“It was a boat you could control with your body,” said Peter Commette, winner of the first Laser world championships, in 1974. What made the Laser different from them, however, was that it could be ideal both for cruising around with friends and for performance racing by a single sailor. Its streamlined simplicity - with a teak tiller and a sail whose sleeve slid over an aluminum mast - made the Laser as basic in design as the Windsurfer and the Hobie Cat catamaran, both of which had arrived on the beach boat scene around the same time. Its creators finally settled on the contemporary-sounding Laser, to capitalize on that latest technological advancement.Ĭoming in colors like orange, yellow, light blue and British racing green, the boat was an instant sensation.

Bjorn, who set up the first dealer network for Lasers, said the boat had originally been called the Weekender, then the TGIF. But with little margin in that business, he was looking for a new small-boat design - an easy-to-build, fiberglass sailboat that a solo sailor could race and that would help keep his I-14 business rolling. One day in 1969 he received a phone call from a friend, Ian Bruce, an industrial designer and boating enthusiast in Montreal who as a side job had been building complex wooden hulls to Mr. He had also won renown racing 14s and was a three-time Olympian for Canada, though without winning a medal.

His day job was as editor of the sailing magazine One-Design & Offshore Yachtsman in Chicago.

Kirby had carved out a niche for himself moonlighting as a designer in the 14 sailing class, spinning off variations on the original design that would have the dinghy planing and skipping across the water’s surface. His wife, Margo Kirby, confirmed his death.ĭinghy racing in North America and Europe in the late 1960s revolved around the International 14, a lightweight, 14-foot, two-person craft, and by then Mr. Bruce Kirby, a Canadian-born journalist, Olympic sailor and self-taught naval architect whose design for a lightweight fiberglass dinghy, originally sketched on a piece of yellow legal paper, changed the face of sailing, died on Monday at his home in the village of Rowayton in Norwalk, Conn.

Mr doodle original