OSTAR 60 & STILL GOING STRONG
No one, probably not even ‘Blondie’, could have guessed that ‘Hasler’s wonderful idea’, conceived in 1956, would still be going strong in 2020 – 60 years after the first event and 64 since the notion first took shape. During the intervening years the Observer Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR) has been through a number of iterations and titles and a few ups and downs, yet it continues to flourish.
In 1951 Blondie Hasler developed an ‘intensifying’ desire to design a ‘radical cruising boat’ that would, in his own words, ‘be my servant and not my master’. Eventually the junk-rigged – ‘because she is such a bloody joke’ – with her self-steering gear and central, enclosed steering position to which all lines led and from which the skipper need not move, was built to ride out a
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