Daring to be Urgent

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davidh
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Daring to be Urgent

Post by davidh »

Hi all,
For those of you with the attention span longer than the smartphone playing teenager, you will recall that on a number of occasions the subject of the Bill O'Brian Daring dinghy has come up.

There is, to the best of my knowledge, just one of these important boats left in existence. I say important because they are - a forerunner to many other designs that would come later.

But sadly the last boat - which I am led to believe is in good condition, is in desperate, urgent need of a new home. It's there for someone who would want to take it on and make it a real floating example of a dinghy of the day.

Please...pretty please - can we save this?

regards

Dougal
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Southern377
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by Southern377 »

STEVEB
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by STEVEB »

Hi,
So give us a clue, where is it?
Steve :D
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Rupert
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by Rupert »

Out of disasters good things can come... I had 2 bookshelves collapse yesterday. The whole of the spare room was flooded by boat books. And there, sat on top of the pile, saying "look at me" was AYRS publication number 8, which contains a long article about designing Daring, plus a couple of small photos. Sadly, I'm not in a position to give the boat a home, but if anyone wants the information from the publication, I can scan it.
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trebor
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by trebor »

Sorry folks stupid question coming, if boat is so good, why aren't their any ?
Robert
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by Rupert »

Quite a few boats in the Pocket Rocket category have failed to catch on, even though they are good. Not sure why, maybe sitting out boats at that length filled the needs of most, and the Int14 and the longer trap one designs did for the rest.
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trebor
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by trebor »

Got you, similar to what Laser did to a lot of single handers.
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Ed
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by Ed »

I presume this is the boat:

http://www.yachtsandyachting.com/forum/ ... tification

But maybe not?

If so, she does look like a really very beautiful boat and well worth the effort.

Certainly it would be a great pity if it was lost.

Unfortunately I don't have the space at moment for her or the time to rebuild or sail her.

But certainly someone should!

eib
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PeterV
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by PeterV »

There's many reasons why some good boats disappear. Sometimes they're good, but not quite as good as something else very similar that becomes a lot more popular. sometimes they're expensive to build and the builder finds he can build something similar a lot cheaper. Sometimes they're quite lightly built and don't last. These last 2 apply to the Mercury, a good boat but Plycraft, the only licensed builders found they could build plywood boats much quicker and sell them for the same money, so they stopped after building 99. Then those that were built were sailed hard and died because they were lightly built. The few that were left got collected together, sailed for another 5 years and then those were knackered as well! Hence hardly any around now.
Another reason fast dinghies aren't so popular as classics is that they need a good, committed crew. Those of us sailing when we're not as fit as we used to be, crewed by our wives cannot contemplate a fast spinnaker trapeze boat, much as we'd like to imagine we could!
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clibb
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by clibb »

Dougal, Agree with you completely. I have always had a soft spot for this class, and pursued finding one for a long time. Sadly, I think I'm too old to do the boat justice now, but remain fully committed to doing anything I can to assist in it's restoration.

Nick
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by Pat »

Dougal, tell us more - location of boat (town)?, can we go and see it? price? - go on tempt us!
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davidh
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Re: Daring to be Urgent

Post by davidh »

All,

am trying to get more details but as I understand this, the boat is available to a good home.

Trebor...to answer your question; I came into this journalistic lark on the back of my first series for Dinghy mag, 'The Lost Classes'

The more I looked, the more I found a large number of boats, often very good - that just had failed, like old rock stars, to survive through to the modern day. Some were good and well known - think of the Mirror 14/Marauder, a sweet boat to sail if ever there was one. Peter V has already told us about the Mercury, there was the Ghost......Unit...so many in fact that a three part series only just scraped the surface of the topic.

Now it has to be said that there were so absolute dogs in there as well, not just bad but..."you have to be joking". I made a point of ignoring these as it is not my way to go around 'dissing' classes (even defunct ones) - never have, never will, but trust me when I say that they are out there..or were.

The importance of Daring cannot be overstated, for it came from a formative period on the timeline of dinghy development and moved the game forward in the UK, not least by introducing a number of multiple world championship winning sailors into the sport. In a way, the current classic scene and particularly the classic merlin rocket scene saddens me; If this was one of the desired Holt or Proctor Merlins, there would be a queue to get to this, even though there are plenty of examples existing already. But a boat like this, unique as far as I know.... will go to the bonfire unless someone acts

D
David H
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