RÆDWALD

Thirteen point nine knots. That’s the top speed Sam Doman has so far recorded on his newly launched 15' dinghy, RÆDWALD. It’s surely some kind of record for a gaff-rigged dinghy, if you exclude Australia’s 18' Sydney Harbour skiffs, which regularly clock speeds of 15 knots and more. Even the gaff-rigged sandbaggers of New York, with their huge sail areas, only occasionally reached that speed, and they can hardly be described as dinghies.

“When I built the boat, I wanted to be able to do 15 knots,” Sam says. “My unofficial target was to be the fastest gaff-rigged boat built outside Australia.” While he reckons that the Sydney Harbour skiffs are “pretty untouchable,” he aspires to “beat the round-Britain record for an open boat, which at the moment is 15 days. That’s an average speed of just over 3 knots. It’s quick, but I think it’s not unbeatable.”

If Sam sounds like a young man in a hurry, that’s because in many ways he is. Speed was his main focus when designing RÆDWALD. But there was something else: Sam is a keen dinghy-cruiser and wanted a boat he could stick a tent over and sleep on. He wanted a boat that would be strong enough and—crucially—stable enough to sail around Britain, which includes some of the gnarliest coastlines in Europe.

It sounds as if those requirements—speed, seaworthiness, and comfort—should be incompatible and yet, probably because he’s young and doesn’t always play by the rules, Sam seems to have achieved the impossible. What’s more, he’s done it while sticking to his preferred genre: a wooden boat with a traditional rig.

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