New Zealand is perhaps the only country that has a book that really covers a nation’s dinghy sailing history. “Southern Breeze; a history of yachting in New Zealand” was written by Robin Elliott and Harold Kidd, who probably rate as the world’s best sailing historians. I’ve relied a fair bit on Southern Breeze for this post, as well as the work of Gavin Pascoe of wgtnclassicyacht.blogspot.com and Alan Houghton of Waitemata Woodies.
If it seems like I’ve given NZ’s early dinghy history little attention, it’s not because I don’t believe it’s worthy of note – it’s just that going into further detail would end up just echoing or leaning on the work of people like Elliott and Kidd. For more information on NZ sailing, go buy their books!
Size for size, sailor for sailor, probably no country has had the same impact on our sport as New Zealand. At the dawn of organised New Zealand small boat sailing in the 1880s, the colony – for such it was at the time – had a population of only 500,000 people and a depressed economy. Even as late as the 1930s, the population was just 1.5 million – roughly as many as Detroit, Hamburg and half that of Greater Manchester. But despite this scarce populace, scattered across two islands, New Zealand was already growing the roots of a sailing culture that was to lead the world in the 21st century.
The pioneering spirit, small population and isolation meant that the typical New Zealander had to become a thrifty do-it-yourselfer; the sort of person who would design and build their own boat rather than call in a professional. The country was also fiercely egalitarian and socially progressive; it was the first nation in the world to give women the vote (although for some reason there does not seem to have been a strong tradition of sailing women) and one of the first to provide an aged pension.
Sailors seem to have recognised that the sport could not thrive in such a climate if it appealed only to the wealthy. Perhaps even the way they applied the term “yacht” to 7 footers as well as 60 footers showed the egalitarian attitude. “Not for us the attitude; ‘If you consider the cost you can’t afford to be a yachtsman” wrote Peter Mander, NZ sailing’s first Olympic gold medallist and a man who, like many middle-class professionals, built his own boats. An attitude like that seems to have led to features like an emphasis on boats that the typical person could afford to build and race, regional support for the top sailors, and the widespread use of golf-style arbitrary handicapping to ensure that even the less competent sailors and those with older boats or those not built to the edges of the loose class rules felt that they still had a chance to win.
Despite the home-builder emphasis, New Zealand was the home of some outstanding professional boatbuilder/designers who optimised the superbly durable and light local timbers and exported boats across the globe. Led by the Logan and Bailey families, they proved that they could out-design the products of men like Fife and Watson. Later generations of professional New Zealand designers like Bruce Farr, Russell Bowler and Laurie Davidson, almost all from the local development dinghy classes, were to go on to reshape yacht design at the end of the 20th century.
As in other countries, New Zealand classes were divided along geographical lines. In the north of the country around Auckland were warmer, well protected waters, world-class cruising grounds and moderate winds that encouraged cruiser/racers and development classes with big rigs. Down south, in places like the famously windy capital city of Wellington and the cities of the South Island, dinghies often faced higher winds and colder and more restricted waters that favoured boats with more conservative dimensions. It often lead to a split between the classes sailed in Auckland and those sailed in the other regions and cities.
As Kidd and Elliott explain, the first major type of centreboarder to race in New Zealand was the “open boats”, which their peak during the early to mid 1880s. They were at their strongest in Auckland, where for some time during the decade they were divided into three classes by overall length; up to 13ft, up to 16ft, and up to 20ft. They normally seem to have been fairly conservative boats with low-aspect rigs and the graceful wineglass stern of a typical oar-and-sail boat.
There are few photographs of the open boats. Southern Breezes includes a couple of shots, but we can also get a feel for their design by looking at the famously successful 25 footer Pet, created by Charles Bailey Snr in 1877. Boats like Pet were not beamy over-rigged craft like the sandbaggers or the Sydney open boats; Pet for example was a moderate 7ft5in wide. Her lines, which can be seen at the Wellington Classic Yacht blog, show a deeply Veed hull with a high wineglass stern. She had 1500 cwt of sliding ballast, and a “ram bow”, designed to get around the system of measuring boats by their length on deck. Pet was later modified by being half-decked and fitted with a yacht-style counter stern, and it is in this form that she can be seen in the photograph below.
Like their great boatbuilding rivals the Logans and many other New Zealanders, Charles Bailey Snr was of Scottish extraction. To me, in details like her shifting ballast, general proportions and lines and the drag to the keel (ie the way it deepens aft) Pet may show hints of a connection with the long-keel open racing boats that had been developed in Scotland since the mid 1800s.
The American catboat/sandbagger type had a strong influence on New Zealand’s dinghies, as it did in every major sailing country. The odd thing is that in New Zealand, the type arrived many years after it changed the face of boats in Canada, France, Germany, Australia and (to a lesser extent) Britain. It wasn’t that the New Zealanders were anti-American; they happily adopted the US leeboard scow schooner as the inspiration for their own trading scows which formed the backbone of the coastal trading fleet. But for reasons unknown they don’t seem to have been influenced by catboats until 1897, when two American cargo ships were caught in a severe gale off the NZ coast. Both captains called it the worst storm they had ever experienced; “nothing but white seething foam as far as could be seen” they told the newspapers when they staggered in for repairs. The barque Sea King was kept afloat only by her steam-powered pumps when she made it to New Zealand, where she was repaired by the Bailey family, whose skills earned high praise from the ship’s master, Captain Pearce.
Pearce (or Pierce; accounts of the day differ) obviously knew about shipwrighting, for he seems to have made a hobby of boatbuilding on board. The previous year, he had built the lug-rigged 24 ft Half Rater Alki, described as “clinker built throughout of white cedar, and rather dishy in appearance” while sailing Sea King from Puget Sound to Sydney.
When repairs were completed and Pearce and Sea King finally sailed out of Auckland, they left a little boat that Pearce had made on the trip from San Francisco. She came into the hands of William Logan. Many years later, Robin Elliott somehow tracked down two photos and some details of the little boat, which had been named after her mothership. “Little more than 14 feet long, she was low-wooded, flat in the floors, very beamy for her length, and half-decked with a cat rig” he wrote. To the sailors of Auckland, used to conventional yachts and the narrower and deeper Open Sailing Boats, this seems to have been something of a revelation; “nothing like her existed on the Waitemata at the time” says Elliott.
Elliott believes that the little catboat Sea King inspired William Logan when in 1898 he created the class that became known as the “Restricted Patikis”. The Restricted Patikis (the name means flat-fish or flounder in Maori) were a beamy 18ft 6in short-ended clinker centreboarder that fitted the Half Rater category under the L x SA rule (hence the alternative title of Restricted Half Rater) but with dimensional limits that would ensure they stayed as a big dinghy type rather than developing long ends and slender lines like the normal Half Rater. Arguments over the class rules killed the class by 1904 – a common problem for many years in New Zealand, where there were rival clubs, regatta organisers and sailors who rarely agreed on rules and their interpretation – but as Elliott says, they had become the first properly organised class in the country and had led the way in promoting the concept of the flat-bottomed, wide-transom centreboarder.
At almost the same time that the Restricted Patikis appeared, the first of lightweight fin-keel Raters turned up on the Waitemata. The early highlight was the 1898 Intercolonial Championship for One Raters, where Bailey’s Laurel took the prize but Logan’s unlucky Mercia proved herself the fastest boat. Both boats were quickly sold to Sydney, where they regularly raced with success against the 22 Foot Open Boats. One of the fleet, incidentally, was the clinker-built Maka Maile, of an unknown US design – given that clinker Raters of American design were rare and that we know that Pearce had spent time in NZ after building a Rater, perhaps he could have been the unknown designer.
As Kidd and Elliott note, Mercia effectively became the prototype for a flat, light-displacement unballasted breed of Rater or scow style centreboarder that Logan exported as far afield as South Africa. After the Restricted Patikis died out, these Rater type centreboarders took over the Patiki label. These “unrestricted Patikis” proved themselves too fast for Auckland’s Waitemata harbour; they were ruled out of most yacht races to stop them from making the cruiser/racers and deep-keelers obsolete. These days it’s common to condemn the sailors and clubs that excluded the unrestricted Patikis, but they were essentially a very big and fast dinghy in an era when Auckland’s racing scene centred around passage races to the beautiful cruising anchorages of the Hauraki Gulf was a mainstay of Auckland yacht racing. Given the attractions of Gulf sailing there was probably no way that the typical Aucklander would swap their cruiser/racers for a big stripped-out day racer, and racing the unrestricted Patikis against dual-purpose cruiser/racers was probably about as fair as racing a windsurfer against catamarans or skiffs against sportsboats. If the unrestricted Patikis had been allowed to race against the Mullet Boats and keelers and win everything, many of the stunning classic yachts that Kiwis now cherish may never have been built.
Some of the unrestricted Patikis moved to the shallow waters of Auckland’s other harbour, the Manakau, where they were no deep keelers or cruiser/racers to complain. Their other refuge was the lagoon near the east-coast city of Napier, where they found the perfect combination of flat water and strong sea breezes. Here the tales of the Unrestricted Patikis became not just legendary, but (as with the 18 Footers and Z Jolle of the time) sometimes frankly unbelievable. The last of them were 27 footers that could be lifted by two men and, men swore, sailed at 40mph.
The era of the unrestricted Patikis effectively ended in 1931, when an earthquake levelled the city and lifted the bed of the shallow lagoon two metres or more over an area of about 40km2. Like so many other boats inspired by Raters, the lightweight structure of the unrestricted Patikis could not survive the pounding their flat bows received when they were forced to sail on the ocean; as Kidd and Elliot say, “one by one the great boats fell apart.”
After the Patikis faded, the open centreboarder lived on in classes like the Auckland 16 footers; undecked boats initially limited to a maximum beam of 6ft, four crew and 180ft2 of working sail, although as often happened in Auckland some clubs and regatta associations applied different rules. Within a few years, some 16s were carrying ballast (and winning) and others set up to 300 sq ft of sail. Shortly before WW1, the type died out; a victim, Elliott and Kidd believe, of rising costs.
The two main cities of Auckland and Wellington each had their separate restricted classes of 14 Footers and 10 Footers in the early 1900s. The Auckland 14 footers pictured in Southern Breezes look like the same style of conservative yacht-tender type as the British boats that were to become International 14s, but the class died when professional boatbuilders dominated the trophy lists. Meanwhile, in the Wellington men like the Highet brothers were developing a separate breed of hard chine (“square bilge” in NZ language of the day) 14 footers. According to Elliott and Kidd, many of the Wellington boats were heavy influenced by the chine designs in the American Rudder magazine, especially the 14ft Sea Mew. Exactly why the Sea Mew had such an influence is unclear, but given the later development of NZ design the key factor may have been its exceptional beam of 6ft 8in.
The Rudder hard chine designs may also have been the last important and distinct overseas influence in New Zealand dinghy design for some time. As with so many other countries, from WW1 to the 1950s New Zealand design developed its own distinctive style. Even when the Kiwis took on the Australians during this period, they did so by racing two distinct national classes against each other, rather than by merging one class into another or adopting a foreign class.
When Wellington sailor/builder George Honour moved to Auckland in 1918 he introduced the type of hard-chine boat that Wellingtonians had been developing to a city where hard chine boats had previously been rare. Enthusiastic reports that spoke of Honour designs “as light as a feather” planing at great speed seem to have been exaggerated, but they were fast, quick and cheap to build, and an inspiration to young sailors short of a pound. Honour’s boats were the basis for the 14 foot long “Y” class and the 18 foot long “V” class – one of the ancestors of the 18 Foot Skiff. For a brief period in the 1930s, as many as 35 Y Class could start in a single race in Auckland.
This division of similar development-class boats into different classes according to the shape of their bilge became a Kiwi characteristic; authorities like Kidd and Elliott and veteran New Zealand dinghy champ Graham Mander believe that it was considered that the hard-chine development classes should be left for juniors and amateur builders. Ironically, the loose rules often allowed the hard chine boats to carry bigger rigs and often they were faster than the “aristocratic” round-bilge boats of similar length.
After WW1, New Zealand developed a veritable alphabet of development or restricted class dinghies, often combining a hard core of racing machines with fast cruising dinghies or half deckers. Rules were simple; normally just a length limit and a restriction on sail area. The V Class for example was (at least initially) had only two rules; a maximum length of 18ft and a crew of between three and five, which effectively limited the area for some time until a limit of 400 sq ft was imposed. The T class and Y Classes were both 14 footers restricted to 250 sq ft of sail; one round bilge, the other hard chine. Canterbury sailors were developing what became the R Class; 12ft 9in long and with 110 sq ft of sail.
In many ways it seems to have been an ideal formula. The fact that weight, beam and other details were normally unrestricted meant that designers could experiment, and the hard chine hulls in some boats made such experiments comparatively cheap. The classes that shared a common length seem to have been able to race together fairly successfully, despite their other differences, which may have reduced the problem of keeping a fleet of critical mass together. What simple restrictions they did have were enough to stop designers chasing ever-diminishing returns by going to the extremes of length or sail area like the Suicides, frei Renjollen or Sydney’s 18 Footers.
The Wellington 10 and 14 footers, the Christchurch skimmers, punts and Rs and Auckland’s alphabet soup of Ts, Ss, Ys, Ms, and Vs all had one thing in common – they were basically restricted to one region. The class that was to finally break the pattern of short-lived or localised classes was born in 1918. W A Wilkinson, who had been trying to years to kickstart a one design dinghy class, had Glad Bailey draw up a clinker 14 footer as a junior boat. From the outside, the “X Class”, as it became known, looks pretty much like a typical but stubby version of the clinker one-designs that could be found along the coast of many countries from Britain to Italy, but it quickly proved to be the fastest 14 foot dinghy of its time in Auckland.
One of the first of the Xs was then bought and raced by Sir John Jellicoe, the Governor General (national head of state) and commander of Britain’s Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland. In Australia and in New Zealand, vice-regal sponsorship was a significant seal of social approval for a sailing contest. With performance and social status on their side and a national championship trophy (the Sanders Cup) dedicated to a national hero, the “boat for boys” suddenly became New Zealand’s blue-ribbon national dinghy class. “Nothing else came close to it in importance, nationally” write Elliott and Kidd in Southern Breezes. “Such was its stature that, for almost 40 years, newspapers around the country devoted as much space to the Sanders Cup in the summer as they did to rugby’s Ranfurly Shield during winter….the sport had never had such a high profile nationally.”
Credit top: New Zealand Herald Vol LXXI, Issue 21776, 16 Apr 1934, from Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand; Credit above: “Southland X-class yacht Murihiku, Evans Bay, Wellington, [ca 1921]Reference Number: PAColl-5927-19Southland X-class yacht Murihiku, Evans Bay, Wellington, circa 1921. Photographer unidentified; National Library of New Zealand Evening Post Collection.
Measurement disputes were de rigeur in the early days NZ dinghy racing, and the Xs were no exception. After some controversy, the original loose rules were tightened into a true one design; then loosened into a development class; then when fibreglass arrived in the 1950s, the class became a one design once more. With three or four men in a 14 footer carrying a moderate-size rig, the X Class was soon seen in Auckland as a rather outdated boat (although quite capable of beating the less-restricted 14s at times) but in the smaller cities and regions it represented the chance take on the sailors of NZ’s largest city in a fair match – and to often beat them. In the words of Peter Mander, who proved that he could win in the most high-profile of Auckland’s classes as well as the “national” types, “the Xs were never particularly numerous, but in a life full of incident and adventure they did attract the best.”
The Sanders Cup was open only to a single boat representing each province. It may seem strange to modern minds, but given NZ’s small population, small number of wealthy individuals and undeveloped transport, it was a logical step that was followed by all of the national classes until well after WW2. “The early centreboard boats were intended largely for sailing on home waters and when they came ashore most of them would travel little further than the permanent slip near the end of a mechanical winch wire” wrote Peter Mander. “The boats were not intended principally for contests which would involve travel, time off work, freight, money. When contests began only one boat from a whole fleet would represent a province, many of whose yachtsmen would contribute to a common pool to meet the expenses of the lucky representative crew.”
The X Class became the leader of a quartet of national classes that were to dominate much of NZ dinghy sailing until the 1960s. While the X Class wasn’t dramatically different from the sort of boats you could see in many other countries, the three smaller national one designs showed the evolution of a distinctive style.
The first step down from the X was the Idle Along, a boat in which beam and stability were pushed to the limits for good reasons. The Idle Along’s home was the capital city of Wellington, squeezed between mountain ranges and Cook Strait which separates NZ’s two islands. Wellington is said to be the world’s windiest city – it has an average annual windspeed of 14.4 knots and up to 233 days of gale force winds in a year. When amateur designer/builder Alf Harvey created the Idle Along as a fast general-purpose boat, he ensured it had the stability to handle Wellington’s howling winds by packing three crew, a low-aspect rig, flat hard-chine sections, and the enormous beam of 6ft on an overall length of just 12ft 8in. It’s widely claimed that Harvey modelled the foils and rocker profile from a dolphin he caught, measured and released, which may explain the boat’s length and the steep rocker right forward.
Harvey also ensured that the Idle Along had fore and aft buoyancy compartments, making it a safe, practical day cruiser. The Idle Along was cheap, versatile, tough, stable and fast by the standards of the day and by 1939 it had become the most popular boat in the country outside of Auckland, which remained loyal to its local development classes.
The national youth or intermediate class was the 12ft long Takapuna, also known as the Z Class or Zeddie after its sail insignia, which was born in 1920. Like the Idle Along, the Zeddie was a characteristically Antipodean boat. It was cat rigged, but it carried the characteristic Australasian “flattie” spinnaker on a long pole. A typical Zeddie of the 1950s weighed about 300lb; the lightweight era had yet to hit New Zealand. Like many Australasian boats of its era, with its flat hull and low-aspect rig the Takapuna compromised on light wind and upwind performance in the name of high speeds downwind. As former Z Class champion Peter Mander wrote “the lively little craft reached extraordinary speeds with a beam wind. Each season would bring its crop of authentic tales of how they had passed boats of up to eighteen feet when the wind was fresh and the boats were on a broad lead (ie broad reach) in the hands of skippers who knew what they were doing”.
The national junior boat was the 7ft Tauranga P Class, which was to go on to take a stranglehold on New Zealand junior sailing. The stubby little boat was developed from 1920 by Harry Highet, one of those who had developed the hard-chine 14 Footer of Wellington. Highet was a non swimmer, and not surprisingly he gave the little boat extensive decking and buoyancy tanks. In an era when many boats would barely float after they capsized Highet’s design had obvious attractions, although it took until about 1945 before it made big inroads into the Zeddie’s dominance in Auckland.
With its long boom and conventional stem (instead of the pram bow of most small trainers) the P Class is a challenging boat and notorious for nosediving. “This great little boat is a big reason that New Zealand has produced so many good sailors” wrote Russell Coutts. “They are much more demanding boats to sail than the Optimist or Sabot and they are one of the most difficult boats to sail downwind in strong winds because they frequently nose-dive…..it’s such a complicated boat in terms of balance, sail shapes and tuning that there’s no doubt that if you can master it you can sail almost any boat.”
While the X, Z, IA and P were becoming accepted as national classes, two of Auckland’s indigenous development classes were attracting some “international” (or at least interdominion, to use the old term) attention. In 1938, New Zealand sent a team of “V” Class 18s and an “M” with an enlarged rig to the first “world” title for 18 Footers in Sydney. They were fast and high upwind, but could not compete against the vast rigs of the Australian boats downwind.
The following year, the contest was held in Auckland. In a shock result, the M Class Manu – a cruiser/racer that sailed over 20 miles across the open Hauraki Gulf each weekend to race – won the first race in heavy air. In the last two races Manu sailed consistently while the best of the V Class and the Sydney boats capsized or were disqualified, and the “Emmy” became the only boat with a cabin to win the 18 Foot Skiff “world championship” trophy. Sadly, her owners never got the trophy – the Australian defending champion refused to hand over it over for years, even when he lost an appeal and was chucked out of his own club. The story ends happily, for Manu has been found in dilapidated condition and restoration awaits.
Perhaps a more symbolic event occurred when two of Auckland’s 14 footers went to race in the 1938 Australian 14 Footer championships. The round-bilge clinker hull T Class Vamp won the contest, defeating the “unbeatable” Triad. The other NZ boat, the snub-nosed hard-chine V Class Impudence shocked observers with her planing speed but was erratic, winning one race in the regatta by ten minutes but trailing the fleet home in other events. Writers like Frank Bethwaite have claimed that this was a victory for the light and efficient Kiwi boats against the over-crewed Australian displacement boats. Such commentators seem to have missed that the days of the giant Australian 14s were long over. The Australian boats in Hobart were all just 5ft wide, dramatically smaller than Vamp, which was 6ft 4in wide. The Kiwi boat had trimmed her upwind sail area slightly (from 240 to 220 sq ft) to match the Australian rules of the day. Judging from the slim evidence of the few available photos and reports it appears that the Kiwis usually carried three to four crew while the Aussies carried four to five.
The victory of Vamp, and the outstanding performance of Impudence downwind in planing winds, may be a symbol of the development of the New Zealand stream of dinghy design. For years, Australians had also been trying to develop lighter boats, but they had done it by reducing beam as well as sail area. The New Zealanders had developed lighter boats, but they had also increased their beam so that they could carry lighter crews but still produce enough hiking power. At least in the conditions in Hobart (where the water is flatter than on the 14s strongholds of Melbourne and Adelaide) the Kiwis had found the faster option, and the future was to prove them right.
“New Zealand seems to be the only English-speaking country that has a national history of the sport of dinghy sailing”:- The only Australian national sailing history concentrates on big yachts and 18 Footers and manages to deal with major dinghy classes like Sharpies, Lasers and 14s in a sentence or two.
achts I Have Known.PROGRESS, VOLUME VI, ISSUE 6, 1 APRIL 1911 – Pastime’s sliding ballast ejected through her topsides
“By the 1890s, the open boats had largely faded out”:- They seem to have survived longer outside of Auckland. The Daily Star newspaper from Otago, in the south of NZ, shows pics of a champion 20 foot open boat as late as 1908, although its clinker construction, fuller stern and gaff rig make it appear quite different to the Auckland boats as detailed by Elliott and Kidd.
“Wellington is said to be the world’s windiest city”:- TBA One official meteorological report says that Castlepoint, about 100km away, gets 50 knot gusts about every third day!
“clinker built throughout of white cedar, and rather dishy in appearance”:- Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 15 Dec 1896.
“Little more than 14 feet long, she was low-wooded, flat in the floors, very beamy for her length, and half-decked with a cat rig” Emmy p 20
“For a brief period in the 1930s, as many as 35 Y Class could start in a single race in Auckland”:- NEW ZEALAND HERALD, VOLUME LXV, ISSUE 20056, 20 SEPTEMBER 1928
The V Class for example was (at least initially) had only two rules”;- NEW ZEALAND HERALD, VOLUME LXXV, ISSUE 23156, 30 SEPTEMBER 1938
“the Xs were never particularly numerous”: Mander and O’Neill, p 23.
“Exactly why the Sea Mew had such an influence is unclear”
It appears that two Rudder 14 footers may have been confused. It’s sometimes said that the Sea Wren inspired the Wellington hard chine boats, but the Sea Wren was a Schock-designed round-bilged catboat, with very little in common with the Wellington boats. the Sea Mew was a hard-chine boat available in cat and sloop form, which appears to be very similar to the Wellington boats.
Above – the Sea Wren plans from The Rudder, December 1907, p 887. Below, the Sea Mew plans from The Rudder, November 1916, p 512. The round bilged Sea Wren is very different from the Wellington boats that can be seen in photos like these, whereas the hard chine Sea Mew is quite similar to the Wellington boats. Some NZ papers also refer to a “Sea Mew” class in Christchurch, and Mander also refers to them.
The P is also problematic because it is so hard to handle that, as Coutts went on to say, “in some ways the difficulty of the boat…drives some kids away”. Peter Mander called it “basically unsound in design”; ‘Give a Man a Boat’ p 262.
I’m still tracking down information on the 14 Footer nationals, which were part of a larger regatta. It appears that Vamp had an unbeatable lead on points after two races and was 4th in the last heat, which was won by Triad. counted those heats, but the 14s did the later races associated with the regatta. Vamp scored two firsts and a fifth in the last heat of the regatta. Impudence was 8th in heat 2 and last in heat 3, but ended the associated regatta with an easy win in which she planed as fast as the 21 Footers that were also having their national titles. Triad scored 2,2,1.
It’s quite possible that Vamp, having already won, was taking it easy in the last heat. It’s also possible that Triad was more consistent. However, the future trend of design was to indicate that the beamier “kiwi style” was the way to go.
See for example The Advertiser (Adelaide) 18 and 25 Feb 1938; Advocate (Burnie) 19 Feb 1938;
Yachting in Port Nicholson.PROGRESS, VOLUME VI, ISSUE 6, 1 APRIL 1911
As late as 1940 there are accounts of the more restricted X Class beating the big-rigged Ts when the two fleets started together.”;- See for instance
SailCraftblog 
One thought on “Pt 1.35: Growing the silver fern; NZ dinghy sailing to 1950”