The first occurred in Australia in 1928 when Len Morris built a cat rigged (single sail) flat bottomed scow (horizontal bow rather than the "normal" vertical bow) to sail on Andersons' Inlet at Inverloch, a seaside resort 130km from Melbourne.
The scow was hard chined, 11 feet (3.4 m) long, with a single 7.4 square metres (80 sq ft) mainsail.
At much the same time, 1929 in fact, halfway around the world another development class, the American Moth Boat was started by Captain Joel Van Sant and Ernest J. Sanders [1] of Elizabeth City, North Carolina[2] with the boat “Jumping Juniper” built of Atlantic White Cedar from the Great Dismal Swamp.
In 1933, an American magazine, The Rudder, published an article dealing with the Moth Boat scene in the US.
The Australians noted the similarities between the two groups of boats and intuitively realized that the name "Moth Boat" rolled more easily from the tongue than "Inverlock Eleven Footer Class", and changed the name of their class to Moth.
New rules embraced the larger, more powerful high aspect, loose footed, fully battened rig of the Australian Moth.
Finally, guided by the influential UK Moth sailor and WW2 war hero, Major Tony Hibbert, the rule change abolished the US centralized organization of the class in favor of an independent world body with equal-partner national associations.
The NZ Moth was standardized as a 41kg flat bottom scow type known as the Mk2 using an alloy spars and a Dacron sail.
The IMCA rules from 1965, the final year prior to the phase-in of the Australian rig and wings were consulted as a starting point for reviving the US Moth.
The King raced for almost 20 years on his second moth called 'Super Mod' until his design and construction efforts were cut short by the 'press of royal duties'.
[3] In 1957 Patricia Duane became the first woman to win the Moth World Championship in her Cates-Florida design.
[citation needed] In 1968 Marie Claude Fauroux became the first woman skipper to win a World dinghy racing title from an IYRU sanctioned international class, in her Duflos-designed moth.
as an official training class for the Japanese Olympic sailing team, to hone their balance skills.
This high speed is reflected in the International Moth's RYA Portsmouth Yardstick of 570, the fastest (As of 2016[update]) of any sailing dinghy or multihull.