Bigger Luggers

Designed to be a safe family boat for coastal trios, the Drascombe and Devon Luggers have taken intrepid sailors on some long sea passages

- CLIVE MARSH

Visit any UK harbour in the summer and the chances are you’ll see a Drascombe Lugger or a Devon Lugger afloat or dried out on the mud.

My first experience of a Drascombe Lugger was at Flushing where I’d hired a holiday flat with my family overlooking the harbour. The flat came with a tender and use of an old Mk2 Drascombe Lugger kept on a swing mooring. It rained all week but we got afloat most days and it didn’t take long for me to discover the significant benefits of the boat.

In recent years I’d owned small fully decked cruisers, and anchoring, jib changing, etc. required certain agility when walking on the wet deck in a chop. In the Drascombe Lugger, I could go forward and deal with things within the safety of the full-length cockpit. And this provided much more comfort for the crew than the small cockpits of my little cruisers which normally required one crewmember sitting half in the hatchway when sailing.

A few weeks later I found myself at an event and sitting next to the chairman of my bank. To lighten the conversation I asked him what he did when not working. He told me that he liked sailing his Lugger and had recently sailed her across the wider part of the English Channel to France and then back again a few days later. We talked a lot about coastal sailing and the benefits of an open boat and I decided there and then to look out for a used Lugger.

Buying a Lugger

I found an old Mark 1 for sale lying next to an air museum in Kent. I snapped her up. She wasn’t cheap but like most things you get what you pay for and few boats are so well designed and fit for purpose.