Yachting-Live

Des Townson Receives Queen’s Birthday Honour
Class designer, Des Townson, sails the original Zephyr in the Sail-Past at the 2006 Zephyr Nationals – Photo from the Zephyr Owners Association / Sail-world.com

Noted New Zealand designer, Des Townson has beeen made a Member of the Order of New Zealand in the Queen’s Birthday Honours announced today.

A top P-class skipper and small boat sailor, Townson is recognised as the designer of one of New Zealand’s most popular singlehanded classes, the Starling – designed as a progression boat from the P-class.

All of Townson’s designs share two characteristics, simple and fast. After leaving school and starting various jobs including a car body builder, he moved into boat building after a friend asked him to help build a dinghy. Next step was to move into boat design, where he started with the sweet Zephyr class – another monotype in one became the Townson mould. Later many would comment that Des Townson only every designed one boat – all the others that followed were variants on that one root design – which is the Zephyr.

With the exception of the Starling and Pied Piper, all Townson designs have been characterised by the same enduring qualities, a slightly raked bow, curving into a shallow keel rocker with a fine underbody and easily driven lines. Townson began building the Zephyr as a wooden production boat from his shed in Panmure, using the same diagonal planked and glued method that characterised all his designs.

Always keen to get young people into sailing, Townson drew the Pier Piper design, again a response to the popular mullet boat length of 22ft, but also to provide a cheap fast keelboat that would allow excellent racing and gulf cruising for young sailors getting into their first boat.

It was also designed, like the Starling for home construction.

Lately Townson has become known as a designer and builder of the Electron radio controlled yacht class, which he designed and builds. — Richard Gladwell in Sail-World.com, full article at www.sail-world.com/indexs.cfm?nid=44954

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 7:06 am and is filed under Yachting-live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.