Refresher

As far as we can discover the first working Moth foiler was a flying scow produced in 1974 by Frank Raison (ironic but no relation). However, Dr Ian Ward was very likely the first person to fly a modern centreline twin-foil configuration in 1999. Ward is also an expert on the Moth scows that flourished in the southern hemisphere in the 1970s and 80s. With the explosion of scow activity in modern offshore fleets he suggested that this might be a good time for a brief review of some of the fundamentals…

Introduction
The sailing scow hull shape has been around for over 150 years, epitomised by the traditional inland lake scows of the US, and also highly developed within the Moth class in Australia and New Zealand since 1928. In some ways scows can be seen as an intermediate transition between a conventional fine bow, straight-stemmed skiff hull shape and that of a wide, stable multihull catamaran.