Media Our new old Sunfish (a work in progress)

benEzra

Stuck on land
A photo of our "new old" Sunfish. Everything but the hull is from a small wooden kit sailboat my sister and I built with our dad in the early 1980's, using marine plywood and Sunfish running gear. I was about 13 years old at the time. We raced that boat for a couple of years in a local class, then used it for pleasure day sailing for many years. I kept the boat when I married and moved to Florida, and we sailed it some down there as well. Unfortunately, that hull became unseaworthy due to rot a few years ago, but the Sunfish bits were still in good condition in our garage.

Then I noticed a couple months ago that one of our neighbors had an old 14' Sunfish hull (a late 1980's AMF/Alcort) buried under a bunch of junk in his back yard. The boom and rudder of that boat were broken, the daggerboard was lost, the sail was in bad shape, and the hull needed some minor repairs. But I just happened to have all those parts from our old wooden kit boat, so I bought the old hull for $200, and here we are.

We took it out for the first time last weekend. The hull still needs some fiberglass repair, cleaning, and painting, the current rudder is a bit kludged (need a new one at some point), and I am in the process of installing a 6" port in front of the daggerboard trunk, but the boat sails beautifully...
 

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Al Court,

I didn't realize that, but I believe you're right. It actually makes sense that it's a Minifish rig, as the kit boat it came off of was a wooden dinghy about 9'6" long, as I recall, and a full-size Sunfish rig would dwarf it even more than that one did.

The Sunfish hull sails well with the minifish parts, believe it or not. It's probably not quite as fast as it would be with the bigger Sunfish sail (I'm guessing), but fast enough.
 

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