Originally Posted by
MoAlpha
Wife and I cruise a Dufour 40. She drives, leaving me with about 800 sq. feet of sail to manage. These days, my competitive life consists of a Bermuda race each summer and maybe a local thing or two. I come from keelboats, mainly OD; didn't grow up on dinghies, unfortunately. Anyway, at 5'9" and 153 lbs., I'm smaller than most of the men I sail with and some of the women. My doc, who's really a nurse practitioner, says I'm "one norovirus away from the hospital," but she's as scrawny as I am.
We are the same weight. I'm (well was) 6' 1/2". Racing SF Bay in my late 20s, I was fit and hard. (And TG, the 28' keelboat I ground winches on had excellent 2-speed winches and I had a world class tailer and often a foredeck hand who ran the new sheet back on tacks. We were a really good team and could out-tack the big boys when they visited our fleet. We once worked our way back from a distant 9th place to a couple of feet from a win on one leg from Treasure Island to the SF Yacht Club. Our big break? One of the year's biggest flood tides. We went further into the docks and tacked sooner on hitting the big wind than anybody else. Meant alternating tacks in very light shifty air and in the full city-front wind tunnel SF is famous for, just a few boat lengths apart. That race was hard!
My love sailing is on performance boats. Now I was sailing before the new wild boats, the 49ers and Aussie 18s and the like. Grew up with a Firefly, that 12' British upwind rocket. In Seattle, I raced a Tasar. Both these boats I loved to singlehand. Boats I love but am not big or strong enough for are Finns, 505s and Stars. The keelboat I put a lot of time on that I love is the Moore 24. Sadly, I never got the "ride", the 20 mph surfing spinnaker broad reach. I've sailed them in those conditions, but never got to go in the right direction! Got to sit on the committee boat my first year around those boats and see the leading edge of the keel on every well sailed boat as they broad reached past us in the famous Santa Cruz, CA wind they were built for.
Sadly, not sailing now. Portland just doesn't do it for me sailing-wise. But the rest of the fit is the best I have ever had, so I made my choice. Life's good.
A little nostalgia - just google Moore 24. Read up on it on Wikipedia, then went to the Moore website. Saw the boat Mercedes, then read that Adios had finished 2nd in a race. I spent a year working for Moore Brothers as a laminator. (Those boats are built beautifully with fiberglass quality that was unheard of, for strength, stiffness, low weight and craftsmanship in the days before epoxy, CF and pre-preg. We took real pride making the best fiberglass boats anywhere. I left there 1980. I asked my fellow laminators to be patient for my last full boat. (We did a boat every two weeks.) That boat got named Mercedes and probably had my best work in it. The hull I was working my last day got named Adios. 36 years later, they are still sailing. And, yes, Moore 24s are classics. As good as those 505s and Stars. Great, great sailing boats.
Ben