Plywood Boat Plans
Designed by Sandy Douglas, the Thistle debuted in 1945. The sail plan consists of a marconi main, small jib, and a spinnaker. The boat planes easily in 10-12 knots of breeze and will glide effortlessly in light air.
Sandy Douglas was mentored by the superlative Uffa Fox and the racing canoe influence is readily apparent in the nimble Thistle.
One of my favorite boats, hull number sixteen, was manufactured in 1946. The Thistle Class Association has no record of this boat, so it is speculated that it was a "kit" boat, possibly assembled by its owner and probably never raced.
The original wood thistles were built by a "hot molding" method. All of the wood hulls up through the 1960s were taken from a single mold in a plywood factory, where the double diagonal mahogany strips were fastened to the mold with bronze staples and glue, then heated under pressure in the factorys drying kiln. The resulting laminate is amazingly resilient even though it is only 5/16"(79.4mm) thick. A finished hull, with lead centerboard, thwart, seats, mast partner and rudder weighs in at 500 lbs (US). The bare hulls, along with all of the wood parts were sold as a kit, so many of these old boats were finished at home by the racers themselves.
The Thistle Class migrated to fiberglass boats in the 1960s and as such are still manufactured today.
One-design rules dictate that the boats be held to strict specifications in order to be raced. There is no reason this 63 year-old wood boat would not be competitive with a modern Thistle. In fact modern racers believe the antique wood hulls to be stiffer than a fiberglass hull just a few years old. Retired wood hulls from all over the US are being restored and pressed back into service. Hull number 16 is no exception and following her restoration in my shop on the west coast of the US has moved cross-country to be raced in the Delaware area by her new owner.
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Her design uses carbon spars and a fully battened lug rig on a efficient and shallow draft hull (with centre board). Seen here is Mischief leading the way in the Solent Old Gaffers race a few years ago - she finished second.
André Mauric was the most prolific and best known of Frances 20th century yacht designers. His career started in the 1920s with radical designs for racing yachts to the International Metre Rule in the days when the bermudan rig was still considered new-fangled and fragile, and carried on well into the 1980s when, among other winners he designed the the highly successful Atlantic crossing record breaker Kriter VIII. In between he designed dozens of great boats, including Pen Duick VI for Eric Tabarly, the 1972 Half Ton Cup winner Impensable, the popular and successful First 30, and Sylphe, a classic yacht hidden for 5 years underwater.
After the war Sylphe was recovered and completed. Her long submersion had done no harm – indeed it may have further improved the seasoning of her timbers and made them less liable to distort, crack, or split in later age. She was finally launched in 1947, and though Mauric had designed her with one of his trademark tall bermudan cutter rigs supported on a slender mast, her sailplan was modified in 1953 to give her a larger and taller foretriangle, its foot extended by a short bowsprit. These modifications were no doubt intended to keep her competitive with the latest offshore racing boats which, encouraged by the allowances in the old RORC rating rule, had begun to sport big overlapping genoas and high aspect mainsails. 
Her new Dutch owners sailed her to Turkey and set about a 7-month total overhaul to make her more suitable for Mediterranean charter use. Although the interior had mostly to be stripped out and rebuilt to provide more comfortable charter accommodation, the original hull timbers and planking, having endured such a long submersion so many years ago, were found to be in excellent order. Only a couple of rot-infected frames had to be replaced. Her owners are proud to claim that Sylphe still has none of the steel bracing and reinforcement that many other yachts of her day now need to keep them in sailing order. They are equally proud that she retains her original mast winches and her unique, custom made, cockpit sheet winches. 
The happy band of sailing men seen in the picture here are volunteers from the "Cale 2 lIle" association based in the French port of Nantes. The association aims to save some of Frances nautical heritage by restoring and maintaining old boats.
The boat theyre sitting on is one they all helped build - the St Michel II - a replica of Jules Vernes second yacht in which he enjoyed escaping from land to cruise and write his novels in peace. (The reason theyre all sitting on the rail, by the way, is that theyre helping the boats designer, Francois Vivier, to measure the boats stability.) 
The 6 year project to build St Michel II was completed earlier this year and she was launched at Nantes where Jules Verne was born in 1828. 
In 1875 after having been elected to membership of Frances premier yacht club, Verne ordered a larger 13m yacht from the Cherbourg yard of Abel Lemarchand. Although he took pleasure in working with the builder on the yachts plans, she retained the lines and character of a traditional northern French pilot vessel. The new boat was named St Michel II and launched in 1876. Once again Verne undertook a full programme of extended cruising, along the coasts of northern france, the south of England, Brittany, and even across the Bay of Biscay to Bordeaux and back. He loved the peace and solitude he found on board his boats, and was able to write very productively while at sea, unburdened by everyday social and family matters.
After only a couple of seasons, however, the St Michel II was replaced by a magnificent steam motor-sailer of 31 metres length, the St Michel III, a vessel befitting the worlds most famous author of tales of travel and adventure. This new boat required a crew of 10 men, and Vernes cruises became even longer and more extended, reaching as far as the Baltic, Scotland, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, Malta and Italy.
St Michel II
