Plain
Sailboats
My
father occasionally built sloops long before he started racing. They were based on plans of the kinds of
small boats you would sit in and sail for an afternoon. They all were hard chine boats (boats with flat
surfaces and sharp corners when viewed as a cross section), usually they were
white and they all had a hatch that looked like a shoe box top. As a kid, I referred to them as “plain
sailboats”. As a kid, I never understood
why my father built these. The scale
models seemed so much more exciting. The
racing models he built and sailed later on were essentially plain sailboats but
at least they had a purpose. These just
seemed so plain. My cousin Jim got a
boat like this as a present.
This boat
[shown left] was constructed after he read a magazine article about racing
model sailboats. It was his first attempt at a 36/600 model racing
yacht. Around this time he started
putting numbers on sails and making sails out of plastic instead of
silk. This boat was gone long before
he started racing. If he had raced
it, the boat would have performed horribly.
It was nothing like the high-performance model racing yachts he
built later on (except the Star 45).
When he did start racing 36/600’s, (about 10 years later), the boats
he built did quite well.
In
the early seventies, my father became interested in vane controlled
sailboats. These were easy to build and
sail. They weren’t anything nearly as
complicated or advanced as the ones that were raced in Central Park. Compared to anything else he built, these
were like toys. He cut out a bunch of parts and let me build one like a
kit. I couldn’t make up my mind what
color I wanted it to be when I finished it. So…
One
sail was red. The other sail was
purple. It was blue above the waterline.
It was red below the waterline. The deck was also dark blue, and the hatch was
dark green in honor of Godzilla. If I find a picture of it, I probably won’t
show it to anybody.
Cindy
Too
Last
but not least my father built a small plain sailboat for my sister. It’s an adorable pink, hard chine sloop and
she still has it. It originally had silk
sails but it was later fitted with plastic sails when my father retrofitted a
radio control into it. He asked her what
her favorite number was and she said, “Two.” so he put the number two on the
sail to make it look more like a racing boat.
According to her, he called the boat “Cindy Too”. I didn’t know this. I guess it was a Daddy-Cyndy
thing. He made boats for both of
us. I got a tugboat. He put our names on the backs of our boats
before our first trip to Central Park so people would know the boats were ours. I don’t recall her ever sailing it but she
says she sailed it once. I remember my father sailing it for her a couple of
times. It looked nice in the water. At some point my father replaced the plastic
sails with Dacron sails and he didn’t replace the number on the sail. She took
these pictures of it recently. There was
a little Cyndy Sailor inside.
