Perry’s Picks, Ship Happens…

By Bob Perry

First and foremost, special thanks to the fine folks at Lats & Atts for inviting me into their family. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here. After chatting with David, their Editor, it was decided that I would do a series of comparative reviews of boats I would consider to be “oldies but goodies”. These would be older production boats that represent excellent opportunities for a couple or a small family to start their cruising adventures. 

I’m choosing boats that appeal to my aesthetics, have good performance and have a robust and durable build history. I’ll talk about “comfort” while recognizing that comfort is a very subjective term.  I’ll also talk about price. Some models retain high resale values while others, for a variety of reasons, don’t and can be bought for a bargain depending usually on how well they have been maintained. 

I don’t pretend to be unbiased so just because I don’t like a boat that doesn’t mean it’s a “bad” boat. It simply means the boat does not appeal to me. I’ll factor in availability also. The Flounder 28 might have been a great boat but if they only built 6 of them, the Flounder will be hard to find on the used market so I won’t include it here.

I’ll begin with two boats I know very well, the Ranger 29 and the Islander 28. The Ranger 29 is a Gary Mull design, first built in 1970 and running till 1975. The Islander 28, my design, was built between 1975 and 1985. They built over 500 hulls of this model. Not sure how many Ranger 29’s were built but I’d guess over 300. Gary Mull was a very talented designer and, even more than that, a truly great guy. He was a few years older than I. But one early Monday morning I received one of those “gut punch” phone calls telling me that Gary had died. He was 51. He left a true legacy of excellent designs.

The five years that separated the introduction of both boats was a busy five years, and a very important five years, in the world of yacht design. Prior to 1975 the dominant handicap rule for racing in the US was the CCA rule (Cruising Club of America). The CCA rule produced wholesome boats like the Hinkley Bermuda 40 and the Cal 40. Both were effective on the race course and made good family cruising boats. The problem was that the US fleet of racers could not effectively compete against the British and European race boats because the UK and Europe’s dominant handicap rule was the RORC rule (Royal Ocean Racing Club). 

Each rule produced a boat designed to take advantage of that rule in order to produce boats that had low handicaps relative to their potential sailing speed. This primarily involved measurements to determine “sailing length.” The longer the sailing length, the faster the boat. Each rule measured sailing length in very different ways and produced very different boats. 

The CCA rule used a waterline measurement taken just above the designed DWL. This produced hulls of moderate proportions with some overhangs, moderate beam and good initial stability. 

The RORC rule used girth measurements in the bow and stern to measure immersed volume, i.e. the more volume you immerse the greater your sailing length. I’m over simplifying here because to go deeper into how the handicap rules worked would take a whole chapter or more. I’ll try not to get too bogged down in numbers just yet. Maybe in a future article we can delve deeper into that geeky world. 

In 1968 designers and sailors on both sides of the Atlantic got together with the aim of producing a handicap rule that would be used by all. Elements of the RORC for hull measurements were combined with elements from the CCA rule on rig components to produce the IOR, or International Offshore Rule. Please do me a favor and don’t say, “IOR rule”.  The “R” in the IOR is already “rule”.

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