Proper little yachts
As is usual these days, my September stroll around the Southampton Boat Show in search of interesting sub-30ft sailing cruisers came to naught.
With the exception of the characterful Swallows and Cornish Crabbers, the whizzy BTC 22 and some startlingly expensive small Beneteau sports boats, there was zilch.
So my advice to any sailor looking for a small and sporty cruiser-racer is still to study classified ads and brokerage listings. There are many production yachts around 25ft of this ilk – several heavily influenced by competitive Quarter Tonners – that emerged on the scene in the 1970s and 80s. And these were proper little yachts that could go offshore.
At that time the Junior Offshore Group (JOG) ran a summer-long series of cross-Channel events for small yachts, and I crewed in many of these. The racing was challenging, the post race parties were wild and the hung-over return trips to the UK were often a bit of a blur.
My uncle started Jogging in a 29-footer then went down in size to a Nicholson 26, followed by a 22ft Westerly Jouster followed by the first Hunter 19 then a Hunter 701. Sadly cross-Channel racing in boats of these smaller sizes is now virtually nonexistent.
To get further insight into how everything changed so dramatically with the transition from the old RORC rule to the IOR, I contacted Julian Everitt (of E Boat, Evasion, Magnum etc fame). He was one of the new breed of young designers to come to the fore in
