Sharing your boating thoughts and opinions
Email pbo@futurenet.com or write to us at the address on page 5. Photos are appreciated, letters may be edited.
Trailer-sailing
In ‘Trailer-sailing in Cardigan Bay’ (PBO, April 2024) Frank Sibly suggests that the Etap22i ‘is about the largest boat that can be trailed and launched’. Not so: we’ve trailed and launched our Swallow Yachts Bay Cruiser 26 Iris to Spain a several times, as well as lots of other places since we bought it nine years ago, straight from the Swallow Boat yard in Cardigan Bay!
Timber club
Welcome to wooden boat ownership Dave Selby (PBO, November 2023). I have always enjoyed your work, more so now. We have had a small fleet here in the USA for the past 30 years. We did up the 1948 Folkboat ourselves, down to bare wood and back, and also have a 65-year-old yawl and a sloop from 1930.
I first sailed with my naval officer father at age seven and have had one boat or another since college. First a Sabot–now my granddaughter Isla’s, age eight, complete with Swallows and Amazons flags. On to Folkboats then in 1993 my cherished Aage Nielsen yawl. Chauncey, my five-year-old salty dog, sailed from Naragansett Bay to Penobscott Bay for the Eggmoggin Reach Regatta at nine months old in the Folkboat. We’ve sailed the Chesapeake Bay for 40 years. I cut my teeth on the west coast of Scotland in the 1970s. Now I’m enjoying New England and the Chesapeake year-round with the boats and the kids.
My first PBO discovery was in 1978. I was a postdoctoral fellow in Edinburgh riding the last train to Carnwath reading sailing and motor magazines. I always appreciated the ‘practical’ definition. Keep up the good work.
Ken Gummerson
Dave Selby responds: I always appreciate it when readers and contributors take the time to write in –and all the more so when it’s not to complain about me! And I’m amazed to get correspondence from the USA. I wonder if you had to use Google Translate to make sense of my musings. Compared with my ‘fleet’, you virtually have a navy. Of particular interest to me is your boat Congruence, which I first took to be a cat-boat until I noticed the stayed mast. I love small boats with large cockpits, though many people favour larger cabins, which in my view actually decrease the living space. Both my Sailfish and Blackwater Sloop have cockpits over 6ft long. That means I can sleep under the stars, or with a boom tent –much like adding a conservatory extension to your house. On my Sailfish, the cockpit footwell in-fill means I can spread out on a king-size air bed. I tell you, that really is living.
Floating line query
Robin Petherbridge asked ‘Is floating line any good for knots?’ (Letters, PBO, March 2024). It’s true tha
