George Bailey's Comments:
When I discovered the Classic Moth Boat Association website in September 1998 and read the history of various types of moths, I was surprised to discover that Harry Cate's was getting credit, directly or implicitly, as the designer of the so-called "Cates Florida Moth." This highly original design type copied by Harry in 1955 and thereafter first saw life as the Mach I, winner of the 1954 then-designated moth international worlds cup. The Mach I was designed by Warren C. Bailey, not by Harry Cates. Harry built four exact copies of the Mach I for racers in New Jersey after Warren refused (after winning the world's in the Mach I, Warren wanted to move on the new ideas). Then Harry built a number of copies with three inches less vee than the Mach I. These boats were noticably slower than the Mach I in all conditions and points of sail. I know, I raced both variations, switching back and forth, from 1958 to 1961. (I owned the Mach I, which my father had bought back around 1958 after selling it in 54 or 55. My sister owned the Mach II, with three inches less vee. When it would blow too hard for my sister, my father would sail the Mach I and I would be relegated to the Mach II. The Mach II was fast, but not as fast as either the Mach I or Lewis Twitchell's round bottomed "Flying Saucer".)
Harry's copies and moths copied from the copies Harry built and variations of these are being called "Cates Florida Moths." I am told this has been going on since the late 1960's. Well, be that as it may, Harry never designed a moth boat in his life. Indeed, this was one of the going jokes about Harry among the guys who did design their own moths. Harry always copied other people's designs, never doing a design of his own. On the serious side, there is nothing wrong with that, just with Harry's being credited with designing somehting he didn't. It is absurd that the ongoing "tradition" is to label the Florida Bailey Moth as if Harry Cates had anything to do with its design. And it is ironic that Warren does not mind this situation because he thinks that the copies with less vee are inferior boats and does not want to be associated with them. Well, it is good to recognize that the deep vee was one thing that made the Mach I so fast, along with the 5' beam and sharp, deep bow. But when considered as a design type, which is what interests me and should interest all people who want to get their moth history straight, the many variations are variations on a design originated by Warren Bailey, not Harry Cates.
For some time now I have hesitated to make these points on a web page until someone other than Warren, Bill Lee and me asserted the same facts. The following is an excerpt from an email recently received from another moth sailor from the 50's describing his first encounter with Warren sailing the Mach I:
I remember the weekend after your fathers Mach I was first raced. The lake was just abuz with talk. - A guy named Bailey beat the entire moth fleet by 7 1/2 minutes in a drifter at MYC. - Dammest thing I've ever seen, the boat is . . . pure V, only runs on the center 12 inches or so. . . If anyone really wants to know, send them to me, I was there, I know who invented the Bailey Moth.
Given the above comments, made by someone with no connection to Warren as family member or friend, it is time to set the historical record straight and stop using the incorrect designation "Cates Florida Moth."People skeptical of the origin of this design should just call it the "Florida Moth." Those of us alert to the historical facts will call it the "Warren Bailey Moth."
George Albaugh's Comments:
I agree that a number of folks, many who didn't sail these boats
back when they were contemporary designs tend to gloss over the
differences between these designs and lump together what we, up
in New Jersey, referred to,separately, as the "Bailey" and the
"Cates" and what the folks further south called the "Mach I" and
the "Mach ll". To further complicate matters, the old IMCA referred
to Cates' modification of the "Bailey" design as the "Florida Moth"
on the blueprints drawn up by Charlie Hunt, which one could buy
from Ken Klare's dad when he was the class secretary in the IMCA.
I remember two "Baileys" back in the late 1950s (around '59--my first year racing a Ventnor); Peter and his sister Doris Cope, sailing out of Spray Beach YC had one, called DORPET and Jimmy Greenfield sailing out of Cooper River YC had another called IRISH, I think. These boats while sharing a family resemblance to the "Cates" Florida boats were obviously different.
So, one asks, how then did the sharp stem, deep-vee, 5 foot wide Moth that we know originated with your father's designs like WINGAWAY and MACH l get to be called the "Cates"? I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that Charlie Hunt drew up the plans based on the easier to build, modified "Bailey" which Harry Cates developed. By taking 3 inches out of the vee (and reducing the amount of rocker in the keel) Harry was able to come up with a version of MACH l which could be "planked" up in the bow with ply panels. The true "Bailey", as you well know, had to have a false fiberglass stem added to the "pulled up" forward area of the boat because you can't get ply to take as severe a curve as demanded by the original MACH l shape.
Harry was not a designer. He wasn't a draughtsman either! MIT trained Charlie Hunt drew up the plans for Harry's modified "Bailey" and offered the plans to the Moth class, after he (Hunt) had successfully build a bunch of them at St. Pete. According to Hunt, Harry got mad at Hunt's token of generosity to the class and as a way of making peace, Hunt wrote on the blueprints that the design was the "Florida" Moth by Harry Cates. Later, the IMCA had the blueprints modified to say just "Florida Moth", deleting Cates' name from the prints. I have copies of both versions of those blueprints in my collection. The ones with Cates' name on them, I got directly from Charlie Hunt a few years before his death. As a result of plans being available, the "Florida" or "Cates" as it came to be called soon greatly out numbered the original "Baileys". It only took a single younger generation of sailors for the Moth class's collective memory to lose the appreciation for the actual origin of the boats they were racing.
So, my take on all this is that although your dad DID originally come up with the design for MACH l, Harry, by modifying the keel and the amount of vee and the way the bow is planked up did contribute to making the basic shape easier to build. This plus Hunt's contribution of drawing the lines of Cates' modification up and making them accessible to the class at large is how the "Bailey" came to be know as the "Cates".
This is very much the same as the Du Flos Moth being better known as the Mistral. A Frenchman named Benoit Du Flos came up with that basic round bilge shape in 1962 (I have a set of his original plans as well). The trouble was that with all those round sections, the boat was an absolute bitch to build. As a result, although much admired, few Du Flos were built. Later, an Englishman named Derrick Chester came up with a stitch and glue version of the boat which successfully allowed Du Flos' elegant round shape to be easily built from flat ply panels. Today the Du Flos shape is pretty much referred to as a Mistral. Is this fair? Perhaps not, but without such modifications, and without the lines being put down in blueprint form, such elegant designs tend to get lost. As an aside, some of us think that the original Du Flos is just a touch faster than the Mistral--much like some think the original "Bailey" is superior to the "Cates"!!!
An example of a design which was almost lost is Bill Lee's MINT. MINT is, of course, a contemporary of the Bailey/Cates and was fast enough to win the Worlds twice (1958 and '59) the Nationals in 1960 and the North Americans in 1964. This design is a hard chine shape with a lovely shear line. Because of the swoop of the shear these boats were nicknamed "banana boats". Anyway, very much fewer of these boats were built than the "Cates", not because they weren't fast, but because the lines weren't available to the class. I remembered MINT's sistership, COBIA because Bill Spencer brought her up to Brigantine in '63 and raced with us as a tune-up before the Worlds in Larchmont, NY and the Nationals in Ocean City, NJ that year. Few other Mothists recalled the design. But COBIA was such a pretty boat that years later, in the 1980s when I started to look for Moth Boats to restore, I tracked down MINT in an apple orchard barn in Vermont, while trying to find COBIA. The reason Erky and the guys in E. City are building variants of MINT is because I made the boat's lines available. I thought it was a shame to not share a great boat. Later I learned, through your father, that Bill Lee was very much alive.
Any way, history is very much a story interpreted from the teller's viewpoint! I'd like to know more from yours and others from south Florida.
>Greg Allen's Comments:
Warren Bailey is a revolutionary. He built deep V Moths when the standard
was more of a scow-like hull. And because of his success, the Moth changed
forever. In fact, I believe that if a Mach I were built today, with the
right skipper, it would give the Mistrals a hard time.
But what about Harry Cates? Was he a designer? Is he due Credit? In manufacturing we have a term called DFX, designed for ___ or whatever. In the case of Moth boats, X might equal speed, ease of use, ease of repair, easy to maintain, easy to build. The Mach I was designed for speed but difficult to build and sail. The Mach II easier to sail, still difficult to build. The boat many called the Cates or Florida Moth was designed or evolved to be easy to build and sail. And the drawings Charlie Hunt made allowed the masses to build and sail a competitive Moth.
Question: How different does a boat have to be to become a different design? I'm not qualified to answer that one.
However, when Dave and I received our Moth plans from the IMCA (described as a Cates), we like many others, chalked the lines out on the garage floor. Then we compared the lines with the 505, Fin, and Dutchman, took some measurements and began building a round-bilge mold. This was in Southern California in 1969. I had never seen a Moth before, Dad hadn't seen one since the '40s and Dave since the '50s. What we ended up with looked a lot like the Moth Doug Haulsey successfully campaigned in the '60s. So what did we come up with, a design? An innovation? Doesn't look a thing like a Bailey or a Cates, perhaps a Haulsey? Ellis?
I don't know, but I do know Warren Bailey set the Moth world on it's ear, and Harry Cates & Charlie Hunt enabled them build and sail competitive boats. All three of them earned my respect.