Feb. 17/2023: Leave it to the most experienced performance sailors to come up with the most interesting boats when they get older and want to go cruising. Exhibit A in today’s brief is Oddity (see image up top), a custom plywood/epoxy 32-foot gaff-rigged barge of a thing masterminded by ex-round-the-world solo racer Pete Goss. A...
This is the most interesting new cruising sailboat design I’ve seen in a long time. Currently in build at Berkeley Marine Center, as conceived by a notable client, Barry Spanier, and drawn by a notable designer, Jim Antrim. It is significant, I think, that Spanier, a lifelong sailmaker who in his heyday designed and built...
I HAVE ALWAYS been very attracted to junk rigs, first, I suppose, because they seem so very strange and archaic. As one early Western proponent, a British cruiser named Brian Platt, who sailed from Hong Kong to California under junk rig in the late 1950s, once wrote: "Nobody could have designed the Chinese Sail, if...
American shipwright and boat designer Tom Colvin, who has long championed both metal construction and junk rigs on cruising sailboats, has designed about 300 small ships and boats over the course of a career that has now spanned about 70 years. He designed the original Gazelle for himself and his family to cruise aboard way...
