Midget sailboats: two boats, one name
A boat catalogued as a Midget is one of two entirely unconnected craft. One is a Dutch pocket cruiser built in Kortenhoef, Netherlands, by three generations of one family; the other is a small sailing dinghy built by an American company on the opposite side of the Atlantic. The two share no design lineage, no builder, and no overlapping history — only the name.
Origins and ownership
Henk de Kloet founded Jachtwerf Gebr. de Kloet on 12 March 1959, at 18 years old — young enough that he needed permission from the Queen to start the company. His first boats were wooden rowing boats and work boats. Two years later his brother Teun joined, and the yard took the name it has carried since, Jachtwerf Gebr. de Kloet BV. Teun designed the Fellowship 27, one of the very first polyester S-frame sailing yachts: 200 were built before the larger Fellowship 28 followed, selling more than 650 units, mostly to Germany. In the early 1980s, around the same period the Midget 26 joined the range — described by the yard as a comfortable family sailing yacht sold worldwide, including multiple units to Japan — the brothers also expanded the business by taking over a stainless-steel construction company. Leadership passed to a third generation when Martin de Kloet, Henk's son, who had joined as an employee in 1993, took over running the yard in 2005 as Henk and Teun withdrew. The 2009 financial crisis cut sales dramatically; the yard responded by founding a separate aluminum-boat company, Alufleet BV, in 2012, and the two companies merged in 2024.
The designers
The Midget's hull shape has an older, unrelated pedigree of its own: it traces to the fishing yawls of Lynæs, on the north coast of the Danish island of Zealand. The Dutch line began with a 20-foot Midget, also called the Oostzeejol, designed by Ir. B. Malta Müller, which reached the Netherlands in 1969 through Mr. Moorkamp of Polymore boatbuilders in Harderwijk and Mr. De Vries of Marfrig Yachting in Zuidland; about 120 were sold, nearly 100 of whose owners eventually belonged to an owners' association. That association, the Midget club, was founded in 1977 by Leendert Koppenol after he issued a call to action in the magazine De Waterkampioen. The club engaged naval architect Martin Bekebrede to design a 26-foot Midget based on the lines of the smaller boats — but no builder wanted to take it on, doubtful that a "slow" S-frame hull could find buyers in an era when "fast" round-frame sailboats were fashionable. Then, at the start of 1981, Polymore went bankrupt despite healthy sales of the 20-footer. The club turned instead to the De Kloet brothers, already known as successful builders of S-frame boats; by mid-March 1981 the participants were told De Kloet had taken over Polymore's obligations for the prototype, and construction was proceeding as planned. The first Midget 26 was finally shown, to those involved and other interested parties, in December 1981. A self-designed 31-footer followed in 1990, added to the existing range.
Construction through the eras
The 26's hull is moulded in one piece, unlike the earlier 20-footer's, which was built from two halves later laminated together. Midget hulls are moulded not at De Kloet's own yard but by an outside supplier in Zwaag. By the time of a 1988 club history, roughly 150 Midget 26s had been completed, about forty of them sold as bare hulls for owners to finish themselves; the 31, added in 1990, carries ballast at 44 percent of its 5,400-kilogram total weight. YACHT's used-boat review of the Midget 26 called its manufacturing quality "legendary," pointing to details such as multiplex reinforcement in high-load areas of the hull and deck and a foam-core sandwich deck.
The Dyer Midget: a different boat, a different coast
The other Midget belongs to a completely different lineage: a 7-foot-11-inch sailing dinghy in the Dyer line, built by The Anchorage, Inc. of Warren, Rhode Island, which has built boats named for founder Bill Dyer since 1930. That dinghy line began with the classic Dyer Dink, then the plywood Dyer Dhow of the early 1940s; Anchorage was contracted during World War II to supply small lifeboats for minesweepers and PT boats, a role the Dhow filled. A fiberglass version of the wartime Dhow followed in 1949, and that design was in turn followed by the 7-foot-11-inch Midget and the 12½-foot Daysailer. Before switching to what the company called "Dyeresin" construction, the whole Dyer dinghy line, the Midget included, was built in wood lapstrake.
Who Midget is for
A cruising-minded Dutch buyer and a small-boat American buyer are looking for entirely different things under the same name. The Midget 26 and Midget 31 suit someone drawn to a small, one-family boatyard's S-frame pocket cruisers — boats built to a design commissioned by their own owners' club rather than styled to any passing fashion. The Dyer Midget is a different proposition altogether: a small sailing dinghy from a Rhode Island builder with no connection to the Kortenhoef yard, and no shared history to draw on. Knowing which Midget is under discussion is the first thing either buyer needs to establish.
