What's the worst sailing boat?

This is an example of the boat where you want to be so much the best, so that you make sth like that. The same as with beauty: someone wanted to connect all best features from different women's faces to make a perfect woman face...she wasn't even pretty. The same is with this boat.
 
The name says it all.
IMG_2265.jpg
 
Yeah I went from my first boat being a Folk boat to a Macwester 26 and oh boy was I disappointed; we had to 'wear ship' or put the engine on to tack?However we did get across the channel, have fun, and learnt what we didn't want, as you say
 
This was some 25 years back and I was asked by a charter company in St Lucia to deliver a catamaran from St Vincent to Martinique. I don't remember the manufacturer maybe Fontaine but it was 38 ft in length. It had in mast reefing.

It hobby horsed viciously and was stopped everytime the bows got buried.

Well it went sideways more than forwards. I finished up running the leeward engine on half throttle.

It was not possible to tack without gunning the outer engine.

The huge and heavy patio doors slammed from side to side as it rolled. When we located the bits of broom handle to fit in the tracks to restrain them they kept getting spat out and we had to chase them round and refit them. The catches had failed many moons ago.

It steered like a pregnant hippo on ice.

I stopped off in St Lucia topped off the diesel and motored the rest of the way. B****** trying to sail that thing.
 
Good job things have moved on in the world of cat sailing.
Pretty much every anchorage now has cats that are the right way up after a transat or trans pacific.
 
OK, I am pleased to admit that I have never sailed one but SURELY must be in the running for the worst sailing boat..... The younger forumites will not remember but back in the late 60s, envious of the success of the Mirror Dinghy sponsored by the Daily Mirror, the Daily mail launched the "Mailboat". Made of polystyrene and with an on-the-water price of £49 & 10 shillings, this was terrible - anyone ever (admit to) set foot on one?!

http://www.cvrda.org/dinghydata/mailboat/
 
Nudge said:
OK, I am pleased to admit that I have never sailed one but SURELY must be in the running for the worst sailing boat..... The younger forumites will not remember but back in the late 60s, envious of the success of the Mirror Dinghy sponsored by the Daily Mirror, the Daily mail launched the "Mailboat". Made of polystyrene and with an on-the-water price of £49 & 10 shillings, this was terrible - anyone ever (admit to) set foot on one?!



http://www.cvrda.org/dinghydata/mailboat/
Click to expand...

If it succeeded in drowning a few Daily mail readers it can hardly be classed as a bad boat.
 
I was given a mailboat back in the late 70's, The hull resembled a victorian hip bath with long shallow bilge keels. We smashed it up & put it on the club bonfire.
The sail was used on our Edwin monk "Stubby" tender a 9ft pram & with decent spars sailed very well indeed. Possibly the only bit of a mailboat that actually sailed!
As far as Yachts go the Snapdragon 24 sail like bricks through wet sand, bilge keels like cows udders.
 
Nudge said:
Made of polystyrene and with an on-the-water price of £49 & 10 shillings, this was terrible - anyone ever (admit to) set foot on one?!
Click to expand...

I don't remember the Mailboat, but I do remember other attempts to build expanded polystyrene dinghies. They were OK, just about, until you decided to use an outboard and spilt some petrol into the boat ...
 
Wouldn't dream of making that assumption.
Just pointing out that in my humble opinion that cats are not the death traps that hearsay would have us believe
 
I learned to sail at the school's sailing centre on Chasewater in the Midlands. They mostly sailed Cadets but also had a fleet of 'exotics', Seabat, Sunfish, Fireball, Shearwater cat etc. The most challenging by far was an old public park rowing boat, the type with a cast iron bench across the stern. It had been fitted with mast and sails but no centreboard. Heel it more than about 5 degrees and it was scooping in water over the gunwales.
Jeez, that was more than 50 years ago, do I feel old...
 
Some time in the late'50s, my father bought this little sailing pram built by Prout, who I believe later built slightly larger boats. It was cat-rigged and about half the size of any sane boat, but its main characteristic was that it refused to go about. I was well used to racing Fireflies by this time, so not completely incompetent. After much experiment I discovered that it would go about if you kept plenty of way on and raised most of the dagger-board. It would sit happily on the roof-rack of my mini, though.
58_zpsvshah3sm.jpg


Another boat that I remember sailing with less than complete delight was the 12 sq m Sharpie. We used to sail them one day each year at the hospital regatta in Burnham. They were long and narrow with a chine and a very heavy centreboard. The mainsail was a small cotton gunter thing and the jib tiny, so excitement was out of the question, apart from the fact that we were give a free choice of the nurses to pick as crew.
 
johnalison said:
. . . .Another boat that I remember sailing with less than complete delight was the 12 sq m Sharpie. . .
Click to expand...

Wash your mouth out! Sharpies are classic in every sense of the word!

They're also still alive a well in the UK, Holland, Germany, Portugal, Australia, Argentina, etc and regularly get 60 or so boats at their European Championships.

They're like old racing Bentley's - there's no argument that modern boats are 'better', but as someone said a long time ago: "get them off the wind a bit and they hitch up their skirts and charge off like demented grandmothers."
 
Motor_Sailor said:
Wash your mouth out! Sharpies are classic in every sense of the word!

They're also still alive a well in the UK, Holland, Germany, Portugal, Australia, Argentina, etc and regularly get 60 or so boats at their European Championships.

They're like old racing Bentley's - there's no argument that modern boats are 'better', but as someone said a long time ago: "get them off the wind a bit and they hitch up their skirts and charge off like demented grandmothers."
Click to expand...

You're probably right, but these were pretty clapped out, and we were obliged to take three nurses as crew. It can't have been all bad, since I won three years out of four, when I came second.
 
As you can see, the "small cotton gunter thing and the tiny jib" was never really typical of the class. Their gaff mains and genoas have been maxed out since the 1960s to my knowledge. The biggest mainsails were probably the ones made by Rockalls in the 70s with the boom was so low, you had to kick it out of the cockpit when you bore away.

Sharpie2.jpg
 
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