Deffinition of a skiff..

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

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.

Defn of a Skiff

 

A type of boat that no-one can really classify, It's probably fast in single hull terms, it probably has large righting moment, it probably planes and it probably has a Spi.

 

Originally posted by tickel Chris 249. Not so much of the "Tick". It's Tickler to you, I don't approve of all this familiarity.

Tickler, tickel... crisis of identity there or have you found your long-lost password at last?   

 

Maybe you're trying to do what BWD has only ever dared dreamimg about: take over the forum!  

 

Originally posted by tickel Chris 249. Not so much of the "Tick". It's Tickler to you,

Hey Ticko, In australian all names are abbreviated to a single syllable, although you can add an optional O on the end. OK mate?