Windsong Featured
The Financial Times
June 2026
Is the Windsong the sailboat of the future?
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.
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.
The combination of old-school sailing aesthetics and the wherewithal to plane at speed is “where it gets terribly exciting”, says Cory Wright. “By comparison with other boats of its size, it is really quite stable,” adds Owles. When Classic Boat magazine ran a story on the prototype, it called it “possibly the coolest wooden boat ever built”. The coverage drummed up their first six buyers. “Unquestionably, to me, this is an art piece,” says Cory Wright. “More commercial dinghies, your Lasers and your Mirrors, are fantastic at racing but they don’t have the high-end sense of craftsmanship that Windsong does.”
Now, thanks to plans that have been made available for download (£25), enthusiasts can craft their own versions of Windsong. One is being built by a woman in Florida, and another by an amateur sailor in Wisconsin, says Owles, who has been offering advice over Whatsapp.
Meanwhile, the prototype, or Herself as she was named by Owles, is staying put in Burnham Overy Staithe. “The future for Windsong is open-ended,” says Cory Wright. Two freshly built vessels will take to UK waters in July, manned by a young team that includes Hanna Dahlborg and 20-year-old Charley White, who is on the University of Portsmouth sailing team. Says White: “The Windsong boats feel alive on the water. They are unlike anything else I have sailed.”
EASTERN DAILY PRESS
June 2026
New sailing boat Windsong built at Burnham Overy Staithe
Now those behind a new Norfolk craft called Windsong hope she might put the county back on the charts and put fresh wind in the sails of its traditional boat building industry, with a new workshop in the village where Nelson was born.
When photographer and sailor Harry Cory Wright came up with the idea of a new wooden sailing boat before Covid hit the coast, his friends at Burnham Overy Staithe soon got the picture.
John Owles, who runs a boat repair business in a 17th century granary beside the quay drew up the designs for the nimble 14ft craft, sketching out her sleek lines and the traditional sail rig which would be hoisted aloft.
Then his wife Maxine took on the task of building it - admitting to the odd cross word between the pair in the process of assembling the prototype.
Mr Cory Wright said while the harbour at Burnham Overy Staithe was full of wooden boats including lovingly-restored historic fishing vessels, he felt it was time for a new generation built locally to take to the waters of the Burn Estuary as it snakes out to sea through the marshes.
"They're lovingly looked-after but they're old and they're not going to last forever," he said.
"You have to have something new coming in, so we thought what about a building a new boat for Burnham Overy." The prototype Windsong sailed like a dream.
Its top speed so far of 13 knots (15mph) was notched up after Mr Cory Wright swapped his tripod for her tiller and let fly with fresh air in the North Sea breeze instead of sheet film during early trials.
She was fitted with a powerful sail rig copied from the so-called luggers - larger, heavier boats once commonly used for fishing off the coast and also relied upon by smuggling gangs to outrun customs patrols whilst transporting their booty to remote tidal creeks. Speed was everything in those days, whether you were bringing crabs ashore or illicit gin.
Now Windsong looks set to bring a 21st century twist to our shores. Her carbon fibre mast might be a nod to the modern day. But her ample canvas means she can turn and tack on a sixpence as she threads her way through winding, shallow harbour channels, while out on the open sea she leaps up on the plane as she hits her sweet spot.
"She really does go like stink when you've got the right conditions," said Mr Cory Wright, who is better-known on dry land for the more leisurely pursuit of taking landscape pictures with the large wooden cameras which are his trademark.
Mrs Owles clocked up 500 hours on the first build, which was started during lockdown. The prototype boat, now sitting on cradles through an entrance embellished with warning tape low enough to give a limbo dancer nightmares is currently being re-varnished.
"Best duck and then duck again," said Mrs Owles as she flicked on the lights. "It's lower and further than you think." The coast's traditional boatbuilding methods bumped heads with modern-day tech along the way, as she mixed assembling red cedar and birch ply parts produced by computerised cutting with scratch building where needed.
"I've been building boats since I was in my 20s," said Mrs Owles, who admitted the air sometimes turned blue during her latest project.
"Every boatbuilder swears at the designer but I know him so well I can see inside his brain.
"Maybe you'd best not put that, it does sound messy."
Four young sailors are now taking two of the £20,000 craft on a promotional tour taking in Hickling Broad and Wroxham, before heading to the Solent to sail at Cowes Week followed by a stint at the Southampton Boat Show.
Charley White, 20, who is one of the team, said: "She's like nothing I've ever sailed in, she's so much fun.
"We were at Hickling Broad yesterday and people were coming up to us saying she's just so beautiful."
Poet Sally Festing, who lives in Burnham Overy, was inspired to pen a verse about the boat, which is now framed in the boathouse amid its coffee machine, fading pictures and yellowing, dog-eared sailing almanacs.
"Windsong was a channel, a challenge, a hymn full of solos, the song in her pattern and weave
converged in the builders’ hands," she wrote. "She’s buoyant as mackerel, light like a tern."
Classic Boat Magazine
January 2022
It was during a conversation with fellow East Coast OGA members about the merits of the lug rig that led John Owles to design his latest boat. “They were saying the lug rig was no good - that it was just a table cloth on a stick halfway up the mast. I pointed out that the development of the rig in places like Brittany and Loch Fyne - where they faced a long beat to windward - meant they had to produce a rig that was efficient and easy to sail. Nigel Irens spotted that when he designed Roxane and Romilly and gave them a high-aspect lug rig. And he knows a thing or two about designing fast boats!”
John had by then designed and built several lug-rigged dinghies himself, starting with the Holmsbu 12, designed by Per Corel in Holland and which, back in the 20th century, John and his partner Maxine produced as a solid timber kit - complete with pre-compressed, ‘bendy’ hardwood frames . More recently, he’s produced the 15ft Summer, based on a Finnish post boat design, and the 15ft Windchime, which he describes as a clinker day boat “based on a generic type you find in harbours all around the UK - ideal for a family expedition up a river or out to an island”. All were lug rigged.
Then one night I got up at 4am and turned on the design programme and cracked it. I just whittled and whittled and whittled until I reduced the hull resistance to as low as possible.”What John came up with is certainly strikingly different from the ubiquitous clinker dinghy which dominates the classic boat market. It’s flat-bottomed, with low- freeboard, a wide transom, a stubby bowsprit, a strongly raked stem - and of course a high-aspect lug rig.
So far so good, but lovely as they were, none of these was going to set the water alight, let alone impress those naysayers at the OGA. So John started designing a boat that would specifically suit the conditions of his home waters at Burnham Overy Staithe in Norfolk. This is classic north Norfolk territory, with a narrow tidal estuary, mud banks and strong tides. With its flat, enclosed water and often gusty winds, it produces a special kind of sailing.“I wanted to try out the lug rig on something really slippery,” John says. “1 started sketching and developing a shape, based on a derelict boat I’d seen in the Golfe du Morbihan in France.
It’s an unlikely combination that shouldn’t really work but somehow John has carried it off to great effect. Local photographer Harry Cory Wright happened to see John’s drawing and suggested it might make a nice one-design for Overy Staithe. The village already has a fleet of 25 or 30 classic Twinkle 12s, which have been raced here since the 1950s, but perhaps it was time for an upgrade? A fundraising campaign was launched, and duly raised £15,000 to build a prototype. John’s playful design had clearly struck a chord among the good (and affluent) people of Overy Staithe.I he prototype wras built by John’s wife Maxine during the winter of 2020-21, using the exhibition hall of the Burnham Overy Boathouse as a workshop.
Unusually for a smallish dinghy, the hull was built of strip plank cedar, epoxy sheathed inside and out, with twin buoyancy tanks forward on either side of the mast partners. The mast was made of Sitka spruce wrapped with carbon fibre, to produce a lightweight, stiff spar without any need of standing rigging (that Nigel Irens influence). The sails were made by McNamara Sails on the east coast of Norfolk.
The prototype Windsong was launched in September 2021, with the young boatbuilder Ashmole Faire-Ring (currently restoring the barge Growler) as crew. She performed well enough in light airs on her first sail, both with her standard sloop rig and, with the bowsprit off and the mast in its forward slot, in cat-rigged mode.
But it was during her second sail that she really came alive. With a Force 5 south-westerly blowing over the estuary, she quickly picked up her skirts and was flying along at over 12 knots (and John has the GPS reading to prove it!).
Harry Cory Wright was there with his smart phone to video the boat, and the resulting footage (and stills) certainly capture the excitement of the moment. You only have to look at the expression on John’s and Ash’s faces to see what an exhilarating sail it was.
“She got onto the plane effortlessly and just flew,” says John. “I was worried she might be a bit skittish, but she was so stable we both just sat there without toe straps. Gybing in a Force 5 was an absolute joy: the sail just flaps over to the other side and the boat stays upright.”
The boat’s performance also seemed to prove a theory John has about the lug rig.
“Usually, you feel a gust coming, the boat tips over, and you adjust to correct it. But this boat doesn’t do that. The hull doesn’t tip over, it just takes off. That’s because the rig’s low Centre of effort means the wind is concentrated straight into forward motion instead of heeling moment. You feel the lift afterwards, but the boat is always slightly ahead of you in going forward.”
Will the naysayers at the OGA be convinced? John certainly thinks so.
“I think my point has been proven,” he says.
More to the point, the dramatic photos of the boat flying across the River Burn soon went viral on social media and John’s phone started ringing. Within a few weeks of launching the prototype, he had three orders in the bag and a fourth one in the offing.
Which is really all the proof he needs, whatever anyone else says.
Sea trials at Burnham Overy Staithe
The trip summary shows a maximum speed of 12.2 knots and an average of 4.9 knots over 1h 37m
WINDSONG DESIGNED
John Owles
BUILT
Maxine Owles, 2021
LENGTH - 14ft (4.2m)
BEAM - 6ft (1.8m)
DRAUGHT - 5in (12cm)
WEIGHT - 157kg
SAIL AREA - 122sqft (11.3m2)