the sail, so they recut the cloth that night and won the next
day’s contest. The little boat was fast and looked it, with a
low profile that kept sailors close to the water. Spectators
tried to buy it right off the beach.
Back home, the friends began work on a second proto-
type, mailing plans back and forth across the border. They
built it with an adjustable mast so they could play with dif-
ferent configurations. By December, it was ready for final
testing. Doing laps on Lake Saint-Louis near Montreal, they
moved the mast forward a few inches, cut its height, and
took a foot off the end of the boom, looking for just the right
feel. By the end of the cold weekend, they decided their
hot little dinghy—13 feet, 10½ inches long—was ready for
market. All it needed was a name. At a celebratory dinner,
a sailing friend—a McGill University student— suggested
it should be something youthful and international. “Why
don’t you call it something like ‘Laser’?” he asked.
Ian Bruce had a small boatbuilding shop, and the men
decided that he would manufacture the dinghy, while
Kirby would receive royalties for the design. Bruce priced
it at $695. At the New York Boat Show the next month, they
collected orders for 144 Lasers. “We didn’t know what the
hell was happening,” Kirby recalls.THE MASTERPIECEcollegiate Singlehanded Cham-
pionship in a Laser—1983 and
1985—and topped out at seventh
place in the Worlds.
Laser sailors first organized
themselves into an international
class in 1974, codifying Kirby’s
design into strictly defined specs,
and setting the craft on a path
toward the Olympics, where it de-
buted in Atlanta in 1996. In the
’80s, the introduction of a smaller
sail, known as the Radial, allowed
lighter sailors to be competitive
in heavy winds, and became the
standard for women’s Laser rac-
ing. The sport of sailing is said to
be in perpetual decline, but La-
ser racing has persisted. The 2018
Laser Masters World Champi-
onships, held in Dún Laoghaire,
Ireland, had 302 entries from 25
countries. (The apogee was the
1980 Laser Worlds, in Kingston,
Ontario, a legendary event with
350 entries.) But there are also
thousands of smaller weekend
regattas, held everywhere from
Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn,
New York, to the Victoria Nyanza
Sailing Club in Kampala, Uganda.
All told, more than 220,000
Lasers have been built by licensed
manufacturers on five continents.
(Ian Bruce sold his boatbuilding
business in the 1980s. He died in
2016.) With the exception of alter-
native rigs with smaller sails, like
the Radial, the Laser has hardly
changed. There have been slight
upgrades, each one documented and approved in a “con-
struction manual” maintained by the International Laser
Class Association, a kind of worldwide club of Laser sailors.
Each Laser factory is audited for conformity.
“Because it’s such a one-design boat, it really comes
down to the sailor,” says Sarah Douglas, a contender for the
Canadian 2020 Olympic sailing team who recently came in
sixth at the Laser Worlds. “It’s not equipment differences
or sail differences; it comes down to what the sailor is able
to do out on the water,” she says. “At the end of the day, you
can’t blame your boat. It’s just you. It is all you.”FOR DECADES, KIRBY AND HIS WIFE,
Margo, lived in a house on Connecticut’s little Five Mile
River, just upstream from where it empties into Long Island52 SPRING 2019 • POPSCI.COM“I LOOK AT IT
NOW,”KIRBY SAYS
OF HIS CREATION,
“AND I THINK, I
WOULDN’T CHANGE
A DAMN THING.”
There were societal factors at play. Postwar prosper-
ity and the construction of new highways led to a boom
in second- home ownership in the 1960s and ’70s. Many
of those new residences were along lakes and reservoirs,
and there were more of those too: Between 1933 and 1968,
the Tennessee Valley Authority created more than 10,000
miles of new shoreline, while the Bureau of Land Manage-
ment created 200 reservoirs. A new swath of the middle
class could afford a lake house and, apparently, were ready
for an inexpensive sailboat to go with it.
As intended, the Laser was cheap and easy to transport,
rig, and bang into a dock. “From a technology stand-
point, it’s a very simple boat, and just a great, great boat to
learn how to sail fast,” says Scott MacLeod, a sailor at the
Noro ton Yacht Club who twice won the North American