David Clark and the first Machete in perfect harmony while sailing upwind. The International Canoe has always been something of an aficionado class, but the boats are more stable than they look with the lateral inertia of having the helm so far outboard. They are also a joy to sail, with a sound and motion more akin to a multihull than a conventional planing dinghy. The Machete is a praiseworthy effort to encourage the many young and impecunious enthusiasts who sadly are currently being lost to the sport
The Machete manifesto
At Seahorse we bang on endlessly about the cost escalation in small boats and the consequent narrowing of the sport’s appeal as young talent is driven away. Hailing from a sailing dynasty that has contributed a great deal to the sport over the years, David Clark decided to do something about it – and the final result is an inspiration
In many ways we aimed dinghy sailing at the rocks when we discovered carbon fibre. It advanced our optimal performance and it wowed the passerby, but on an economic and cultural level it set us on a track that is lousy for the sport as we know it.
40 SEAHORSE
Circa 1970 the difference in weight, stiffness and cost between a simply con- structed wood boat vs one with equivalent structure in fibreglass was null. Both were a bit whippy, the weights were roughly equivalent, and the costs were low. The lightest, strongest and fastest boats of the era were C-Class catamarans, built from thin plywood with mindboggling amounts of ring bulkheads and stringers inside. My father has Little America’s Cup winners Patient Lady IV and Patient Lady V hang- ing in a shed out back and their insides are more cathedral than boat.
Luckily for everybody outside of speed- sailing, cutting and fitting that many intricate parts by hand was prohibitively labour intensive, so the number of fleet- slaying ‘superboats’ made using this technique was relatively low and thus having one was not necessary. The state of the art was affordable, used boats even more so, and yacht clubs could maintain a strong base of low buy-in young and working class participants. It hit a healthy equilibrium and for a period we achieved a golden age of dinghy sailing.
Enter carbon, the miracle fibre. I’ve grown up working with carbon and the
dirty secret is that it’s tremendously simple to use. In dinghies it practically eliminates even thinking about scantlings. Your prototype’s chainplates ripped out? No worries. Bump up the laminate by 300g in the immediate vicinity and forget about it. Bulkheads? OK, maybe we’ll put in one or two but really the foam sandwich skins are so crazily stiff that in most places you barely need them. From a builder’s perspective, especially if you were already laminating with glass, carbon was the ultimate windfall. No labour increase, huge quality increase. Yes, please. So dinghy fleets around the world started to buy carbon superboats which, while noticeably better, cost a good deal more as a simple function of the materials. Suddenly it was no longer a toss-up between modes of construction; it was a pretty clear dichotomy between cheap and fast. What this ultimately did was slowly push out those with lower incomes, which, as I will explain, is a compounding phenomenon. As the inevitably older and wealthier end of a fleet moves towards a 30 per cent more expensive, but higher performing boat, it automatically discourages partici- pation on the part of the younger, less
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