Sailing Alone in the Mirror Dinghy
A Small Boat that is Seaworthy Stable and Safe
The sea-going qualities of the Mirror ensure that its favoured by sailors of all abilities. Above all it is safe and relatively easy to recover from a full capsize.
Sailing Alone
Many single-handed sailors remain loyal to the Mirror dinghy. These little boats are easy for one person to launch and retrieve from the water. They can be rigged in a few minutes and the sails handled without the need to move away from the tiller. With a little ingenuity a boom awning can be devised to allow sleeping aboard on short cruises.
Versatile and fun
The Mirror's retractable center board and shallow draft make it perfect for pottering about rivers, inland waterways and for exploring salt-water estuaries and creeks. Originally designed to be raced with a crew of two, there are now over 70,000 Mirrors world wide, some of which are many years old and lovingly maintained. But although it is an ideal boat for teaching beginners and for gentle adventures in sheltered waters, it is its inherent sea-going qualities that ensure the Mirror's continuing popularity with experienced sailors who have often moved on to larger craft, but then reverted to their original preference.
Dealing with a capsizeImportantly for the lone sailor, the construction of the Mirror allows her to be righted following a capsize with minimum difficulty - and without the need to bail out a hull that has filled with water. This is a key advantage over open boats that have buoyancy tanks fitted beneath the thwarts as, although they will float when righted, they present the crew with a mamouth task of emptying them before anything else can be done. The Mirror has boxed buoyancy chambers integral to the hull, substantially reducing the area that needs to be bailed should a mishap occur.
Stability and SeaworthinessOne of the most experienced small boat sailors around is John Vigor who writes regularly on the pleasures and comparative merits of sailing dinghies. He points out that the stability of a boat is linked to the ratio between its length and the weight of its crew. (John Vigor - Small Craft Advisor.) A useful guide is to match each foot of boat length to every stone of weight of the crew. Thus an eleven stone person in a Mirror, which is just under eleven feet in length, would meet this guide to optimum stability. John Vigor has a high regard for the sea-worthiness of Mirrors and has written that he has always felt confident that he could sail one across an ocean if necessary, adding that "If I were shipwrecked in mid-ocean, I'd certainly rather be in a Mirror than in a drifting life-raft.
From England to the Black Sea
An Australian, A J Mackinnon, had been teaching at a school in England when he decided to undertake a short cruise of sixty miles on the River Severn. His boat was an old Mirror dinghy that had been re-fitted in the school workshop. A year later, Mackinnon had reached Romania and was still going. His journey took him through the canals and rivers of England and out of the Thames estuary to the south coast before he crossed the English Channel to Calais. By the end of 1998 he had sailed and rowed over three thousand miles through the waterways of Europe, enduring stranding, kidnap, shipwreck and capsizes, all of which tested his durability and that of the Mirror to the full.
SourcesRoy Partridge Sailing the Mirror - Fenhurst Books - 1980
AJ Mackinnon The Unlikely Voyage of the Jack de Crow - Seafarer Books - 2002
