MG SPRING 25

Compact and affordable 1980s yacht perfectly designed for a spot of lively weekend family cruising - or racing...

- BEN LOWINGS is a journalist with 20 years' experience. He has written several sailor biographies and a square-rig manual.

REX FROST is former Commodore (2010-13) of Exe Sailing Club and Chairman of the Port of Exeter Users’ Group. For many years he taught Physics at Exeter School after a naval career. Now in his late 70s, he keeps a Beneteau First 31.7 in France. Tigger is his second boat and is moored close to his home in Exmouth.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

Most of us can admit to having recently trawled through yacht ads on the internet. If my own experience is anything to go by, we do this out of interest and curiosity as much as we do to actually look for a new boat. And there are different approaches. If you type ‘twin rudder shoal draught cruising yacht, 25ft length overall’ in to your search bar, the MG Spring 25 might not even be top of the results. I daresay you could scroll past it. But if you type in ‘yachts that starred in BBC TV show Howards’ Way’, the MG Spring 25 will be top billing. You might well click on the accompanying image and the satisfaction may put you one step closer to a purchase.

Tony Castro’s prototype Spring of Tarrant was indeed a star of Howards’ Way. She typified the atmosphere of the Solent scene in the late 1980s. The synthesiser tunes and dissolving camera shots seemed to work with the Hamble River fog as nicely as dry ice in pop music videos. But today’s not really a day for nostalgia. And we're nowhere near the Hamble. Our example MG Spring 25, the 1988-built Tigger, is surging down the Exmouth Fairway Channel into Lyme Bay.

Tigger was one of the first run of Spring 25s initially marketed by MG. Not that nostalgia was anything to do with Rex Frost’s purchase in 2020. ‘We got the boat because of Covid,’ he recalls, in clipped Australian tones.