Moth (dinghy)

International Moth

Class symbol
An International Moth Class sailing hydrofoil flying over the water.
Design	Development class
Crew	1
Type	Monohull
Construction	Carbon Fiber or Fiberglass
Hull weight	Unrestricted
LOA	11 ft (3.4 m)
RYA PN	600

The Moth Class is the name for a small development class of sailing dinghy. Originally a cheap home built sailing boat designed to plane, now it is an expensive largely commercially produced boat designed to hydroplane on foils.

The pre hydrofoil design Moths are still sailed and raced but are far slower than their foiled counterparts.

The Moth types have been (not all may still exist):

The current International Moth is a result of merging two separate but similar historical developments. The first occurred in Australia in 1928 when Len Morris built a cat rigged (single sail) flat bottomed scow (horizontal bow rather than the "normal" vertical bow) to sail on Andersons' Inlet at Inverloch, a seaside resort 130 kilometres (81 mi) from Melbourne. The scow was hard chined, 11 feet (3.4 m) long, with a single 80 square feet (7.4 m²) mainsail. The craft was named "Olive" after his wife. The construction was timber with an internal construction somewhat like Hargreave's box kite. "Olive's" performance was so outstanding, that a similar boat "Whoopee" was built. Len Morris then sold "Olive", and built another boat called "Flutterby", and with those three boats, the Inverloch Yacht Club was formed. Restrictions for the class known as the Inverloch Eleven Footer class were then drawn up, with the distinguishing characteristic that of being not a one-design boat but rather that of a boat permitting development within the set of design parameters.

At much the same time, 1929 in fact, halfway around the world another development class, the American Moth Boat was started by Captain Joel Van Sant of Elizabeth City, North Carolina with his boat “Jumping Juniper” built of Atlantic White Cedar from the Great Dismal Swamp. The major difference between the Australian and American boats early on was that the American boat used only 72 square feet (6.7 m²) of sail on a somewhat shorter mast. The US development class was formally organized in 1932 as the "National Moth Boat Association" and in 1935, due to increasing overseas interest, changed its name to the "International Moth Class Association" or IMCA.

In 1933, an American magazine, The Rudder, published an article dealing with the Moth Boat scene in the US. The Australians noted the similarities between the two groups of boats and intuitively realized that the name "Moth Boat" rolled more easily from the tongue than "Inverlock Eleven Footer Class", and changed the name of their class to Moth. The Australians also noted the differences, particularly in sail plan between the two boats, but since this was in the middle of the great depression, and the two groups were 13,000 miles apart, no attempt was made to reconcile these differences. Thus two large Moth classes developed separately for over 30 years.