Seabirds: Introduction and Rigging
Our club’s Seabirds are the ‘Sloop’ type of Sailing yacht. A ‘Sloop’ is the simplest type of a sailboat having a main sail and a head sail (jib) and a single mast. It is manned by a helmsman and a crew of minimum one and maximum four.
In 1920, the Royal Bombay Yacht Club assigned a Naval Architect Derrick Morgan Giles to design a sail boat specially for the Bombay Harbour. After studying peculiarities of our harbor and earlier 6 to 8 decades of wind, tide and currents data, Giles designed this gaff-rigged sloop called the ‘”Bombay Harbour Seabird”.
This does not mean that the boat is sailable only in the Bombay harbour. Seabirds have made extensive cruises to far off places like Goa, Cochin, Colombo, Karachi, Laxwadeep, Kutch and even open sea crossings to the Andamans, Muscat and Bandar Abbas (Iran). Also, over the years the quality and design of the boats have been improved and fine tuned. Superior materials of construction such as fiberglass, stainless steel and polyester have replaced conventional materials like wood and canvas.
The safety record of Seabirds is excellent. The Seabird is 21 feet long, and 7 feet at the beam (at the widest). It weighs approx. 1750Lbs (800 Kgs)
