Seven years ago, John Owles was sitting at a sailing club bar when some banter about boat rigs made his ears prick up. “This chap was saying that the lug rig [the arrangement of masts and sails] on old fishing boats was a waste of space – nothing but a bed sheet on a broomstick,” recalls the boatbuilder. “I thought: ‘I’d love to prove this guy wrong.’”
His riposte was Windsong: a sailing dinghy combining the traditional rig with a lightweight cedar hull, which will tour sailing clubs along the UK’s east and south coasts this summer, before being unveiled at the Southampton Boat Show in September. While most modern sailboats make use of the Bermudan rig, with its triangular sail, Windsong’s sail is quadrilateral in shape. “John has actually designed something that, for all its simplicity, is very unusual,” says local artist and sailor Harry Cory Wright.
The Windsong team with the Windsong prototype Herself in 2025 © Harry Cory Wright
Cory Wright and Owles joined forces in 2021 in a fundraising bid to bring “something fizzy and exciting” to the sleepy Norfolk village of Burnham Overy Staithe. One of their backers was Charles McIntyre, founder and CEO of investment bank IBIS Capital, who has stayed with the Windsong team as head of strategy. Within a week they had collected enough money for a prototype. “I thought it would be quite quick, quite slippery, but it was better than I had imagined,” says Owles.
