Many a reader’s first experience of a boat would have been a small, glassfibre dinghy, tender perhaps to a small glassfibre cruising yacht, a Corribee, or something grander, depending on parental income. For others, slightly older, a Mirror dinghy, home built, and those of a generation born in the fifties it would have been a clinker pram or, in my case, Greenfly, my naval grandfather’s 15ft pride and joy, wrecked when a hurricane lifted it from the garden and deposited it some miles away (well, miles may be an exaggeration but I was five when it happened and a mile may well have been a few metres or yards in those days.)
Greenfly, which I can remember helping to paint, upside down on the grass in front of that modest…