What does "performance" mean to you?

From: Judith Franklin Blumhorst, DC (DrJudyB@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 15:24:37 PST


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        West Wight Potter Mailing List maintainer
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To me, sailing for pleasure and never intending to race, performance means
being able to get where I want to go in safety and comfort.

If I wanted to race, the list would be different and I doubt that I could
have racing speed along with all the other attributes on my list, in a
package that I could tow anywhere and store in my yard.

My criteria for a boat that "performs what I want it to do" on SF Bay are:

-It meanss easily trailered and rigged and launched, or else I won't use it.
-It means I'm able to "cruise" to Monterey Bay or Lake Tahoe, with the boat
behind my van without buying a dedicated tow vehicle.
-It means being able to point high well, even in high winds and rough water.
Can't get home without that.
-It means enough stability so that I don't scare my guests to death.
-It means stable enough so that it's almost impossible to capsize without a
gross error on the part of the skipper.
-It means easy to steer and keep under control, so I can enjoy the company
and vistas without having to concentrate 100% on the boat unless I want to.
Well-mannered.
-It means being able to sail fast enough under average wind conditions to
outsail the strong currents on SF Bay.
-It means a dry cockpit in the slop and chop and rollers.
-It means having enough controls run aft so that I don't have to go up on
the cabin top while the boat is bouncing around.
-It means having full sitting head room in the cabin, a comfortable berth
for weekends, and plenty of room to store creature comforts.
-It means having good sails (and enough of them for the range of wind speeds
I sail in) and good hardware in top-notch condition.
-It means having a reliable outboard for getting me out of trouble if I
screw up.
-It means small enough to single hand it (although I don't do that yet, I
need to finish my rigging mods to accomdate my petite stature and arthritic
hands, and get some coaching from another petite woman-friend who does it
all the time. And I need to get better at starting the outboard by myself.)

Sailing isn't all about speed to me. I have different boats for different
types of sailing. I can sail my sailboards leaping from water to air at an
exhuberant 25 knots of pure speed, or my Force 5 dinghy at 12 knots of
athletic exertion, or my Potter, grooving along at a well mannered 6 knots,
not spilling a drop of my glass of wine. As I get older, and my arthritic
hands dictate my activities more and more, the sailboards get used less and
less, and so does the Force 5.

My husband and I daydream about buying a 30-40 ft cruising trimaran or
catamaran. A big fast (expensive) one that we can take 10 people out on for
a party under sail. We'd keep it in the water so we don't have to rig a
thing before heading out, pay the horrendous cost of slipping , pay somebody
else to do all the grunty work of maintaining it (bottom cleaning, yuck).

We wouldn't even think of trailering it to far away places. We'd have to
keep the Potter for that....

Fair winds, Judy B



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