Editors Note: We encourage more response from our readers on College Sailing Dinghies, past present & future, and we have had a lot of feedback from Zach Brown’s original article on the LaserPerformance Collegiate 420. We thought this piece on the Rondar Firefly was particularly well done and illuminates not only the boat, but it’s history in college sailing and, as it sounds, its bright future. Please keep the content coming. editor@sail1design.com
By Guest Writer Dan Rabin
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On opening weekend for college sailing this year, I coached the Brown University women’s team at the Toni Deutsch regatta hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before racing began, I was catching up with Fran Charles, MIT’s Sailing Master, and he mentioned something about how we could reef the Fireflies if the breeze came up as expected. I think I chuckled (I can’t tell when Fran is kidding any more), but sure enough, 2 hours and multiple capsizes later, Fran announced we would reef the boats after lunch. My team came out to the boat with a couple of tie downs, a sleeve, and expressions of confusion. I informed them that while they stared blankly at the boat and tried to will it to reef itself, I was going to watch Fran show the Yale team how to execute the operation. It’s actually pretty slick – one tie goes through a reef point on the leech around the boom, another goes through a reef point on the luff around the mast, and a custom sleeve zips to each side of the main to hold the excess foot. The best part of it all, we spent the afternoon racing, rather than waiting for people to get rescued. |
Courtesy Fran Charles
Like most sailors of recent generations, I largely associate the Firefly with the Wilson Trophy, a premier annual team race event in the UK. Turns out, this isn’t its first rodeo in the home of the free.
Origin and Early Years
The Firefly was designed in 1939 by Uffa Fox at the request of Cambridge and Oxford University sailors looking for a more suitable boat for team racing. World War II postponed production of the boat until 1946. At this time, Fox changed the name of the design from Sea Swallow to Firefly, in honor of the fighter planes utilized in the war.
The Firefly was actually used as a singlehanded boat in the 1948 Olympics, in which Paul Elvstrom won his first gold medal at the age of 20. The boat proved to be a bit much to handle alone, and was subsequently replaced by the Finn in the next Games. MIT, a pioneer of college sailing in the States, maintained a fleet of Fireflies throughout the 1950’s. After winning the co-ed national championship hosted by Cottage Park Yacht Club in Massachusetts Bay in 1961, MIT retired their Firefly fleet.
The Sequel
Fifty years later, members of that championship squad helped lead the effort to bring Fireflies back to the Charles River. Regarding some of the characteristics that attracted him to pursuing the venerable boat, Fran Charles explained, “We had heard that the boat could be sailed by heavier teams without a disadvantage in light air. In addition, a tapered mast with the vang led back allows sailors to learn more about mast bend and depowering techniques in breeze.” The extensive mast bend capability allows lighter teams to hang in heavier breeze, thereby extending the window before heavy air crews are needed.
Why is the boat less sensitive to crew weight differences? Generally speaking, the hull shape is narrow and deep, with a taper at the transom (pictured below). This means that changes in team weight do not translate to a significant change in wetted surface. This is in contrast to the planing hull of a 420, and to a lesser extent the Flying Junior.
Courtesy Rondar/MIT
The Firefly is also lighter than both the 420 and the FJ, giving it a bit more of a lively feel and promoting more frequent transitions between footing and pinching modes. The flip side of that liveliness is that the boat gets pretty squirrely downwind as the breeze picks up, even more so than an FJ. Think that the reefing will just be for women’s regattas? Think again. Thomas Barrows, recent Wilson Trophy Champion, explained that the West Kirby hosts “don’t hesitate to switch down to the storm sails…the crossover to instability happens quickly and they don’t want to fall behind on the rotation.”
It should also come as no surprise that the institution that in recent years has hosted regattas with downwind team racing starts and finishes (I can’t remember what Fran named it but I call it a Kamikaze), mid beat gates, and windward gates, also made some design tweaks to their Firefly fleet. Rondar Raceboats accommodated MIT with a modified hull for robustness, a rig design allowing for a higher boom, jib sheeting to a leeward track, and a gnav kicker system (a vang on steroids led back between the skipper and crew – similar to that of a Tufts Lark, it should be played in each puff and lull to maximize boat speed). The centerboard is a thick aluminum plate without gaskets in the trunk, and the boat comes up from capsizing relatively dry. The cost of the fleet was comparable to other alternatives, and Fran hopes to hold the fleet for at least 12 years.
Moving Forward
I’m a believer in the idea that boats aren’t better than one another, they’re just different. Maybe I need to tell myself that from too many years campaigning J24’s. In any case, no one can argue that racing different boats that require different skill sets and adjustments makes for better sailors. I learned about the concept of reefing on my parents’ Sabre 28 when I was a kid. During a lunch break on a dock 25 years later on the Charles River, a college junior asked “where are the reefed sails stored?” Chalk up another victory to the MIT Sailing Program in its mission of education, service, and enablement.
Reefed MIT Firefly / Courtesy Dan Rabin
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