Shading my eyes from the sun, I sat up to watch the dinghy slipping by in the breeze. A pretty French girl sitting out a little singlehander crossed ahead of our anchor chain and went in to the beach some two or three hundred yards away.

It was August 1969 and for the first time I had seen Francine and a Europe Moth. I was 14 and on a holiday at Brehat in Brittany on the family sloop. Dinghies were my passion and the little una rigged singlehander that the girl was sailing looked chic and fun and I wanted to have a sail in it very much. I also wanted to meet the girl but she had looked too lovely to be interested in a shy spotty English boy.

As it turns out I met Francine later that day. Happily she was the daughter of Parisian friends of my parents holidaying on the island, her English was rather better than my schoolboy French and we got on well together. She was one of a large group of teenage friends from Paris spending les grand vacances racing their Moths from the island's sailing club and yes she would let me have a sail in her boat and we arranged to meet on the beach the next day.

The Europe Moth of the late 60's, which Francine showed me how to rig in the morning, was a different boat from today's sophisticated racing machine. Hers was built of plywood as indeed were the majority pulled up on the beach. There were some GPR ones built by Lanverre which came in nasty shades of either bilious blue, letterbox red or ghastly green and tended not to go as well as the wooden ones as they were floppy. Nevertheless they were popular as they did not need varnishing which endeared them to the French who have sensible priorities about these things.

The Europe had a wooden mast and boom, wooden dagger board and two control lines running to cleats on the foredeck. A cunningham then a new device of which no one knew its purpose and a tack inhaul which was obvious to rig but seemed to have no useful effects on the set of the sail. The outhaul was fixed to the end of the boom which was quite normal at the time and there was no kicker. Instead of a kicking strap one had a wedge. This was not a wad of notes from one's hip pocket but a wedge shape piece of wood which was forced into the joint between a knee on the front face of the mast and the underside of the boom protruding through the mast (the boom was inserted right through the mast). This tensioned the leech and in fact worked surprisingly well albeit in a floppy sort of way but then everyone had the same arrangement.

The centre mainsheet was unfamiliar to me as most British dinghies at that time had transom mainsheets also the universal joint on the wooden tiller extension was a novelty as a simple bolt working in one plane was the usual solution in everything I had sailed up until then. The mast had a key-way device on the foot to stop it falling out in a capsize and was stepped nearly upright in a funnel which kept water out of the bow tank. The mast rake was not adjustable.

Once away I had a lovely sail which was the first of many for me in the Moth that summer and the start of a love affair with this delightful little dinghy. They handled well and being simple and pretty was popular in France and generally on the continent. At 10 stone, I could sit one up in a breeze a revelation to someone brought up on Fireflys and National 12's which were beasts to keep upright if you were light. As now, the boom was sheeted to the deck which was easy in spite of the mast being stepped upright as it was soft by today's standards a huge advantage of this set up being that one was less likely to be brained by the boom in a gybe.

On the subject that you might have been peeking ahead for I regret to say that I learned no bedroom French from Francine. At 16 she was too sophisticated to find me of interest and was being pursued by several older French boys who not only spoke her language, they were able to play the pathos card as compulsory military service loomed at the end of the summer. In the wholesome way that English schoolboys were encouraged I became friends with her brother Jean Francois. He was my age and owned a brand new 470 which was the latest thing and crewing him was some consolation.