How to identify interesting boats and sailors - Marginal REVOLUTION

Boats with quirks tend to contain interesting people; often they have made Unconventional Life Choices, including of course long sea voyages, often solo.

Doesn’t seem wrong.

Counterpoint - from the comments:

My experience tells me otherwise. I have sailed widely all my life, been involved in boating communities and have known lots of the sorts of people that Edward is referring to. I find them mostly insufferable and often quite stupid. Boating is about beauty and grace and simplicity. All that crap piled on to an already ugly boat just makes for one of those eyesores I see all the time in my local waters. And the point of sailing is to, well, sail, and nicely designed racing boats do that quite well–I own a retired racing sloop and consider myself interesting and not at all the sort of blowhard who yaks your ear off on shore. And there is a reason no one builds ketch rigs (two masts) anymore. They are a pain in the ass.

BS. They don’t go hand in hand. There are plenty of boring sailors on interesting boats and interesting sailors on boring boats. Plenty of people on interesting boats aren’t knowledgeable sailors, just boring self absorbed misfits who can only afford to escape society in unmarketable junk.

Example of an interesting and knowledgeable sailor in a boring production boat:

Well, seems like it is not intended to be a rule. Every rule has it’s exceptions they say. That implies a rule has to be true more often then not, at minimum.

The post says it’s a heuristic. So it can be false more often than not and still be useful.

Should we send this along to Martha Stewart for her TV show ? :grin:

This statement should be qualified by defining “pain in the ass”. Ketches have lost market share chiefly because they’re less efficient, which doesn’t jive with the current performance obsession, and additionally because of increased cost and a steeper learning curve. However, once you know what you’re doing, they’re significantly easier handling, especially in close quarters and while sailing short handed

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I’ve only met a couple boat owners so I can’t say but I did meet the owner of this boat a few years ago. He had built this boat himself.

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Must Roos. - Dark Rose.

He was going to take a bunch of kids for sail for a day and wanted to know if I was interested. I didn’t want to sail with a wooden boat enthusiast (my heuristic) so I asked what it made of, when he said steel I was surprised and agreed to go. He laughed when that was my only question.

A home made steel boat you might expect flat plates welded together but the steel had been bent into curves. The owner told me he had built the equipment he used to bend the steel plates. It wasn’t no light weight boat.

It did sail nice, kids had a lot of fun.