If you click the Barnacle Bill Logo to the left you'll get a link to a fantastic film from the early 80's irish TV show called 'Hands', showing legendry Irish boat builder, Jimmy Furey, building a clinker built Shannon One dinghy, of a type similar to Swallow and it is a superb insight into the craftsman’s approach. You’ll see that the main difference between how he works and how an amateur boat builder works is that he is more focused on function than on finish. He’s not in the business of making pretty boats, he’s in the business of making strong boats, well made and quickly that happen to be pretty.
Click Bill to see the film on YouTube
Swallow differs from the Shannon One and from Amazon because she doesn’t have a centre board. Swallow’s keel is 6 inches deep Scottish boat designer Iain Oughtred: “deep external keels like Swallow apparently had are very unusual in such boats. most use galvanized steel centreplates ¼” to ½” thick that are hoisted with a drum winch. Extra ballast is also unusual, but sometimes used according to conditions”.
Swallow carried extra ballast; in the form of “six pigs of lead, five little ones and a big one” the total weight of the ballast would have roughly been 100lb. The unusual keel and ballast arrangement on Swallow is probably indicative of the local conditions she was built to tackle. Anyone who has run into a mud bank at speed with a steel centerplate will know it’s no picnic and typically results in a long wait for the tide to lift you off.
Swallow’s Rig
Ransome describes the rig in some detail. Modern sailors, used to triangular marconi sails sometimes poo poo the basic rig Swallow had but there are some very good reasons why boats of this type carried the rig they did. Firstly there are hardly no metal fittings which keeps cost and weight down, secondly, because the mast isn’t stayed it can be raised very quickly by simply dropping into the mast hole in the front thwart and fitting its foot into a mast step on the keel. Thirdly, the standing lugsail tends to spill its wind in gusts and can be quickly lowered; a quick release hitch securing the halyard to the middle thwart can quickly bring the whole sail down. In areas where gusts are unpredictable, this is a sensible safety precaution, especially in a ballasted boat without buoyancy.
As readers of BBM will know, we are huge fans of such rigs, they take up less space, meaning more room for picnics and a bloodthirsty crew, they perform well if set up properly (most have lost the art of setting a lug or sprit sail properly) and they only require ropes and spars and a single pulley for the main sheet. All cleating can be taken care of with belaying pins of brass or ash and tension can be put into the outhaul and the down haul tack (both critical and often neglected on lug rigs) by using a trucker’s or cart man’s hitch which, if used with an O ring or U bolt will give a mechanical tension ratio of 3:1.
Swallow is described as having a small tackle connecting the boom near the mast to the keel to pull down the boom. Judging by the drawings of the real Swallow, the location of this tackle was very close to the mast step. This would mean that Swallow was rigged with a true standing lugsail rather. It is often wrongly thought that standing lugsails don’t have booms but this is incorrect. The difference between a standing lugsail and a balanced lugsail is the location of the down tack haul. In a balanced lugsail rig this is fixed often some distance forward of the mast which ensures a decent proportion of the sail is in front of the mast, this means that the sail is balanced.
The other major advantage, especially in a ballasted boat like Swallow, with no buoyancy, is that the centre of load on the sail is considerably lower on a lug sail than on a Marconi sail. This gives superb power to balance ratio and therefore makes the boat very stable. The ideal craft to teach ships boys the art of sailing in!
The overriding reason why we champion the re introduction and use of such rigs is because they require less rigging, less ropes, less hardware (much of it unnecessary on all but the fastest of racing dinghies) it is costs considerably less to rig a boat with a lug sail than it does with the ubiquitous racing dinghy rig we see everywhere.
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