Atlantic City, New Jersey, 1929. The prohibition is in full swing everywhere across the USA – apart from Atlantic City of “Boardwalk Empire” fame. “Boss” Nucky Johnson runs the town, and he has effectively legalised alcohol to keep the tourists rolling into the big hotels and tourist attractions. Along the waterfront sit the bootleggers’ speedboats, powered by triple V12 engines that will allow them to dodge Coast Guard cutters and naval destroyers when they run out to the floating booze warehouses that sit outside national waters on the “rum line”.
Two groups of men met in Atlantic City that year to discuss the effects of prohibition. One was a wealthy group who stayed at a prestigious hotel and partied in full view of the press. The other group included boatbuilders and seamen from a “gangster-ridden neighborhood…..a teeming cesspool of rumrunners, gangsters and gunslingers.”
The group who were strutting the boardwalk in the glare of publicity included “Scarface” Capone, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, and many of America’s other leading mobsters. They were planning the future of organised crime in the USA. The group who talked in a rundown neighbourhood was lead by Captain Joel Van Sant. They were planning the class that became the Moth.
The inside tale of the creation of America’s Moth comes from boat designer and former Moth sailor David R Martin, who was born at the same time and place as the Moth and started sailing them as a boy. “There were about a half-dozen boat-building shops within walking distance” he told Yachting Magazine and confirmed to me by email. “Captain Joel Van Zant got the boat owners and captains together in 1929 and told them, ‘This neighborhood is full of rumrunners, gunfighting gangsters and debauchery. When these kids grow up, they’re liable to become rumrunners if we don’t stop it.” Van Sant showed the group a little boat he was in the process of building, and proposed that they start a class of similar boats to keep the local kids active and out of trouble.
Joel Van Sant III was a natural man to lead the class. A member of a family that had been boatbuilders for generations, he was a qualified ship’s master, the former trials captain for the Elizabeth City Shipyard in North Carolina, and the paid captain of the big steam yacht Siesta. Together with boatbuilder Ernie Sanders, he’d created the little boat he called Jumping Juniper while Siesta was in refit at the Elizabeth City Shipyard, to give himself something to carry aboard Siesta for pleasure sails. Perhaps the need to store the boat on Siesta, along with Van Sant’s slender frame and the fact that he was a damn good sailor who didn’t need a stable boat, was the reason why Jumping Juniper was just 11 feet long.
Dave Martin says that in order to encourage the neighbourhood kids to use their creativity, the Atlantic City group decided to create a development class instead the one designs that dominated US dinghy sailing. It fitted the local culture, for Atlantic City was a small island of development classes in a world of one designs. Perhaps it was the way the shallow and narrow waterways (“thorofares” in Atlantic City speak) wound through the city, providing plenty of waterfront space for boatbuilding. Perhaps it was the miles of sheltered waters, for development classes tend to thrive on calmer seas. Whatever the reason, around the turn of the century two 15ft long local development classes had formed; the Mosquito Class designed around the round bilge skiffs (probably a variation of the famous oar-and-sail Jersey Skiffs) and the hard chine Crickets, apparently developed from skipjacks. “Our neighborhood was extremely interested in advancing the art of boat design” recalls Martin. “For instance Cricket Boat sailor Adolph Apel was at the leading edge of powerboat design.” To men like these the development class was a familiar concept, and they had the skill and the tools to explore the possibilities. They found an old building to build boats in and called it Evening Star Yacht Club, because they raced in the afternoons after their working day was done. As Martin recalls, the entire neighbourhood would come down to the waterfront on those afternoons, to sail their Moths or cheer on their friends and family.
In the harsh times of the Depression, the cheap little Moth made waves with astonishing speed. Van Sant took Jumping Juniper when he went down to Florida for the fall, and the class took off there when he sailed to victory in a regatta. He went back to North Carolina, and fleets spread there. Soon there were Moth fleets from Long Island all the way south, although for some reason the class never seems to have spread further west in the USA. The first class championship was as early as 1930, and by 1937 there were Moths in ten states. Somehow the tiny little boats soon ended up with a $2,500 first place trophy and $1500 of other prizes for the “world” championship, although competition from outside the USA seems to have been non existent until after WW2.
In its early days, the “world” open championship shared the limelight with events for juniors, teams racing and women; a symbol of its appeal as a versatile craft rather than a specialised racing machine for experts. It’s hard to realise how big the Moth was in the USA in its heyday as a club racer for people of all skill levels. In 1946, MotorBoating magazine claimed that the Moths had 1500 boats afloat, making it the sixth most popular class in the country. The Moth class pioneers had certainly succeeded in their mission to get kids hooked on boats. As Martin recalls, many of the early Atlantic City Moth teenagers became leaders in boat design, although they made their names under power rather than sail. Russell Post founded the famous Egg Harbour Boat Company; Jack Leek ran President Sea Skiffs and Ocean Yachts. The Russo brothers worked at Pacemaker, while Martin himself spent many years designing powerboats for major companies. In later years, the Moth was to help launch designers like Skip Etchells (of Etchells 22 yacht fame). It was a tradition that was to extend to France, England, New Zealand and Australia in later years.
The early Moth’s Vee-bottomed semi-scow hull looks unusual to modern eyes, but for a bunch of people who sailed boats like Crickets and Sneak Boxes it was a logical design for the local wind and water. “I think the shape of the earliest Moth Boats reflects local conditions (air light with a goodly chop) which one encounters in the rivers and small bays in the Mid-Atlantic region during the summer months” writes George Albaugh, secretary of the Classic Moth Boat Association and author of the fascinating Mid Atlantic Musings blog of Classic Moth information and photos. “Additionally, I think Van Sant wanted a design which amateur builders could home build and thus a chined hull with a gentle vee bottom and a transom bow and stern was what he and Sanders came up with for the initial Moth.”
As Albaugh notes, the early Moths had a “heavy, gentle vee bottom, transom bow and stern, pivoting centerboard (rather than a “jab” or dagger board–which was one of the first important innovations and occurred in the mid-1930s). Early boats also feature flat decks for easy construction. As time went on decks developed crowns which artificially allowed boom heights and sail heights to creep up leading to a rule which limited the length of the mast above “true deck” to 16′ 6″ and also limited boom height to 12″ above deck.”
“Over time it became apparent that lighter boats were faster than heavy ones, and that reduction of wetted surface by (a) increasing keel rocker and (b) introducing round bilge shapes and (c) the introduction of sharp(er) stems to cut through the chop in the aforementioned light air conditions, were all performance enhancers. By the end of the first decade, the boats were quite a bit different than the original Van Sant Jumping Juniper design and tending to look like Dorr Willey’s design. The second world war interrupted further development and the boats that were built immediately after the war were for the most part very similar to the ones built in the late 1930s.”
Although most of the early Moths were scows, Dave Martin remembers that “there were pointed Bow boats modelled after the Cricket boats”, which also indicates how the Moth sat in a culture of development classes.
Despite the development aspect, for many sailors the main appeal of this cheap, lightweight little boat was as a training class. Although it was a playground for wild ideas in design and construction many developments that threatened the basic concept that Van Sant had set were prohibited. Although the class allowed featherweight 20kg (45lb) hulls with fabric decks and 1.6mm (1/16in) bottoms, they banned catamarans and sliding seats that allowed sailors to reduce the hull beam to as narrow as 3ft.
Even overseas the Moth class quickly had an influence. In Australia, Van Sant’s design inspired a similar but slightly older Australian class to adopt the Moth label. An early boat exported to England left many sailors unimpressed, but showed others that “a boat with unorthodox fore sections and a shorter waterline could be driven harder than the average dinghy”. That lesson was an influence in the Brent One Design of 1932, which was soon renamed the British Moth and which remains a strong class. By 1936, the Moth class had quietly started in France, and the class was laying the foundations to become one of the most significant dinghies of all.
While Moths were hitting the water by the dozens, a tiny group of sailors was racing another development class that was twice as long, but just as open in its rules. The “Suicides”, or Development Class was created in the late 1920s on Long Island by a group including William Atkin (better known for his seaworthy cruising yachts). With some of the loosest rules ever seen (initially, it seems they had simply a limit of 11.6m2 (125ft2) of sail, a minimum beam of 3ft 6in, some construction restrictions, and a 23kg (50lb) centerboard) the Suicides became a playground for designers of the quality of Nathaniel and L. Francis Herreshoff. “The class was of tremendous educational value, and, as I see it, demonstrated that with an actual sail area of 125 square feet a 20 to 23 foot over all by 5 ft. 6 in. beam hull can be made to travel very fast” wrote Atkins. He also claimed that they were also quite cheap, at least at first, sometimes costing less than $125.
L. Francis Herreshoff thought the long, skinny European-style Suicides were much better boats than the short British dinghies that were catching the eye around the same time. “The International 14 Footers are so vastly inferior to the (Suicide class) Development Boats that there is no comparison. The latter are faster for their sail area, safer, cheaper and drier.” As early as 1930, Francis’ “Dragon Fly” featured a cat-ketch rig with full battens and aerodynamic pocket luffs like a modern sailboard sail. There were Suicides with hard-chine scow hulls and twin rudders, there were Suicides with graceful yacht-like hulls, there were even International 14s in the fleet. It’s no surprise that in those early days, Yachting Magazine recorded that the different designs were “miles apart in power and effectiveness in varying conditions of air”.
The Long Island fleet seems to have died around WW2, for reasons unknown to me. Their home club is now an example of that US phenomenon, a yacht club that seems to put more emphasis on swimming pools and dress code than sailing. Perhaps the problem was, at Atkins put it later, the Suicides “were good fair weather racing boats; but not useful sailing boats.”
But down in Florida something was afoot. Whether it was the warmer waters, a higher proportion of sailors who lived closer to the water or something else, the southern state became the last haven for Suicides and the old Cricket development class, as well as a Moth stronghold. The Suicides arrives in Florida in the early 1930s, where boats with names like Harikiri and Arsenic raced against Nat Herreshoff’s Biscayne Bay 14s and Stars. Designers like Larry Huntingdon and Wirth Munroe (son of sharpie guru “Commodore” Munroe) became involved, as did aircraft innovator C Townsend Ludington. Ludington’s “L Over D”, a reference to aerodynamic’s lift over drag ratio, had a rotating mast, a pocket luff and a fixed “gaff” that formed a curved head to the mainsail. Inspired by Manfred Curry’s gybing centreboard, Ludington fitted his Harikiri with two asymmetric centreboards sitting side by side in the same box, so that when the leeward one was pulled up the remaining board presented an asymmetric airfoil section. Although the Suicides tended to have narrow sterns, in the 1930s Ludington reported that Munroe’s Suicide “Poison Ivy” had “shown a definite tendency to plane”.
The later Suicides adopted a radically slim-lined and low-wooded shape, similar to the German Renjollen lake racers of the same era; in fact, some used the same designs. But although those who designed and sailed the Suicides remember them fondly (and those memories and designs will be covered later) the class seems to have quickly become unique to Florida. Almost alone among major sailing regions, North America became a sailing culture without a big, high performance development class dinghy class of significant strength.
Soon after the Moth and Suicide classes arose and the archetypal US hard chine one-designs developed, North America’s older development classes were rocked to their core when Uffa Fox’s planing hull sloops crossed the Atlantic and savaged the best of the cat-rigged displacement hull 14s and canoes.
The first meeting between the British and North American 14 footers came about after British and American dinghy sailors met during the 1930 America’s Cup, and took place in September 1933 at that most historic of small boat clubs, the Seawanhaka Corinthian. The British bought across not just a three-boat team, but another three British boats for a US team to sail in a three-cornered match against a Canadian team using their cat-rigged LSSA 14s.
The first sight of the British planing International 14s was a shock to the North American 14-ers. Accustomed to their own slender, hollow-lined craft, so tippy that they had to be held upright once the mast was stepped, they were amazed that to see that the heavy centerboard and fuller waterlines of the British boats allowed them to sit at moorings like yachts. Familiar with their simple, heavy masts, they were stunned by the slender British masts and the maze of their triple-spreader rigging. The bows on the British boats were so full in comparison to the hollow-cheeked North American boats that Yachting Magazine said the Fox designs looked like “bathtubs from about the period of Samuel Pepys”. Uffa Fox looked at the hollow lines of the North American bows and retorted “you’ve got twelve feet of boat and two feet of bow. We’ve got fourteen feet of boat”.
The British boats may have looked like blunt instruments, but they were fast. They won both the 1933 event and a similar one in Canada the following season. Charles Bourke, Canada’s top designer of the time, wrote many years later that in the international series the Canadians lead to the first mark but rolled down the run at hull speed while the British boats set spinnakers and “simply flew away from our cat-rigged boats in a cloud of spray!” Bruce Kirby, the International 14 designer and champion who later became famous as the designer of the Laser, sailed with Bourke years later and notes that the North American boats “could hold or beat an International 14 upwind, even in quite heavy air, but they were not as fast off the wind.” The Canadian boats, wrote Sir Peter Scott from the British team, were “not made for planing and in the event were no match for ours.”
Uffa’s designs became the new model for the North American 14 Footers and a wide influence on North American high performance sailing. As well as their speed, the greater stability of the Fox designs gave them a handling edge over the slender local boats; “The old boats we used to sail were unseaworthy and required an acrobat to keep them from capsizing. Due to this trouble we could not interest many people in sailing them” commented one local 14er. The Fox-style 14s spread in small pockets from coast to coast and through the Great Lakes, finally making the 14s a true International class and providing a playground for many of the great names of North American dinghy design.
Uffa himself came from England that same summer to challenge for North America’s sailing canoe trophies. Like his 14s, Uffa’s planing hull canoes were broad, flat, and powerful in comparison to the slender North American displacement designs. He set himself a high hurdle by designing a boat that could compete under both the UK and US rules. Sliding seats were still banned in the UK, so British canoes relied on stable hulls and heavy centreboards for stability. The US rules required two masts to ensure that their canoes had the traditional ketch rig, so Uffa fitted a solid wooden forestay that qualified as a foremast. The result was a boat that combined the powerful British hull and centreboard with a sloop rig and American sliding seat.
Sandy Douglas, a champion North American canoe sailor and the designer of the hugely popular Highlander, Flying Scot and Thistle dinghies, remembered the contrasting shapes decades later. “Where our boats were slender and dainty, with fine sharp ends, the English canoes appeared squat, giving the impression of brute power” he wrote in “Sixty Years Behind The Mast”. “Where our canoes had softly rounded bilges for a minimum of wetted surface but little stability, theirs were almost flat in the bottom with very hard bilges. Our power to carry sail was provided entirely by our live ballast out on the sliding seat. Fully rigged, our canoes had so little stability they would not even stand upright, but had to be balanced at all times. Their canoes, developed for heavy weather sailing without the advantage of sliding seats, had their own stability through greater beam with a flat floor and hard bilges, plus a heavy and deep centerboard. Uffa had gone as far as possible to use the maximum beam permitted under our rules, forty-three inches, by carrying the full beam very nearly the length of the hull, to where the gunwales, as they came together at the stern, made an angle of more than ninety degrees.”
To the Americans, it seemed as if it was 1886 all over again, and that the British canoes were overweight beasts which would be beaten just like Baden-Powell and Walter Stewart had been fifty years earlier. They were very wrong. In anything more than seven knots of wind, the powerful British planing style of canoe was unbeatable. The British took both the American championships and the International Canoe Trophy, the world’s oldest international small-boat trophy, home for the first time, and the best features of the two styles were blended into the International 10 square Metre Sailing Canoe – a class which remains arguably (in its latest form with spinnaker) the world’s fastest non-foiling singlehanded dinghy.
The first frostbite regattas were sailed in “an odd assortment of dinks and other boats”, and the measurements of those boats were used as the basis for a couple of development classes. In 1935 there was a British/US challenge in Frostbites. Uffa produced Runt and Squall, each with three rigs of varying height for different conditions. They were beaten by the US team with Nick Potter designs using wing masts and wishbone booms (pic and details to come). The class seems to have combined the low performance that was inevitable in a short two-person boat with the high expense of complicated rigs and round bilge hulls. Not surprisingly as Arthur Knapp noted, they “proved expensive and after several years most people turned to the one-design classes in the interest of economy and fairer racing”. Plans from “Uffa Fox’s Second Book” with permission.
And so shortly after the hard-chine one designs arrived to fill US sailing’s mass market, two significant indigenous development classes were created, and Uffa Fox’s designs became an inspiration and model for the minority of American sailors who preferred high performance dinghies. They were often only too ready to join the British in dismissing the indigenous US one designs. “The great majority of small boat sailors in American have probably never sailed anything remotely resembling a Hornet, Merlin-Rocket, 505 or other real racing boat” wrote American I-14 champ George Moffatt in a typical outburst in 1963.
But for all their influence and fascination, the development classes remained a minority in North America. Only the Moth achieved significant popularity, and it was largely confined to the region from New Jersey to Florida. Even decades later when international trapeze classes like Fireballs, FDs, and 505s arrived, they were unable to achieve the same sort of numbers in the USA that they did in other areas. The numbers and the club-based fleets in North American centerboard sailing, then and today, lie in the big old home-grown one designs.
“gangster-ridden neighborhood…..” David R Martin
“There were about a half-dozen boat-building shops within walking distance” Yachting Magazine,
“To encourage the neighbourhood kids to use their creativity”:- Martin (ibid)
“”Our neighborhood was extremely interested in advancing the art of boat design”:- Martin email to author.
“The first class championship was as early as 1930, and by 1937 there were Moths in ten states. BDW 15 Aug 1937
“Somehow the tiny little boats soon ended up with a $2,500 first place trophy”. BDW 31 Mar 1936
As late as 1937, Van Sant ran second in the “worlds”.”:- Chicago Tribune March 28 1937
“When he went to winter in Florida in 1931”:- Avalon Yacht Club yearbook 1955 through Hathi Trust.
“for a bunch of people who sailed boats like Crickets and Sneak Boxes”:- Martin confirmed that the group who created the Moth included Sneak Box sailors in an email to the author
“I think the shape of the earliest Moth Boats reflects local conditions”:- Email to author
“a boat with unorthodox fore sections and a shorter waterline could be driven harder than the average dinghy”:- ‘The British Moth class’ by John Bluff in “British and INt Racing Yacht Classes” by HE Whitaker (ed).
“In the early 1930s the Suicides spread to Florida, where boats with names like Harikiri and Arsenic raced against Biscayne Bay 14s and Stars.”:- Information from Ludington in “Small Yacht and Boats” by William Atkin and from the Francis Herreshoff letters digitised by Mystic Seaport Museum.
Although it’s almost universally acknowledged that the 1933 and 1934 series established the Int 14 in North America, the author of the classic International 14 blogspot has tracked down a small fleet of earlier boats in the US; see http://cbifda.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/
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