Antique 1920s Large Free Sailing Pond Yacht Vane Self-Steering Marblehead 1M

  
I sail R/C pond yachts with my local club. I bought this antique pond yacht to restore and sail in the vintage class, but I have too much going on just trying to keep my three classes of R/C boats I race going.

This boat also looks fantastic on a shelf and has a very nice stand, but we downsized and I don't have a place to display it or would keep it for that. THESE TRUE POND YACHTS ARE EXCEPTIONALLY RARE. Putting that in caps just to make it clear. This is not some Chinese fake, it is a true wind vane steering antique pond yacht around 100 years old that could be restored and sailed with a little work and rigging if you are in the hobby and know how to rig sails. The sails and mast/booms in the picture came with it when I found it.

They are not original and would not sail it properly, but they do look ok if you just want to display it on a shelf. These custom built antique boats are hard to pin down, but I did find some very similar plans in the American Model Yachting antique section files that are very similar in size and shape and this one appears to have been built as a Marblehead design. There were multiple designs used before the class was standardized and this appears to have been one. It is slightly over 1 meter at 42 inches long, 9 inches deck to keel bottom, and 7 inch beam across deck. Total weight is hard to say without proper deck hardware and sail plan on it, but around 17 pounds. Keel weight is proper lead well integrated into the hull shape. There are multiple plans online showing how they use to rig this.

The sail plan is simple and the deck hardware is still there. My plan was to use wood and brass to build out the mast and booms and then fit used one meter Mylar sails from my ODOM for races and sew some cotton ones for display. The wood work on this boat is excellent, someone put a lot of effort into it back in the day. It looks great as is, very vintage, but I would probably re-varnish it all if raced.

I believe the round hole in the front, which has a nicely done coming, is for water drainage and probably had a cork or leather and wood stopper.