F-Frolicsome Fun

As the Flying Fifteen class celebrates seven decades as one of the most popular small keelboats in the world.

- David Henshall

In a sport that is rich in romantic sea stories, the story detailing the birth of the Flying Fifteen has to be right up there with the best of them. According to the legend, designer Uffa Fox described an Archimedeslike ‘eureka moment’ he experienced in the bath during Christmas of 1947, when he suddenly visualised such a boat sailing in brisk winds.

Without wanting to debunk such a great tale, the reality of the story is far more prosaic, harking back to the early 1920s when Uffa Fox sailed an American half decked Herreshoff ‘sports keelboat’ at Cowes with some notable success. Fast forward a quarter of a century and Fox had been asked by Sir John Beale of the YRA (Yacht Racing Association, the forerunner of the RYA) to create a small keelboat that would do for the genre what the new and increasingly popular classes of dinghy were doing for small boat racing.

PLANING PERFORMANCE 

The criteria identified included making the new boat capable of delivering “the frolicsome fun of a 14ft dinghy, but in which a great deal of the physical exertion was eliminated”. Records show that Fox calculated that there were some 10,000 people actively engaged in small boat sailing and with each passing year, a sizeable number of these would find the physical demands of their boats debarring them from the sport. He went on to say that the Flying Fifteen would answer the need for a boat that could keep these people sailing and that with these numbers, the new boat would flourish.