Please help identify this sailcraft

Question

I live on the east coast of Australia, and we've had frequent flooding this year. We have a creek on our property and after our most recent flooding event we found this in our creek:

It's obviously a sailcraft of some kind, with an aluminium socket for a mast, slot for a keel and attachment point for a rudder but has no branding or identification. The hull is some kind of plastic - and it seems mass produced.

I haven't been able to run a tape measure over it, but my estimates would be that it's about 3 metres (10 feet) long and 1.5 metres (5 feet) wide. It's maybe 30cm (1 foot) deep at it's deepest (near the bow) and 15cm (6 inches) at the stern.

I'm hoping to reunite it with its owner via community Facebook groups, but want to know as much as I can and withhold some details in the hope of verifying the authenticity of anyone coming forward to claim it.

Any help with identification would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Almost certainly an Australian Scow Moth (see video stills here (youtube)). It was a pretty common boat in the 1980's or thereabouts, and I think (Wikipedia confirms) that the design was developed in Australia, but they were also common elsewhere.

Moth class boats (now the common foiling dinghy) were and perhaps still are one of the boat classes with a lot of diversity in design because of fairly loose rules about the how they could be made.

I've personally sailed a moth similar to the pictured one over 30 years ago - they are great fun, but IIRC the one I sailed lacked the fittings for wings - which you can see as the 3 square holes between the center and stern in your photo.