The reasons behind the design of the Bucko are many . It was around 1980that we first discussed the possibility but in those days , pre assymetric , precarbon spars etc , the concept was not realistic . It took another 20 years before the opportunity arose -the technology had advanced so rapidly that the only bar to building and sailing single handed skiffs was time and money .At the end of 1999 I decided that it was now or never , my 50th birthday was not far off and the thought was do it now or it will never happen .So we dragged the old 14foot skiff mould out of retirement and set too . I had sailed these boats for 17 seasons from 1969 so the theory was that it shouldn't be that much different from them . This was a slightly optimistic view , it has actually taken a full season of sailing to make the small , very important details work .One thing that did give us great encouragement was in the early building stages we were told about the single handed selection trials and saw pictures of the Musto skiff actually sailing . Considering the designs had been made independently on opposite sides of the world they were eerily similar . Beam , length and sail area being almost  identical , the Bucko is much less high tech with just standard S-glass , vinyl ester hull and our rig is much more conventional (except of course we have a masthead  spinnaker) . The idea here being that the major problem with spinnakers is the getting up and down rather than handling it once it is up .

Since the time this was written two full seasons of sailing has elapsed and much has been learnt from that . I found a multiplicity of new and creative ways to capsize , got flogged around the course by lots of boats but changed many things and eventually wound up with a boat which was reasonably user friendly , a huge amount of fun and quite fast . The major weakness was in upwind speed , hence the decision to build the Bucko Mk2 , which we named "Polymorph V " . You may well ask why this name was chosen - no reason really , it just so happened that at the time I was seeking inspiration I read a newspaper article (Sydney Morning Herald ) discussing the various forms of chocolate molecule . Polymorphs 1 to 4 were your standard nice chocolate , P6 was the rancid one which had been in the shopkeepers window all summer and P5 was the ultimate blissfull melt-in-your mouth type . Hence Polymorph V , if it was a bit of a dog it would have been a simple matter to rename it PIV , if a total dog PVI . Thankfully this was not necessary as the new boat is both very fast and quite user friendly .