The Boat
A Børresen-built International Dragon, raced on Lake Thun in summer and at Cannes in winter.
Her story
Mustique is an International Dragon of considerable beauty, distinguished affiliations and occasionally questionable geographical judgement. Campaigned by an Englishman resident in Luxembourg, she spends her summers beneath the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau at the Thunersee Yacht Club, before reluctantly decamping to Cannes for the winter. Her travels have not been without incident, having once found herself stranded in a substantial snowdrift upon a closed Swiss mountain pass. Dragons possess many admirable qualities; they are not, however, renowned for their mountaineering abilities.
Flying the burgees of the BSYC, Royal Malta Yacht Club, Penarth Yacht Club and Thunersee Yacht Club, Mustique represents a reassuringly old-fashioned approach to yachting: beautiful boats, proper seamanship, distinguished company and a gin and tonic at the appropriate hour. Her upkeep is inconvenient, her logistics absurd and her accommodation nonexistent. She is, in other words, practically perfect. While the modern world continues its regrettable pursuit of progress, Mustique remains a reminder that some things were conceived correctly in the first instance.
| Class | International Dragon |
|---|---|
| Designer | Johan Anker, 1929 |
| Builder / year | Børresen, Denmark, 2002 |
| Names on the register | Aida; Mustique II |
| Length overall | 8.90 m (29 ft 2 in) |
| Beam | 1.95 m (6 ft 5 in) |
| Draft | 1.20 m (3 ft 11 in) |
| Weight | 1,700 kg |
| Sail area | Main 16.0 m², jib 11.7 m², spinnaker 23.6 m² |
| Sail number | SUI 292 |
| Crew | 3 (crew weight up to 285 kg) |
Builder, year and names from the Swiss Dragon register kept by the International Dragon Class archive; dimensions are the class’s.
Anker’s Dragon
Drawn by the Norwegian Johan Anker in 1929 as a small, affordable keelboat, the Dragon was an Olympic class from 1948 until 1972. Today’s boats are glass fibre, built to tight one-design rules, so the results come down to the crew.
Four clubs
- BSYC
- Royal Malta Yacht Club
- Penarth Yacht Club
- Thunersee Yacht Club
Thun and Cannes
- Summer: Lake Thun, beneath the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau
- Winter: Cannes, with the Dragon fleet there
- In between: Swiss mountain passes, when open