Half Meter Class
What is a Half Meter most of you are asking yourself about right now... and with good reason. There are not a great amount of them around.. but we have records that seem to indicate about 70 of the boats were produced. Dick Hein AMYA Hall of Famer was the Class Secretary way back when... The boats did achieve Class status, but only for a few years.
Basically, it's a long story.. and while I have few absolute facts, the basic tale goes thusly. There was a chap that was so enamored with the Santa Barbara, that he wanted to produce the boat under license, on the East coast. Well.. those involved in the production of the S/B said.. "no". So, not to be undone, he sawed the transom off the S/B, faired it around and called it a Half Meter. The earliest examples have been found to show a placard reading Radio Model Specialties Tom's River N.J.
The late Jerry Dolis the former S/B Class Sec. was kind and wise enough to allow the H/Ms to race with the S/B at their events as essentially.. they were identical boats. This fact coupled with the demise of those that were producing the S/B meant that the class could be in trouble without a supplier of new boats.
I get reports of these wonderful boats from time to time, mostly around the Mid Atlantic coast (Maryland) where they were very popular back in the late 70's into the 80's. The earliest versions of the H/M have been tracked back to a sales ad in one of the model magazines in 1968 when the boat sold for $89.00 and sails were $18.50 extra.
I fitted one of my H/M's with a genoa back in 1982 and is pictured below. The other boat belongs to Fred Ferris of Burnsville, MN who was instrumental in helping me find information on the history of the class.
I acquired the molds for this boat when I purchased all of John Reynold's molds from his shop in 1982. It makes a wonderful boat, and sails exactly the same as... you guessed it.. a Santa Barbara. The only differences being.. this boat has a fixed (molded in) keel, and of course the transom is reversed. I do NOT mold the deck with the "shoebox lid" it is a flat deck and faired to the hull as with any other boat. Also, the Santa Barbara "Ocean racer" deck does fit on this hull as well. The demand for this boat is obviously not very high, as it is the same thing as a S/B... but.. just.. not. Still, there are those few individuals that still enjoy some of these boats and for those skippers, we still make this boat from time to time.