Clase Grumete: from a sketch aboard the Graf Zeppelin to a Río de la Plata classic

Every time I watch a Grumete go by, I find it hard to believe that this little wooden boat, designed to cost next to nothing, has survived everything. How did a 1940 design, born for thin wallets, become a treasure that today is restored, handed down and still raced? The answer begins with a naval designer drawing aboard an airship.

The design was signed by Germán Frers (the father), a naval designer and a pioneer of Argentine yachting. The story he told himself is straight out of a film: he was traveling aboard the airship Graf Zeppelin, bound for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin (Germany), and took advantage of the empty lounge to finish the plans for "a little boat" he had promised to a magazine. Suddenly he was surrounded by young men in white uniforms who, very serious, went through his papers: they took him for a spy copying the airship. The tension eased only when they saw that the one thing emerging in his drawings was the silhouette of a sailboat. "The popular Grumete was being born aboard the Graf Zeppelin," reads the account collected in his memoirs.

Grumetes starting a race on the Río de la Plata with the Buenos Aires skyline behind

A fleet of Grumetes racing off Buenos Aires (Argentina); the class still fills the course.

Frers presented the boat in the magazine Yachting Argentino in 1940, as "a class with a future for its price and its seagoing qualities." Local yachting lacked, he argued, an affordable boat halfway between the small centerboard dinghies —with a movable board under the hull, like the Snipe— and the larger classics. The first hull was launched on October 18, 1941, at the Yacht Club Argentino, in Dársena Norte (Buenos Aires), with Miss Magdalena Bemberg as godmother. That is where the "sailing since 1941" badge the class still flies was born.

Its big bet was the V-bottom hull: two planes dropping toward the keel, cheaper to build than a rounded belly. As Frers told it, he chose it for that low cost and for the demands of the short chop of the Río de la Plata, and credited it with "seagoing qualities not sufficiently valued." It came from his earlier design, the "Chorlo" of 1935, and from the German Walboot —also a V-bottom— that he had seen on that trip to Berlin. Frers insisted on one thing only: follow the plan to the letter, because every center of gravity and of lateral resistance had been calculated.

Lines plan of the hull, with the body plan that defines the V-bottom. Design by Germán Frers, 1941.

Offsets and main characteristics from the official plan (design by Germán Frers, 1941).

Official sail plan (No. 7): mainsail, jib, genoa and spinnaker, with their areas. Design by Germán Frers, 1941.

The plan's official figures are those of a small, carefully calculated boat: 7.20 meters length overall, 5.76 at the waterline, 1.90 beam (maximum width), 1.05 draft and 1,200 kilos of displacement. The working rig —mainsail and jib— totals around twenty square meters upwind, as Frers noted; off the wind, the Grumete adds a spinnaker. Nothing excessive; everything meant to sail well and cost little.

Because Frers gave the plan to the magazine so it would spread, the Grumete did not come from a single yard: it was built by boatyards, shoreline carpenters and skilled amateurs. About three hundred units were built —the most prolific by Gómez y González (some one hundred and twenty) and Agnolotti (a couple of dozen in the early days). Interest spread beyond the Río de la Plata: Frers himself celebrated the enthusiasm of sailors in Bahía Blanca, Necochea, Rosario and San Pedro (Argentina). That is why people say "no two Grumetes are alike."

The Grumete "Antares", a white hull with varnished wood trim, sailing upwind

The "Antares" beating to windward on the Río de la Plata; the varnished wood gives away the craftsmanship.

On the racecourse, the class left documented champions. Pedro "Nucho" Sisti won the 2004 national championship with the Cachafaz, and Carlos Maffei was a two-time national champion in 2017 and 2018 with the Ayax. And the affordable little boat ended up proving its mettle far from the Río de la Plata. According to the nautical history of the Club Universitario de Buenos Aires, the Navy carried Grumetes aboard its transports to hold the first sailing races in remote corners of the country: five to Lago Argentino (Santa Cruz) around 1971, Ushuaia in 1973 and, in 1974, the Malvinas Islands, where two of the boats were donated. Those cold waters ended up proving Frers right about the seagoing qualities that few credited to the V-bottom. Today the class is fully active: in March 2026 it held its Rioplatense Championship at the Club Náutico San Isidro, and each season it also races the national championship —23 boats in 2024— and the Copa Germán Frers, among the clubs along the Olivos–San Isidro–Núñez axis.

A varnished wooden Grumete sailing with the Argentine flag and its crew

A classic wooden-hulled Grumete, with its crew and the Argentine flag, in mid-race.

The Derecho Viejo sums up the fate of the class. It passed from hand to hand, was restored and ended up stored in a shed, until Carlos Mario García —author of the class's history, who years earlier had seen it ashore as a "warrior at rest"— managed to make it his. Frers wanted an affordable boat that could be built at home. More than eight decades later, the Grumete achieved something rarer than any championship: that grandparents, children and grandchildren still argue over who takes the helm.

With thanks to Jorge Cousillas, El Ojo Náutico, for the images.

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