30 YEARS AGO

September 1992, CB51

“It’s fair to say that even those who had whooped it up in Douarnenez in 1988 and returned with fishermen’s tales of the scale of the event were totally unprepared for the breath-taking size, the variety and the pace of the festivities that made Brest ’92,” wrote editor Peter Milne. The event, now quadrennial, is by some margin the world’s biggest maritime festival. Half a million visitors attended that first event to see more than 2,200 boats from around the world. These days, it’s thought that up to a million people go to Brest, which makes it the size of about five Glastonbury Festivals. Ga– rig is, it seems, bigger than rock ‘n’ roll. Who would have guessed? Elsewhere in that issue, we ran the story of the long-lived International 14s, the epitome of the extreme two-handed racing dinghy from its inception in the early 1900s to today’s carbon fibre examples. In terms of power, we had the American fairy tale of Chris-Craft, a company that has almost certainly made more boats, of any description, but primarily the mahogany runabout, than anyone else in the world; about 250,000 was our estimate back then. They are still going strong today, 138 years after the company was founded as “Decoy Duck Manufacturer – Also Builder of Duck Boats, Paddles, Etc.” Chris Craft is much snappier.