Recycling a Racing Dinghy -- Part 1

A few years ago I acquired a little Penguin dinghy for teaching. My boat has a fiberglass hull and an aluminum mast, but the Penguin was designed almost a century ago, and most of the Penguins were/are fabricated using plywood and have wooden masts. Although Philip L. Rhodes originally drew the 11-½ foot dinghy’s lines for a design competition (it lost), the Penguin’s story actually begins five years later, in 1938, with a request by a group of Potomac River dinghy sailors for a small, car-toppable racing boat that could be easily constructed by amateur boatbuilders. Rhodes already was a well-known naval architect and would design many of the first-generation fiberglass dinghies produced by O’Day (the Sprite, Widgeon, and Mariner) as well as Dyer’s Dink and Dhow, among many other boats. For his Chesapeake Bay clients, Rhodes supplied plans for a stable single-chine catboat that could be constructed using low-cost boatbuilding materials -- waterproof plywood and resorcinol glue -- which, at that time, were considered “state-of-the-art.”

(from the Penguin Class photo gallery)

While the process of laminating thin layers of wood -- plywood -- was actually invented in the mid-1800s, it was not until the early 20th century that high-speed rotary lathes were designed that could produce the thin veneers needed for large-scale plywood manufacturing, which developed around the fir and spruce forests of northern California, Oregon and Washington. Propelled by the rapidly growing automobile industry, by 1929 there were more than 17 plywood mills on the West Coast. And when new waterproof glues were introduced in 1934, plywood became an interesting new construction material for boatbuilding and for many other exterior applications (from the APA History). Rhodes now took advantage of large-area sheets of waterproof plywood to produce plans for a single-chine dinghy constructed using “developed panels” that were attached to a relatively light-weight internal framework. The technique is used extensively by Phil Bolger, Jim Michalak, and many other designers to produce easy-to-build small boats. And the bible on epoxy and boat building, “Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction” (5th Edition, 2005), has a detailed description of “compounded plywood” design (Chapter 25). But Rhodes was probably the earliest designer to take advantage of waterproof plywood to simplify small boat construction.

The Potomac River sailors built a dozen of Rhodes’ plywood dinghies to test the design. And Hull No. 1 was displayed for many years at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, MD. When plans were published in Yachting magazine in 1940, interest in the Penguin surged, and racing fleets were established on both coasts and around the Great Lakes. Although competition paused during WWII, by 1955 there were more than 100 Penguin fleets. And according to Chris Museler, more than 9,700 Penguins have been built.

With a plumb bow, hard chines, high sides, and 72 square feet of sail, the two-person Penguin dinghies are dry, stable boats. Right from the beginning they were campaigned through the fall and winter seasons, and the Penguin excelled at frostbite racing until tippier and wetter Lasers eliminated the need to find a crew willing to freeze and dry suits replaced wool sweaters and oilskins. The Penguin’s Portsmouth Number rating (D-PN) is 111.5 -- not fast, but not too shabby, either. For comparison, the lateen-rigged Sunfish is rated at 99.6 (lower is faster), and the Laser -- which is quite a bit faster and much higher-strung -- is rated at 91.1. Today there are only a few surviving Penguin fleets, and class racing is centered on the Chesapeake Bay, very close to where it all started (see the International Penguin Class Dinghy Association (IPCDA) website, www.penguinclass.com).

Now it turns out that I’ve got one of the last Penguins built (hull number 9744), a fiberglass boat that was constructed by Lightwave Yachts (aka Innovator?) in Florida in 1995. It’s a “self-rescuing” design, with integral flotation chambers between the hull and the deck; and it has a light, tapered aluminum mast. The only wood on it appears to be in the gunwale cores.

It had been listed for sale on the Penguin class website, but apparently there was no interest from racing skippers who apparently prefer the traditional wooden hulls, which do not carry a 20-pound weight penalty. I found my Penguin for sale on Craigslist and bought a clean boat with top-of-the-line hardware, a roadworthy galvanized trailer, and a crisp North “training” sail. Since I’m not interested in competition anymore, my annual summer boat project is focused on incorporating changes that would transform a classic racing dinghy, typically sailed with a crew of two, more sailor-friendly and capable of being safely managed single-handed. And in the bargain keep an obsolete and unwanted hull (and sail) with lots of useful remaining life out of the landfill.