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| A modern Aile in GRP, built by ACCF of Pont L'Abbe, Brittany |
The Aile is a one-design keelboat,
built originally by the Finnish Abö yard. It was adopted by the
Parisian yacht club, Cercle Nautique de Chatou (now the Yacht Club
Ile de France – YCIF) in 1936, when the club's previous one-design
keelboat racer proved to be unsuitable for the new waters to which
the club had moved.
The club committee had originally
intended to adopt the Star class, and to import as many as 100, but
on discovering that a rival Parisian yacht club, the Cercle de la
Voile de Paris, already had the French monopoly on this design, as
well as the sole rights to organise regattas for it, they moved
swiftly to look for an alternative.
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| Restored 1937 Aile "Aquarelle" |
The Aile is, in the view of many, a far
better and prettier boat than the Star, which is notorious for its
ugly coffin-style hull, difficult handling, and ridiculously flimsy and unbalanced
looking rig. Within a few years the YCIF had 160 of its Aile class
based at Meulan on the Seine downstream of Paris, and there were
additional fleets at Ouistreham in Normandy as well as on France's
Mediterranean coast.
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| Aile sailing on the Seine (photo: YCIF archive) |
A strange peculiarity of the original
Finnish built Aile was its hard chine construction in “Masonite”,
a type of hardboard made from processed woodchips, invented by an
American in the 1920s. The waste material from sawmills was boiled
and blasted under pressure into sheets which were then pressed to
form smooth flat boards. No glue or resin was used in the process,
and although Masonite had excellent mechanical qualities for many
construction and furnishing uses, it may have lacked somewhat in
resistance to long-term exposure to water – not an ideal
characteristic in a boat-building material.
On the plus side,
however, it allowed the Aile to be constructed and sold in France at
a lower price than the Star, and no doubt this advantage, together
with the boat's good looks, excellent sailing performance and
reputation for ease of handling helped the class to grow rapidly.
During the war the Luftwaffe bombed the
YCIF's storage sheds, thinking they were aircraft hangars, and many
of the boats were destroyed. Later, the Allied forces made the same
mistake and bombarded the ruins again, finishing off many more of the
boats. What had been one of France's most popular keelboat classes
was suddenly a casualty of war, and reduced to a fraction of its
former numbers.
Fortunately, after the war, the class
recovered some of its strength, and the class association published
plans for DIY home building in marine ply, although the 200kg keel,
with its fin of cast iron and lead bulb would obviously have to be
fabricated by professionals.
Nowadays few of the original boats
survive, but you can find some pages dedicated to a restored 1937 boat
at the Association Verguillon site.
It is now possible to buy an Aile built
with a GRP hull, plywood deck, alloy mast and with lots of nice
varnished mahogany on show - or you could always build your own in
marine ply. Sail numbers are at over 300, and according to the class association 20 new boats are currently on order.
Aile class:
Designer: Iarl Linblöm (Finland)
LOA: 7 m 10
LWL: 5 m 90
Beam: 1 m 58
Draft: 1 m 04
Hull weight: 450 kg exc. rig
Ballast keel: 200 kg
Sail area (upwind) : 18.7m2
Spinnaker: 27m2
Aile Class Association (France) (photo)
YCIF (photo)
