skiff or no skiff

This post was in response to someone who posted that a skiff was something that planes upwind and gybes downwind.

The problem is that (to quote Julian Bethwaite) planing is “virtually impossible” to define, and "the more you look into it the more impossible it is to define”.

Modern design in skiffs is often about blurring the whole planing/displacement divide, so it's hard to make a case for upwind planing as a skiff characteristic. Julian for example tries to keep the bow low, and pretty much make the boat go bow up (which is what many people call "planing") as late as possible; so maybe a 49er isn't planing upwind much in light winds. He said his Prime Mk2 18 (45kg hull, 2 crew, mast about 38' tall, wingspan of 8.8m I think) was a semi-displacement boat upwind, yet it was damn quick.

Paul Bieker says that the 14 "spends a lot of time at transitional planing speeds upwind". Cherub guys have called the RS800 "marginal" at planing....which means that we'd just have arguments about whether a boat was planing or not. Some 12 guys refer to their boats as "displacement" shapes because like many skiff designs they are now aimed at reducing wavemaking and wetted surface drag, not planing early. Look at the latest 12 Foot skiff - very much Moth style.

So it's not as if we can just look at a boat and go "oh looks its planing upwind it must be a skiff"; it's very hard to work out whether they are planing. As Moths and the "humpless" style hulls indicate, planing upwind is not the only (maybe not the best) route to speed, and planing upwind is NOT a keynote in skiff design.

As early as the '50s, John Westell noted that his 505 rewarded angles downwind, and it planes upwind, so that would make it a skiff under your definition. Tasars can plane upwind and you sail angles (very low) most of the time, and they aren't skiffs. Certainly old skiffs didn't plane upwind, yet they are skiffs.

There seems to be a simple way of working out where "traditional" racing skiffs physically differ from dinghies. They have always had more sail and crew-induced righting moment for their length than a dinghy. When you plot the skiffs in terms of SA and RM for length they stand out distinct from any dinghy of their era and just about always have. These two factors drive the rest of the design to a large extent.

So it's easy to work out the physical characteristics of the traditional  skiffs.....whether that is enough to work out what makes a skiff is a different story.

PS anyone bored by this thread, the simple answer is not to read it!


Edited by CT249

What's the big deal about describing a boat as a skiff or not????? To someone who doesn't sail do you think the wording "skiff" means anything to them? I'm quite happy calling my boat a high performance racing craft because that is what is, no grey area in reffering to it as that.

Strawb, why pick fights with people about this?  You've been to SA, seen the arguments, then you've brought it here and bashed it out some more, in the process ragging on the Musto. 

The term skiff is massively overused, in order to make people feel better about their own boats because apparently if your boat is a "skiff" then you are just a bigger man for it.  But, words do not have a set meaning that never changes over time.  You should know this, I have a feeling you're doing a law degree.  Meanings of words change as the usage of those words changes - I'm willing to argue that the word skiff now has come to mean high powered, fast and tippy dinghies that require finely tuned skills to sail. 

I will not provide a list of boats that are or aren't in my opinion skiffs, but some definitely are.  49ers, 800's, Mustos etc.  This does not make them better boats than others that aren't "skiffs", just in that class of boats which is now widely know as "skiffs". 

Originally posted by les5269 We do seem to be forgetting that the original skiffs weren't sailing boats at all they were rowing boats.So if you take definition to the extreme (as we seem to be doing ) no sailing boat is a true "skiff". Personally I don't call my 49er a skiff I call it a 49er!!( if someone asked me what sort of boat it is I call it a high perfomance sailing dinghy )

We "forget" it because it's not true.

Apparently it's a 16th century word that comes from the French Esquif, which comes from the italian schifo, a germanic origin term related to "ship", and it refers to a ship's boat....the flat bottomed/pointy bowed rowing boat idea seems to just be a US and British addition in the 1800s.

The idea that rowboats are the "real" skiffs is about as valid as saying that only 12s, 16s and 18s are "real" skiffs!

By the way, skiffs don't always plane upwind (as Julian Bethwaite says, defining planing becomes harder the more you look at it, and 12s and 16s are sort of vaguely Moth-ish in that they don't plane upwind all the time), and 12s and 16s don't have self draining cockpits, and terms like "big rig" and "goes fast" are a bit too loose to be of any real use aren't they?

So yeah, we can't get too rigid because the language does change. Calling a 49er a skiff seems fine (just a personal opinion). But I've seen several words in this sport become completely useless because of marketing/trendhead rubbish......why let it happen againby applying the term to anything with a trap ?







Edited by CT249

Originally posted by 29er397 no it doesn't. It means that some of the sailing population need to accept that no one person 'ownes' or puts meaning to a word. They also have to accept the natural evolution in language, hence we don't speak ye olde english anymore. Fair enough there is a lot of history behind the word but it has also grown to represent a commonly understood description of a type of sailing dinghy, which will never be undone. Why not just accept it and get on with sailing the boats we love.

Quite ... 4 hours of MPS sailing a Whitstable in sun & breeze ...

Now for a few beers ....