Deffinition of a skiff..

Originally posted by Chris 249 ... I've gone through all the early Australian articles and heard Ben talk about the boat.

Is any of this published? Any chance of some pointers to it (or even being sent them if you have them electronically). I'm quite interested in the early days of the design and so are a few others in the class.

Only problem, Tick, is that could also include boats like a Canoe (Int or Cheseapeake Log Canoe), Punt, Renjolle, or 505 and they've got not a shred of skiff DNA in any way.

I wouldn't say the Tasar was in the least bit skiffy. Having spoken to many of the designers and pioneers of the NS it was developed from, I can't think of a single shred of Skiff influence - however the NS has influenced Skiffs and the Tasar has influenced the later Bethwaite boats. There's some Tasar DNA in the Bethwaite 18s, but they don't feel like a Tasar to sail!

The funny thing is that the skiffs and dinghies are quite different but equally good. Down here there's not such a rush to call boats "skiffs" because plenty of people don't want to be skiffies. Merlinboy and TT are dead right, denigrating boats 'cause they're not skiffs is ridiculous IMHO.

BTW there were plenty of boats planing long before Uffa; the earliest clear description I can find is from 1891, when the Thomas Smith canoe "Snake" did a race averaging nine knots and had “the extraordinary power of rushing over the water at ten or twelve miles an hour, probably more, without any wave-making apparently; only a wide smooth wake is seen astern. Yet at five or six miles an hour she makes waves like any other boat” - a clear description of a planing hull. Another 1890s British canoeist wrote how water passing under a canoe’s fore sections “at high speed acts on them like a wedge, tending to lift the bows” - so he was actually much more accurate about the position of planing lift than later experts. Uffa knew about Smith's boats as he was an early Canoe sailor and he admitted he borrowed Smith's roller centreboard - something still used today in the Thistle, one of the most popular US dinghies.

Uffa's hero Laurent Giles seems likely to be the person who wrote of "planing" in a dinghy in 1925, but by then there have been pics of boats clearly planing for years. Where Uffa had a breakthrough, it seems, was in getting a boat to plane regularly and on a reach, and then telling the world about it.





Edited by Chris 249

 That's a definition I can sympathise with and makes me think that, despite earlier denegations, a Contender IS a skiff, at least mine:
the cockpit is wonderfully glassy smooth, with just a hint of sandy gelcoat judiciously placed where i don't put my feet. So, according to Tickler's theory, when I come off the trapeze and start skyting aboot in my boat, I could add the magic ingredient "F*** F***!" and turn it into a SKI F*** F***

I like that...

 

 

All we ever seem to talk about on this forum is "skiff" this and "Skiff" that, my Skiff is faster then your skiff Bla bla bloody bla, or how crp lasers and SMOD's are.  Now i know i'm guilty of it probably more then most, but does it really matter, most people who talk about skiffs dont sail one themselves!  Yeah Lasers are crap but so Crap they are brilliant.  A skiff is an Ausie term i think, a 14 and a cherub would be described as a skiff, but in humble old Britain they are just another Dinghy

I thought that originally a Skiff was a "simply " constructed light boat. By that I mean that the more "fluted" designs that appeared during the early/mid 1900's (flying fifteen et al), were seen as developments away from a simple shape that dug in and didn't glide through the water..... in short was a pig to sail. Of course, all that ceased to be relevant once the boats could take enough power to premote planing all the way upwind - something in here about evolving back to where it started..! By that measure, most of the SMOD designs perporting to be "skiffs" - in fact arn't.....they are better than that, they have "dinghy like bow sections, with skiff-like planing sections...... actually I'm bored of this too....!!!