Mirror Dinghy VÅGA

 
      
It was in the 70-ies. My hands were eager for something bigger than model boats, my mind was eager for sailing and my purse not too fat. By happening, I heard about the Brittish Mirror dinghy and the ingeniuos way it was constructed to make building joyful also for less experienced builders. Not much more difficult than building a paper model.

I bought a kit in 1979 and during the spring that year I put the parts together in our garage. Great fun! And still more fun to put the result in the sea and feel winds and water through tiller and sheets get inn direct contact with my inner mind.

We named the dinghy "Våga" which in Swedish could be red as a feminine personation of the word for "wavve", but "våga" in Swedish also means (to) "dare". It has through the years luckily carried wife, daughter, grandchildren, cats and friends, not to talk about my own sole tours on the sea..

 

      
    
The dinghy was constructed in Brittain by Barry Bucnell in the sixties and was promoted by the Daily Mirror newspaper. From there it got its name.

My dinghy is numbered 61660, which make people ask me if it is my telephone number for "that many boats of one type can´t exist". But I have now heard tha another 20000 Mirrors are built since I built mine.

 

                   A visit to my paper model constructing friend David in Brittain several years ago led us to the National Maritime Museum of Cornwall in Falmouth. And there, to my great surprise, found the Mirror dinghy No 1 exhibited. And happy memories flashed through my head.
   
You are invited to click the picture left and download a cut-out model for my Mirror dinghy Våga. If you print it without rescaling, you get it in the scale 1:43 (like the Dinky cars).
   
But you can also download a white (and slightly easier to build) model of the Mirror dinghy in scale 1:25 if you want to paint it your own way. Then yuo have to download separate files for hull, sails and montage sketches.