Leigh on Sea Sailing Club is home to the largest fleet of Vintage Solos in the World and on Sat 12th July will host the seventh running of the Vintage Championship.
Like thoroughbred horses galloping around a make-shift course, unaware that they were laid out to pasture decades ago, these fine specimens just do not know when to quit. Their owners too, display similar traits, one could argue that some should have gone to the knackers yard years ago but the Solo is forever and technological advances in epoxy repairs, medicine and joint replacements keep Solos and they're sailors strong. Good job too as generation X, fed on T foils and Sail GP media, seem to have missed out on the fun you can have trying to push a 70kg hull through the water rather than over it.
The Solo, with its distinctive bow profile presents a challenge classes such as the Ok, Phantom and Streaker miss out on and that is to say, in a short chop it is nothing like putting a hot knife through butter.
The Solo design, first pencilled by Jack Holt in 1956 (next year is our 70th Anniversary) has seen plenty of development but like a small tributary, initially V-shaped and narrow has, over many decades and sometimes painfully slowly, evolved into a full blown river. This metamorphosis has only been possible through the clever + and - of 5mm tolerance Jack and the Solo Committee included in the first rules of the class, a tiny detail aimed directly at the amateur builder but providing huge scope for the professional builder to explore.
This Saturday, we celebrate the ingenuity of those early craftsmen who spent many late nights and early mornings struggling to find the magic formula that would propel their build to the front of the fleet. Whether you have a Holt, Stone, Beasley, Lovett, Uttley, Avacraft, Beckett, Severn Sailboats, Don Marine, Young, Crawshaw, Thresher, Miles or Gosling, you are now the ambassadors of the legacy that Jack created all those years ago.
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