(Oh no, not him again.)
The Junk Rig Sailing and Rally Club (the cumbersome title has internal-politics origins which I won't go into), an offshoot of the Junk Rig Association, held a rally at the Solway Yacht Club, Kippford (near Dumfries in Galloway: up the M6, turn left at Gretna Green, about 40 miles further, on the north coast of Solway Firth) last w/e 7-8 Sept. The reason I'm reporting it here is because exactly half (numerically) of the assembled boats were Swallowboats.
There were four boats! One was Robin Blain's JR BC20 'Gigi', and I was there with Cavatina. (The other two were "Badger', a famous small JR schooner, which has been several times across the Atlantic, and at least once to New Zealand and back: and a new sister ship to 'Tystie', the latter being the JR boat in which David Tyler has been all over, from Greenland to the Antipodes, for which endeavours the Ocean Cruising Club recently awarded him with their Rose Medal.) However it's interesting that 30 people (apart from owners and crews of the boats) came to spend the w/e getting some sailing under JR, to assess the possible merits of JR for their boat projects, and to discuss the rival merits of lower luff hauling parrels and batten parrels, and jointed battens v cambered sail panels
The weather was partly dreadful (gales and horizontal curtains of rain), but windows of sailable weather happily coincided with the best of the tides, and we had some great sailing on both days. Robin Blain's BC20 looks very pretty with her JR sail, which has jointed battens - the alternative to cambered panels to obtain an effective aerofoil for sailing upwind. And on 'Cavatina' I had company actually for the first time, which made her even more stable. We ventured - no, that sounds too timid; we boldly went - out to sea from the estuary into quite a seaway because of wind-against-tide effects: and 'Cavatina' frisked over the metre high waves in a F4+, some of the time with a single reef (taken in or shaken out in about 15 seconds according to conditions), as her cambered sail panels drove her along in tremendous style. Not for a moment did she cause us any anxiety about her ability to cope. She is an absolute star.
Michael Cavatina (Trouper 12)
