Sunfish

A 13 ft 9 in lateen-rigged board boat, drawn by Alexander Bryan and Cortland Heyniger and in production since 1952. Something like 300,000 have been built, which makes it the most produced sailboat in history by a very long way. A single unstayed mast, a lateen sail on a boom and a yard, a daggerboard, a kick-up rudder and a footwell. There is nothing else to it, which is exactly why it has outlived almost everything built alongside it.

The thing to look at on an older one is weight. The hull is a fiberglass shell with foam blocks bonded inside, and once water gets past the deck seam or the daggerboard trunk it sits in that foam and stays there. A dry boat is around 120 lb and a wet one can be double that, so lift the bow before anything else. Deck and hull separating along the rail seam, a soft daggerboard trunk and crazed gelcoat around the mast step are the usual jobs, and all of them are within reach of a first restoration.