The comment I just made under "Technical" about farmers led me to this question. I'm not talking about the hacks most of us have to pull at one time or another just to get through; here's the kind of thing I'm after:
We go down to Flathead Lake in MT fairly regularly (though not last summer or this one - yet - thanks to the border closure). A handful of years back I had the TF down there and met a somewhat-local chap with a Stilleto 27. That was interesting, as I'd never seen one. Very nice guy, and we struck up a bit of a friendship. Ran into him there again a few years later, and just as we were leaving at the end of our trip a pal of his showed up towing a couple of cats (a Prindle 16 and a Sea Spray 15, each on its own trailer) behind a rustbucket old van. My friend described him as some kind of mountain man, living in a trailer with no power (which ain't no shame on its own, but...) To begin with, the towing was unsettling, as each trailer was just being towed by a regular ball (up here, that's totally illegal - you can tandem two trailers, but the first has to be connected to the towing vehicle via a fifth-wheel, and there's a total length limit that he was certainly exceeding). But, you know, "Montana". At first I was a little dismayed that were leaving when he was just showing up, but the closer I looked the more thankful I became.
Just about every place where rusty hardware-store hardware (rather than marine-grade) could be used on the Prindle, it was, and I had to avert my eyes for fear of damaging my soul. But the Sea Spray... For those not familiar, they're held together with a lot of extra tubing - the normal crosstubes, in addition to bolting into big humps on the hulls, are connected together by a third tube running aft of the mast, and from which the tramp hangs, so you have to clamber over it when you tack (and there's no room to spare between it and the boom). But there's also a tube connecting the bows together, which was missing on this boat. In its place was a length of complex extrusion, obviously scrap from a two-or-three-pane window frame, each end of which had a storm of sharp edges and corners that I was certain would make me bleed just by looking at them. And when he raised the main, there was enough space beneath the boom to march the Red Army through. Too tall a mast? Too short a main? Both? I dunno... I was just happy to be seeing it in my rear-view mirror.
Edited by jonathan162 on Jul 14, 2021 - 02:25 PM.
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Southern Alberta and all over the damn place.
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1981 SuperCat 20 "Roberts' Rockets"
1983 SuperCat 19
TriFoiler #23 "Unfair Advantage"
Mystere 17
Unicorn A-Class (probably made by Trowbridge) that I couldn't resist rescuing at auction.
H18 & Zygal (classic) Tornado - stolen and destroyed - very unpleasant story.
Invitation and Mistral and Sunflower and windsurfers w/ Harken hydrofoils and god knows what else...
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