 2014 from Matt Bruton on Vimeo.