This is a sleek 33-footer, has all the ingredients for a winning Sailing World Magazine’s Overall Boat of the Year award for 2004. It's a stunning looker, with a dark blue hull and narrow beam.Very clean on deck: Everything is led aft, making it easy for shorthanded sailing. I'll take the J/100 with the optional, self-tacking Hoyt Boom for the headsail. A standard marine head. There's no built-in fridge, just a large cooler. This boat only displaces 6000 pounds would be quite sensitive to weight placement while sailing. If the mainsail trimmer goes to leeward to release the traveler, it would be noticeable. When all four or five crew can be sitting to weather, legs in, there can be gentleman rules for this class!
A tiller makes all the difference in the world when it comes to sailing. On my current boat with the wheel I wear my arm out sitting to leeward trying to keep my eye on the jib. Maybe I would add a power winch for the main halyard for single-handing!
With respect to your listing "bucket boats", here's Meghan Daum on What the McCourts lack:
ReplyDelete.... but then it's also easy to feel sorry for the McCourts. Not for all they stand to lose now but for something they lost long ago: the pleasure of salivating over what you don't have.
I don't know about you, but this is a pleasure I enjoy daily. Though the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed isn't lacking the essentials (food and shelter) or even a lot of non-essentials (far too many magazine subscriptions), I'd be lying if I said what I'm accustomed to doesn't involve thinking about having more. By that I mean not one Malibu house to live in and one in which to do the laundry but, say, a house with more than one bathroom or a car with functional air conditioning.
In fact, what's most satisfying about my lifestyle may be, ironically enough, the fantasies that result from its being less than entirely satisfying. In other words, while I wouldn't refuse a set of 800-thread Egyptian cotton sheets, something in me suspects it's as much fun to look at them in catalogs as it is to sleep in them as a matter of course. Likely-to-be-unfulfilled longing is, in many ways, central to what it means to be human, especially an American human. And if what you're accustomed to precludes that kind of desire, doesn't it also deny you a certain kind of humanity? .....
Hey: In response to your response: Yes, a pencil would be a great "only wooden object" on the boat. I guess you would be happy in a laser or sunfish. But not in the old days. I was the fortunate owner of laser #802, and it had, as well as a wooden tiller, a wooden daggerboard and rudder! Imagine that.
ReplyDeleteYes, I recall my first generation of Lasers had wooden tillers, hiking sticks and daggerboards. Now, even the grab rails on the inside of the cockpits are plastic. Interesting!
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, the grabrails too!!! And how funny that you say "hiking stick"! It's tiller extension, don't you know? Doc, you've been around the block.
ReplyDeleteYes. True. Around the block. Definitely too old to race. (My crew takes me sailing!) I can grow old but I can never grow up!
ReplyDelete