Small cruisers, so they say, give pleasure in inverse proportion to their size. ‘The smaller the boat, the more it gets used and the more fun it gives,’ goes the saying.

Nowadays we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to small cruising yachts, but it was not always thus. Compared to today, there were precious few around before or just after World War Two – so some sailors went to extremes to get their small-boat fun.

Take for example the late, great Uffa Fox: designer extraordinaire, confidant of royalty and intrepid sailor. The opening chapter of his famous book Power and Sail might surprise you.

It starts as follows: ‘If we are fond of music, we play some instrument or sing, so that we may enjoy it; and if we are fond of the sea, we must sail on it in some form of boat. Our choice of boat is as wide as our choice of musical instrument; and for a cruise across channel and along the Normandy and Brittany coasts into the Bay of Biscay to Spain… I chose, designed and built [wait for this] a 20ft double-handed sliding-seat canoe.’

Its beam was 4ft, freeboard almost nonexistent and it weighed 650lb.

It gets better. Uffa then explains how he and his crew lived aboard this high-speed semi-submersible mini-‘cruiser’ called Brynhyld. He carried two tents, one that fitted over the main boom and another that could be pitched on the beach.

‘In some places,’ he wrote, ‘it would be impossible to sleep in the boat, and in others impossible to sleep ashore.’

So that’s Uffa’s accommodation sorted. And what about supplies?

‘Once we had crossed the Channel, it was only necessary to take one day’s food with us. For the actual crossing – though I hoped it would take us something like 10 hours – I wanted food for three or four days. In calm weather we could cook sausages, eggs and bacon or soup under way (on a primus); and for rough weather I took a large quantity of milk chocolate and plain biscuits, which can be eaten in the roughest of weather and contain a great deal of nourishment and energy.’

And how about clothes? Planing canoes with a few inches of freeboard get wet. Easy. Uffa and his crew had sailing clothes, and also took one pair of trousers, one jacket, one shirt, one pair of socks and pyjamas each. Pyjamas?

As soon as they arrived at a destination, they changed into dry clothes while sailing clobber was spread out to dry. Obvious, really.

Cruising yacht rarities

Of course, few sailors contemplate such extremes in order to enjoy small-boat cruising: exhilarating and challenging though this may be. But it might surprise you that until the post-war years, the sub-8m yacht designed specifically as a pocket cruiser was a rarity.

Sleek small yachts produced as racers were of course commonplace: maestros like Herreshoff, Alden, Stephens, Fife, Nicholson et al designed plenty. But these were rarely adapted to be cruisers with accommodation down below.

Smaller cruising yachts were invariably adaptations of working craft such a fishing boats and pilot cutters.

Indeed, even the iconic Spray that Joshua Slocum sailed single-handed around the world in 1895 was copied from the rotten hull of a Delaware oyster boat. Slocum added a foot of freeboard and commented: ‘Her lines were supposed to be those of a North Sea fisherman.’

And the equally famous Moonraker, a converted 28ft Looe fishing boat dating from the 1890s and belonging to Dr and Mrs Pye, completed many transoceanic cruises in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Workboat heritage

One of the first sailors to go cruising in a small yacht was RT McMullen, sailing 8,000 miles between 1850 and 1857 in his 20ft Leo.

She was a hefty three-tonner based on workboat lines. Then in 1869, Edward Middleton circumnavigated the UK in a 23ft gaff yawl called Kate.

Other remarkable cruises were made in converted lifeboats such as the Atlantic crossing by John Buckley (US) and Nicolas Primoraz (Austrian) in 1870 in City of Ragusa, a 20ft yawl-rigged lifeboat conversion with internal ballast.

And seven years later, Mr and Mrs Capo also went transatlantic in a 20ft whaler called New Bedford. Then in 1876, another American, Alfred Johnson, became the first man to cruise across the Atlantic single-handed.

His Centennial was another 20-footer – a converted dory with a gaff ketch rig and flush deck. She was unballasted, once remaining upside down for 20 minutes before righting.

Johnson’s voyage from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Abercastle in Wales took 64 days at an average speed of two knots. These early adventurers who cruised small boats were a courageous and hardy lot.

Indeed, they put Uffa’s adventures in his 20ft sliding-seat canoe into perspective!

One of the first sailors to make an epic cruise in a custom-designed yacht – as opposed to a workboat derivative – was Harry Pidgeon.

In 1917 he built his dream cruiser: a Flemming Day-designed 34ft hard-chine ketch featured in the American Rudder magazine. The rig was still gaff, but the lines were defnitely ‘yacht’. In 1921, Pidgeon and Islander set out from Los Angeles and sailed around the world.

Then, perhaps to prove it was no fluke, he repeated the adventure in 1932-37.

In 1928, meanwhile, another American called WA Robinson chucked in his career as a banker and sailed his beautiful Alden-designed Bermudan ketch Svaap around the world, covering 32,000 miles in 3-and-a-half years.

But at 32ft 6in overall (with a beam of 9ft 6in and draught of 5ft 6in) this elegant yacht hardly falls into the category of a ‘small cruiser’. And nor did the 34ft Islander.

Change is afoot

So when did the move towards the type of mini-cruisers that we sail today begin?

When did little yachts start to shake off their heavy workboat heritage and develop lighter displacements, sleeker underwater lines and efficient Bermudan rigs? And who would dare design such a boat, let alone sail it offshore?

A book written in 1954 explains how the sailing scene began to change in the early post-war years. It features one of the first custom-designed and built mini-cruiser-racers.

On the first page, the author writes: ‘Halfway across the Atlantic… I looked down to the end of the cabin where there was a large pair of feet. I wiggled them. They were my own. ‘The cabin was exactly 6ft 6in long, tailored to fit two men, side by side. I scrambled out into the hatch. When I stood on the keel, the cabin roof came up to my waist… I could stretch out my arms and lay my hands over both sides of our little boat at once… she was less than 20ft long…but that was the point. We were out to prove that really small boats, so small they could be trailed behind the family car, could go anywhere on the sea in safety.’

The yacht in question was Sopranino, designed by Jack Laurent Giles and sailed by Patrick Ellam and Colin Mudie. She changed the direction of small-yacht design and was the foundation on which all modern small-cruiser development has been built.

In short, she was a game-changer.

Ellam’s adventure started with a simple thought. He wrote: ‘All attempts to produce very small seagoing boats had followed the general principle of scaling down the big fellows… on the whole their performance was very poor… and as they still weighed at least a ton or two they were far too heavy to be taken home behind a family car.’

After the war, around 1946, Ellam decided to attack the small cruiser problem from a new angle. He wrote that he set out to produce a boat the size and weight of a dinghy but modified so that it would be safe at sea in any weather while retaining the dinghy’s high speed and manoeuvrability.

First off, he said: ‘I decided to make an experiment to determine just what were the limits to which we might go. For this I chose as a starting point one of the most extreme types of boat ever developed; the racing sailing canoe.’

Does this ring any bells? Ellam explains that around that time there was a ‘two-seater’ belonging to a well-known designer who had won acclaim by sailing her across the Channel, calling this ‘an exceptional performance by a slightly eccentric genius and not to be attempted by ordinary mortals.’

Indeed. Ellam proceeded to follow in Uffa’s footsteps, buying a Kenneth Gibbs-designed 20ft two-man sailing canoe with added buoyancy tanks and storage lockers.

He then went cruising, criss-crossing the Channel on this frightening beast. When his regular crew once failed to arrive, he enlisted an ex-fighter pilot marooned on the quay in Ramsgate by offering to sail him across to Boulogne.

Bob Green had never been in a boat before and, in the words of Ellam: ‘He turned out to be an ideal crew for an experimental run. He did exactly what he was told and did not know enough about what was going on either to argue or to be frightened. Also, he was impervious to the damp.’

The mind boggles. Today’s health and safety boys would have a fit… and how would a pre-departure risk assessment form have read?

But all went well. In four successive weekends Ellam’s open ‘cruiser’ called Theta covered 30, 66, 86 and 151 miles, regardless of weather, crossing the Channel six times.

‘We were ready for the next stage,’ wrote Ellam.

Designing Sopranino

And that next stage was Sopranino. Designer Jack Laurent Giles explained how she evolved.

He took as a starting point Wapipi, his 1939 light-displacement centreboarder, various dinghies and Myth of Malham, the mould-breaking and world-beating light-displacement Giles-designed ocean racer.

Then, in his own words, he ‘threw them, with Ellam’s specification, into the saucepan; and cooked up Sopranino. ‘When I did the design, coast-wise cruising and racing was the declared purpose of the boat, but it soon came out that the broad Atlantic was in fact Ellam’s Everest. With that in view he staged a try-out in the form of hanging on to the ocean racing fleet from Plymouth to Santander and back via La Baule, a trip which the little boat performed with the utmost success. The Atlantic venture was therefore on.’

The story is told in Ellam’s book called Sopranino (Western Crossing in the USA). The passage from the Canaries to Barbados took 28-and-a-half days.

Sopranino was the second-smallest yacht to have made the east-west southern crossing at that time. Then she sailed on up the US eastern seaboard to New York. Some trip.

In his book, Ellam gives her vital statistics as 19ft 8in overall, LWL of 17ft 6in, beam a mere 5ft 4in and draught 3ft 8in. He says Sopranino’s clinker-built hull weighed 410lb and her bulbed fn keel added a further 350lb.

With stores and equipment on board, Ellam says: ‘her running weight is about half a ton. This compares with a boat of the same size but of normal construction which would weigh about two tons – four times as much.’

When Sopranino was launched in 1950, the seagoing lightdisplacement pocket cruiser had arrived. Her slightly modifed sister ship, the Barchetta class, grew 3in overall, 5in in beam and displaced slightly more at 1,580lb including a 470lb bulbed-fn keel.

First of a breed

An immediate result of Sopranino’s seagoing abilities – as proven by her ‘shadowing’ of the Santander race – was the establishment of the Junior Offshore Group (JOG).

Under the presidency of the influential John Illingworth (Myth of Malham’s owner and co-designer), the JOG set out to promote the development of this new breed of midget offshore cruiser-racer.

Soon two sisters to Sopranino were built while other similar yachts were designed and planned. A new fleet set sail in the spring of 1951, completing a series of weekend races.

The small seagoing cruiser had come to stay.

A young designer called Colin Mudie, who worked at Laurent Giles and helped draw Sopranino’s lines, also became heavily involved.

I contacted Colin who told me he was a founder member of the JOG and for two seasons was often lent Sopranino, racing her in the years before he and Ellam took her transatlantic.

He told me: ‘I was very well acquainted with her in cross- Channel and North Sea conditions and brimmed with confdence in her.

‘A typical occasion would be to go to the coast on a Friday evening, start a race at midnight, arrive in a French port next day, have a party and a night’s sleep, start the race home next morning, fnish overnight and make our way back to London in time for work next day.

‘Patrick Ellam’s golden rule was that we should stay fve miles offshore if possible, and if the weather deteriorated make it 10. I should mention for the modern audience that we did not take any form of auxiliary power and depended on the wind and our sailing ability.’

Nor, of course, did they have the luxuries of RDF or Decca, let alone GPS. Navigating any yacht in those days was a challenging business, and the smaller the boat, the more difficult it became.

Colin added: ‘Sopranino felt just about right for this offshore racing for two of us… she was a very endearing little boat. She would do anything you wanted even at short notice. She even put up with our jokes – we would hike out on the trapeze during a race ostentatiously reading The Times, for instance. ‘For our transatlantic voyage both Patrick and I knew Sopranino very well and had complete faith in her ability.

‘Patrick’s requirements were ever practical and for our long voyage we had a shorter mast and cockpit rails. His logic was that if we had a knockdown in our local waters we could swim up the mast if anything needed repairs, but this might not be practical in the tropics where they had sharks. Also, he was not keen on anything hungry getting up into the cockpit with us.’

Barchetta class

Hot on the heels of Sopranino came the slightly modified Barchetta class, with 5in more beam and displacing 1,580lb including 470lb of bulbed fin keel.

Sailors are still buying sets of plans to build their own Barchettas to this day. The latest example is in build in the USA.

A current Dutch owner of a Barchetta class told me: ‘In light wind she is extremely light on the helm. If well sailed and trimmed, you outsail 25- to 27-footers. In heavy weather on the wind she is not an easy boat. She’s stopped by the waves, so you must concentrate hard when steering. However, off the wind she can start surfing, and keeps up with the 30-footers. She’s easy to keep in the groove and designed for speed.’

It’s worth remembering, however, that with less than 6ft beam, she is bound to be initially tender, only stiffening up once heeled enough for her bulbed fn keel to start working.

It was several years before designers started adding a broad beam to small cruisers.

Next development

The most popular Sopranino development is Trekka.

Originally designed by Laurent Giles for John Guzzwell, Trekka was a slightly larger and heavier development with a carvel hull.

With LOA of 20ft 8in, LWL of 18ft 5in, beam of 6ft 5in and draught of 4ft 5in she’s bigger than Sopranino. And displacing 1.41 tonnes, she’s also heavier – albeit still a light displacement for her era.

Designer Jack Giles explained: ‘John Guzzwell wanted a strictly seagoing version to build himself. The response to this was Trekka. Guzzwell made a wonderful job of her… his circumnavigation has been a remarkable performance – not for overall speed from departure to return, but for the consistently high speed of his passages between ports. The oceans of the world seem somehow to divide themselves into stages of about 3,000 miles, and 30 to 35 days seems to have been his regular time.’

In 1959, the Channel Islands-born Guzzwell became the first British singlehanded circumnavigator, and Trekka the smallest yacht to then circle the globe.

I was lucky enough to track down John Guzzwell in Canada. Now well into his 80s, he’s still an active and highly skilled boatbuilder and sailor. The great man told me: ‘After I emigrated to Victoria in British Columbia when I was 22 years old, I wrote to the Giles office in Lymington and asked what they would charge to design me a slightly larger version of Sopranino.’

The answer was £50. John was earning good wages as a cabinet maker-joiner so he sent a bank draft immediately.

‘The first drawing to arrive was a proposed sail plan and it showed the ketch rig I’d requested. I was quite excited at the look of the little boat, which was very modern with the reverse sheer and fin keel.’

So John rented a shed at the rear of a fish and chip shop and got building.

He told me: ‘The next drawings to arrive were a table of offsets for lofting the lines and a keel and posts plan… I had to wait for some of the later drawings which, when they arrived, were a little different to what I had already built. I’d assumed that my boat would be very similar to Sopranino, but Trekka featured a knuckle at the deck edge that made fitting the deck beams to the shelf tricky.’

After Guzzwell completed his circumnavigation, he built another Giles design (in wood) all by himself. But this was something completely different: a 43ft centre cockpit cruiser called Treasure. Meanwhile the mighty Trekka went back to sea.

John told me: ‘She circumnavigated again when Cliff and Marion Cain from California had her during the mid-1970s. How they ever found enough room for the two of them and stores amazed me. The waterline painted on the little boat now is at least six inches higher than when I had her!’

Building your own

Trekka plans are still available from the Laurent Giles Archive as the Columbia class, and this distinctive and delightful little cruiser remains in demand.

[At the time of writing] Hull No.98 is currently in build in the UK. She comes as either sloop or ketch, with most following Guzzwell’s choice of the latter because he found it ideal for single-handing. Her reverse sheer succeeds in adding interior space while enhancing the boat’s good looks.

In his book Voyaging Under Sail, one of my sailing bibles, Eric Hiscock (of Wanderer fame) wrote: ‘Reverse sheer, which… in a larger yacht often has little to commend it, is the only practicable method of making habitable so small a vessel as Trekka without resorting to excessive freeboard at stem and stern, but, as may be seen here, when reverse sheer is drawn by an artist it can be pleasing to the eye.’

These great little Giles-designed classics still fire the imagination and are built by amateurs around the world.

Retired civil servant Patrick Webb – who is now on his second – told me: ‘In the late 1990s I found a copy of the book Sopranino. I must have been going through a late-life crisis and decided that I wanted to build a replica. So that is how I built the Barchetta [which was subsequently sold].

‘It happened again a few years ago when I read John Guzzwell’s book Trekka Round the World. I got in touch with the Giles archive and got the drawings. I’ll very likely be too old to sail it but I’ll try – just to see how she differs from the Barchetta.’

Wake up to small cruisers

In the 1950s, British magazines also began to wake up to small cruisers. Yachting World sponsored a design competition for a new mini-cruiser that was won by the Swede Per Brohall. His 23ft YW People’s Boat, with its hard chine hull, was ideal for DIY builders.

And Yachting Monthly promoted the Buchanan-designed 20ft YM 3 Tonner, also aimed at DIY builders. But both were long-keeled and heavy. The lighter Laurent Giles designs, however, revolutionised small cruisers. Bulbed fin keels, separate spade rudders and light displacement had arrived.

Then as finances recovered after the war and plywood’s popularity as a boatbuilding material soared, the number of new small cruiser designs was about to explode.