30 YEARS AGO

August 1992, CB50

It turns out that the editorial in this number was a paean to the joys of small boats. “As a youngster,” wrote then-editor Peter Milne, “I well remember that as far as sailing was concerned, dinghy racing was the only sport. Centre-boarders were OK, but you just had to be over the hill if you thought there was any merit in sailing anything with a keel swinging beneath it. At that time I even raced with a crew who championed the theory that stated ‘the amount of fun to be derived from boats is inversely proportional to their size.’” The cover, fittingly to that sentiment, is of the clinker dinghy that won an award for excellence of build at that year’s Greenwich International Wooden Boat Show, then held annually at Maritime Greenwich in London, and which would go on to become the Beale Park Boat Show for many happy years thereafter. Continuing his editorial, Peter Milne quotes the great U a Fox (covered in this issue too), as saying that an owner is best suited by a boat whose overall length in feet equalled his or her age in years. That sounds brilliant, but you’d better be retiring pretty well to a ord a 65-footer!