Quorning Boats (DEN) DRAGONFLY 800

The Dragonfly 800 is where the Swing Wing began. In 1989 Quorning Boats fitted this hull with folding crossbeams that halve the sailing beam in under a minute a side, from the cockpit, without tools, and every Dragonfly built since has carried some descendant of them. Børge Quorning, who started the yard at Skærbæk in 1967, drew it; the boats that replaced it carry his son Jens's name. The yard's own telling has Paul Elvstrøm as a customer for a decade, sailing a customised 800 and feeding what he learned back into the drawings — which is a better endorsement than a brochure has ever bought.

The name covers two different boats, and that is the thing to settle before anything else. The 800 had been in production for years with fixed but removable crossarms before the folding version appeared; the yard counts 143 Swing Wings built between 1989 and 2005, out of an 800 career that reviewers put at around four hundred hulls in all. More were built with arms that come apart than with arms that swing. A listing headed Dragonfly 800 tells you nothing about which one is in the photograph, and they are not the same purchase: one folds at the pontoon while the kettle boils, the other has to be taken apart.

The honest notes are all about age. Quorning publishes replacement intervals for its own boats, and on a hull from the early nineties they read as a bill of work: waterstays and side stays every seven years or 10,000 miles, the forestay every ten, trampolines re-stitched every six or seven years and sooner under strong sun, the Teflon pad rings the wings turn on every thirteen to fifteen. The pivot bolt itself grew over the model's life — 16 mm at the start, upgraded to 18, and 20 mm on the boats that followed — and owners on the Dragonfly user forum describe finding strut holes worn oval where somebody sailed on with movement in the assembly. None of it is exotic and the yard still sells the parts. It is simply the difference between a thirty-year-old 800 that has been kept and one that has been used.

So the beams, nets and folding pivots get surveyed like the safety equipment they are, and know which rig you are buying: Cruising and Racing differ mainly in mast height and sail area, which is a different boat in a blow. The cabin is a weekender's, not a liveaboard's. On this model the difference between one asking price and the next is rarely the year on the plate:

Where this idea went once the yard had carbon and thirty years of practice to spend on it is the Dragonfly 28 — the same folding logic, a generation of engineering later, and priced accordingly. The shelf built on the argument that a boat should fold to road width and winter in a driveway is the trailerable trimarans.