R11

Owner

Ray Mills and family

Provenance

A standard late production glue lap dinghy. Ray Mills bought the dinghy directly from the Rankin workshop in the mid 70s. At that time the Mill’s garage and the Rankin workshop were neighbours on Lynch’s quay. R11 is very much a production boat with off centre box. At one stage she went missing off Kidney’s Strand. It transpired she was picked up by the Irish Navy several miles south of Roches Point and brought back to Haulbowline, eventually returned to the Mills family some months later when she was spotted by someone in the know. All’s well that ends well.

Her main construction / design details are -

• Planking of 3/8 “Stout Ply” (1mm thick face veneers with a 4mm thick filler).
• 4 bottom boards each side of the hog.
• A dagger board box that was offset to the keel; this allowed a standard hull to be built and stacked one inside the next enabling construction to continue pending a client ordering a punt or dinghy. In this case the box was tied into the mast thwart.
• The last major design change was the stringer running the length of the boat was dispensed with and individual risers were fixed directly to the hull to support the thwart ends.
• The aft seating battens were made the same width and concave shape to the forward batten.

Fig.1