Its very beams sigh with human voices, weighed down with a century of weary toil. Sailors claim the Dutchmen has led ships astray, causing them to crash on hidden rocks or reefs. Since then, Captain van der Decken has been given the moniker the Flying Dutchman, sailing his ghost ship the world over. There is a 20-foot one-design high-performance two-person monohull racing dinghy named the Flying Dutchman (FD). When mariners awake screaming, it's because they have dreamed of a ghostly ship and its terrifying barnacled crew. In sailors' legends the Flying Dutchman rises from the ocean depths, its rigging draped in seaweed and its sails glowing like fire.

Flying Dutchman, in European maritime legend, spectre ship doomed to sail forever; its appearance to seamen is believed to signal imminent disaster. It speeds across the flat water when all other ships are becalmed. They say that if you look into a fierce storm brewing off the Cape of Good Hope, you will see the Captain and his skeletal crew. When sailors fall overboard and are doomed …

It made its Olympic debut at the 1960 Summer Games competitions in the Gulf of Naples and is still one of the fastest racing dinghies in the world.