A boats I wouldn’t want to sail offshore
and plenty of smaller alternatives I would
be happy to.
Today’s choices
If you want a small boat for offshore
cruising today, what can you buy? Old
favourites like the Corribee and Hurley 22
are available second-hand. Then there’s
the evergreen Folkboat, dating from the
1940s, while Bossoms Boatyard still offers
the Vertue, designed by Laurent Giles a
decade earlier.
Even the Yarmouth 23, which I tested in
PBO in 2000 and again in 2011, and in
which an owner sailed from the UK to
Brazil a few years ago, is based on the
hull of the Fisher 25 – and that goes back
over 40 years. The Yarmouth and the
Fisher are now built in Sri Lanka, where
both labour and teak cost a lot less than in
the UK.
Apart from the Corribee, these are all
relatively deep-hulled, heavy designs in
the traditional vein. About 20 years after
the Vertue, however, Laurent Giles
designed the Trekka, a light-displacement
20-footer well ahead of her time that John
Guzzwell built himself and sailed around
the world between 1955 and 1959.
Mukti Mitchell designed and built his 15ft
Explorer (see PBO March 2005) and then
sailed it around Britain in 2007 on his own
and without an engine. It has an innovative
lifting keel and could be scaled up, but the
concept didn’t catch on.
You don’t have to stick to one hull to sail
offshore in a small boat. Designed in
1981, James Wharram’s Tiki 21 catamaran
is newer than most of the designs we’ve
mentioned. She won’t roll, can easily be
beached and has all that bridgedeck
space between the hulls. Rory McDougallsailed his around the world single-handed.
You could order a set of Tiki 21 plans
and start building one in your garage
right away.
Alternatively, for a bit more money you
might consider the Polish-built Haber 800,
which I tested in PBO May 2009. This is
no deep, narrow heavyweight. A deck
saloon provides shelter and eliminates
inverted stability. Raising the centreplate in
heavy weather means she can slide
sideways rather than being ‘tripped’ by a
fixed keel and rolled, while the gaff rig
reduces weight and windage aloft when
the mainsail is lowered. Three optional
extra centreboards also give directional
stability under any sail configuration and
minimise loads on the rudder. She’s
unconventional for sure, but her designer
and builder has tested her in some pretty
wild weather.
So some small production and
semi-production offshore yachts are still
out there, completing some remarkable
passages and showing what modern
designs can do.BOATS
ABOVE Fisher
Yarmouth 23
RIGHT Contest 29The Westerly Cirrus, a
proper little yacht