Florida Cates Moth Offsets

George Albaugh, fellow blogger and Moth class keeper of plans, kindly lent me the Florida Cates Classic Moth plans to look over. Jeff Linton got his start in the Classic Moth class in a somewhat tired fiberglass Cates and just recently, Gary Gowans, shown in the photo below, won the Gen I division in the 2014 Classic Moth nationals with his home-built modified Cates.

George provided more details on the history of the Florida Cates Moth in the comments section, which I have dragged over to the main post:

"Warrens 1954 World Champ boat was Mach One, NOT Mach Two. After Harry Cates modified the design of Mach One to make the boat easier to build and less tippy, Warren ordered one from Harry and named that particular boat Mach Two. The modified boat is alternatively referred to as a "Cates" a "Florida" or a "Mach Two" design, depending on whom youre taking to and to an extent where you are geographically up and down the eastern seaboard.

"As a footnote, only a handful of Mach One type Moths were built. The Mach One has more keel rocker and a much deeper vee. This makes a Mach One type almost as evil to sail as a Mistral. This also means that the bow sections on the Mach One have to be pulled up pram style rather than planked as in the case of the Mach Two/Cates/Florida derivative. Warrens Mach One had a false nose, made of fiberglass, glued on the front of the hull to achieve the sharp stem seen in most surviving photos of the boat.

I scanned parts of the plans and was also able to convert the Florida Cates lines into an 8-station offset table incorporating Gary Gowans wider transom. Ive made up a small PDF file, which, while not the complete plans, gives you the flavor of how they built this 1950s design. If you were an experienced builder, you could probably make something out of this PDF. If not, contact George for the complete set of plans (see PDF).

To print or download this PDF, click on the right-facing arrow icon on the top right of the PDF window. This will open the PDF into another tab.

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Miami Yacht Club Florida Late 1940s

History is marked by "flowering" time periods, a confluence of time, location and people that melds in a dynamism that creates something interesting and different. (Some of these periods have enormous influence on world history, Paris in the 19th century springs to mind; a center of radicalism in mid-century, a center of frenetic artistic bounty in the late century.)  Such was the case with small boat sailing out of Miami during the post-WWII years. A combination of professional builders and amateur tinkerers pushed the development of three small boat classes, two of them local. However, in this history, the two local Miami classes, the Suicide and the Cricket, "flowered" and then disappeared, their effect negligible on the later history of small boat sailing . The long, lean, Suicide dinghy with the wishbone rig was the fastest sailing class in the U.S immediately after WWII. The Cricket was an all-out racing cat-boat with a wishbone rig and a sliding seat. (The Mothboat was the third class - what we call the Classic Moth today.) Miami Yacht Club on the causeway was the focal point for racing these unique craft.

In search of more archival material on the Suicide and Cricket class in Miami, I turned to George A of Mid-Atlantic Musings. George has a vast collection of Mothboat historical material including the Miami period. Sure enough, George was able to produce the Walter Dietel album. Walter was a German immigrant who designed and built his own Mothboats and Suicides in Miami after WWII.

Photos from the album are featured below. Some of the photos are from the Miami Y.C and some, I think, are from the Coconut Grove Sailing Club.

A Cricket coming at the camera with a Suicide in the background.

Walter Dietel Album

A Cricket on a trailer with Mothboats launching.

Walter Dietel Album

A Cricket and a Suicide. I think this is the race committee boat that is throwing them a line. (See photo below.)

Walter Dietel Album

Three Crickets. This may be a start, or possibly a leeward rounding - hard to tell. You can definitely see the sliding seat in use on the leftmost Cricket.

Walter Dietel Album

Jerry Gwynns champion Suicide Joker.

Walter Dietel Album

A Suicide kicking it up on a reach.

Walter Dietel Album

On the launching beach, a mixture of Suicides, Crickets, Mothboats and what looks to be a Whitman EZ-build chine decked canoe (International Canoe) with most likely Lou Whitman himself standing over it.

Walter Dietel Album

The peanut gallery, in rapt attention to the racing, consigned to a log on the beach, .

Walter Dietel Album

Walter Dietel, from whose photo album these images were taken, with his home-built, amateur designed Mothboat.

Walter Dietel Album

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The Florida Cricket Class A Missing Link

The Cricket class was a 15 foot, chined, V-shaped, catboat with wishboom that died out in the early 1960s. By that time the Cricket fleet was only found at the Miami Yacht Club and, given the small numbers at the demise, it is today, a forgotten class. But in digging through U.S. sailing history more comes out about the Cricket.

The Cricket class was designed sometime during the 1890s, in or around Atlantic City N.J, where it became extremely popular. Reports indicate hundreds were built and about one hundred were racing out of Atlantic City in 1900. It was, as far as I can determine, the earliest example of a chined, V-shaped sailing dinghy in the United States. More about the early development of the Cricket class (who was the designer? what prompted the design? when did the class die out in Atlantic City?)  has been hard to come by.

In the 1920s, when Northerners began to flock to the remote, but bucolic winter paradise that was Florida, the Cricket class was also exported in numbers from the New Jersey shores. It was reported that twenty five Crickets were shipped to southern Florida with most of them destroyed in the hurricane of 1926. The  Cricket class would rebuild in Miami and would form the core of the Southern Florida Sailing Association (later the Miami Yacht Club) when it was organized in 1928. The Cricket would become the boat to beat in the free-for-all under 150 sq. foot (sail area) class.

When, in 1931, Bill Crosby designed the Snipe for the Florida West Coast Racing Associations free-for-all Trailer class, he must have been mindful that his Snipe would initially be compared against the Cricket class, at least in Florida. Between the two, the hull design similarities are striking. It does seem that Crosby started designing his Snipe using the Cricket as a baseline and then added user-friendly features (a sloop rig with a high boom being the most notable one). The Snipe went on to international fame, the Cricket, to oblivion.

Some photos:

A smattering of classic Florida sailing dinghies; on the left, the Optimist Pram, behind the Pram, a Mothboat, in the center, a Cricket, with the other Cricket, bow on, in the foreground. Behind the Cricket is a Suicide class.

Crickets launching at Miami Yacht Club, late 1950s.

Crickets going upwind. In all three of the ones in view in this photo the crew are hiking using skinny hiking boards.

The closest we have to a set of lines for the Cricket was this one-design commissioned by St. Petersburg Yacht Club as featured in The Rudder, 1919. The lines look very close to a copy of the Cricket although the length for this one-design is a foot longer than the Cricket.

A blog post about an earlier New Jersey dinghy, the Philadelphia Tuckups of the 1870s can be found here.

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