Old Quarter Tonners -Magic Bus

Discussion in 'Sailboats' started by steveo-nz, Oct 5, 2008.

  1. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    There is an old pintail with a plywood deck in Long Beach. It was being used by a boat rental place a couple of years ago, but I think they went bankrupt. Seems that boat was on Craigslist a short time ago for almost nothing.

    Might have been Wizard at one point, but there were quite a few of those old pintails with plywood decks running around in the old days.
     
  2. sean9c
    Joined: Jan 2011
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    Location: Anacortes,WA

    sean9c Senior Member

    I was just thinking they'd make a nice PHRF boat. Wizard with the flush deck was nice for hiking and gybing the pole and like that. Their old so the rating is established and stable. They have a lot of ballast so they're easy to sail. They go straight upwind and straight downwind. With a set of good sails I'd think they'd be tough to beat in light and moderate air. Boring though and no fun in a breeze.
     
  3. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    I was mistaken. The boat for sale in LB did not have a flush deck.

    I know the flush deck Peterson from Ventura (Flying Circus) was for sale about 2 years ago. At the time they were still racing it very competitively.

    If you had wanted Goose (Santana 25 QT with custom plywood flush deck and mods, similar to Wizard) you could have had it for free about a year ago.

    It was on a trailer in a yard in Mission Bay. The inboard had somehow shorted, started, and ran with the boat in gear while it was on the trailer. By the time the thing ran out of fuel the shaft log was broken. It would have been easy to glass it over and use an outboard anyway. I imagine it went off to the dump at some point.

    In your neighborhood there is the old Peterson 23 Mini Tonner "Great White" (2nd '80 NAs in del Rey) that really needs to be restored and sailed. It can be bought, but needs a lot of work. It was a daggerboarder but now has a keel, and has a fractional rig. Probably the most "wide stern" of any Peterson IOR boat ever.
     
  4. sean9c
    Joined: Jan 2011
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    sean9c Senior Member

    Goose was cool, the 3 guys + Nelson that built it had lots of tricky little rigging details. I think it started out as a fire damaged hull. Perfect SD boat lots of sail and no drag.
    Great White, for some reason I know the name but can't remember why. Do you know who sailed it?
    If it's up my way it'd be fun to look at and I can always use another project. Any idea how I'd find it?
    Thanks
     
  5. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    Goose was a re-build, but it was done by another guy who fixed it and raced it with good results before selling to Neal/Harris/Reigley(sp?). I'm sure Nelson had some things updated after he got involved with those guys. I forget the original guy's name, but he was a young guy who ended up getting sick and dying (cancer?).


    Great White was supposed to be sailed by Blackaller, I think. But something happened and I think Mike Braney acquired the project. I know Dave MacCauley was involved, but he can't remember anything about those years.

    I will send you a Private Message with the contact info for the owner of Great White.
     
  6. sean9c
    Joined: Jan 2011
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    sean9c Senior Member

    Paul you're totally correct, there was a young guy that had Goose first, I totally forgot. Damn, you sure know the details. Did he die falling from a mast?
    Ya, I remember Braney and MacCauley, involved in something but I can't remember the details. Did maybe Teel build the boat? Oh well doesn't really matter. Braney was later a partner in LizzieB.
    I got the PM thanks.
    When I was driving to lunch I got wondering why would I want GW? If I had 1/2 a brain I'd just buy a M242 or if less than 1/2 the M241 FS in Portland and just go sailing. Though that wouldn't be as interesting. If I went to CA I'd have to call Don Martin, he sure to tell me I was nuts.
     
  7. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    It was a long time ago and I don't really recall for sure, but I think the young guy who rebuilt the Santana died of a disease like cancer or something.

    Yes, Teel Bros built the Great White as a one off.

    Yes, Braney was a partner in Lizzie B. in the MORC days. He also had a Peterson pintail QT in MdR for a while. Sadly he passed a few years ago. So did the other partner in Great White, Joe Schriefer. So getting info about the project isn't easy. I know Bill Tripp was working for Peterson at the time GW was built and worked on the project. If you get it you might give him a call.

    If any friend of mine was talking about getting an old IOR boat to re-furb and asked my opinion I would probably tell them to think long and hard, then walk away unless it was a boat that they really connected with. As you mention, you can get a nice boat like a 242 for less than it would take to re-furb an old Quarter Tonner. The 242 will sail better, have less problems, and have better resale value.
     
  8. sean9c
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    sean9c Senior Member

    Teel built, that why the name was familiar. I knew Stan and John and had to keep up on what they were building.
    Did you ever see the cold molded QT they built, designed by a friend of theirs that was at North Sails. It was unremarkable, old style small stern IOR style. They built it out of basswood which is super soft. It quickly started leaking at the centerline. I think it was scrapped.

    Stan bought some Peterson QT an HT molds, from somewhere (Poseidon?). Built himself a QT called Big Red, it was green and a couple of HT's with cabins and full interiors.
     
  9. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    Never saw the cold molded QT. Someone at North? Not Roy (who posts here), do you recall who?

    Did Teels build Wide Load, the 28' bilgeboarder non-IOR boat?

    Yes, the Teels acquired the Poseidon molds. Then maybe after someone else? Loads of boats built out of those molds over the years. I think Don Rosenkrans' HT OUTLAW was out of those molds with a plywood deck. Maybe Teels did that one?
     
  10. sean9c
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    sean9c Senior Member

    No not Roy, the guy wasn't around long, I just remembered the name of the boat was Cannonball.
    My brother an I built and sailed Wide Load.
    I'm pretty sure Stan ended up cutting up the molds. There'd been no interest in the boats, the Port wanted to buy his property, he was tired of the game. Don't know what he did after closing the shop. John had moved up Lake Tahoe way and got into house construction years before.
     
  11. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    Never saw or heard of Cannonball. That must have been retired pre-'76 or '77.

    Wide Load was interesting. It seemed to be retired to her slip in Naples around '77 or so. What was the purpose? Not IOR. Was it for MORA or MORF? What was the PH rating on it? Seemed to me it was sold on to MdR sometime around '80, where it was painted blue and sat in the slip some more.

    Also a Rogers design, right? I heard it well exceeded 20 knots once down the backside of Catalina. Do you have any photos of it or more info that you can share?
     
  12. sean9c
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    sean9c Senior Member

    Ya, WL was a Bill Rogers design, built as a MORA, so IOR, boat, which like Terrorist and Hawkeye explains the bilge boards. MORA died soon after the boat was finished so it became PHRF racing.
    We built it for a friend, Steve, that was sailing with us on Hustler, (the super light Rogers design that my brother and I built for ourselves), the deal we made was during construction he'd just pay for materials and since he owned a restaurant would keep us fed. After the boat was far enough along that he could have it appraised and then get a loan against it he would then pay for the labor. He was a guy that never should have started a project like that, OK as a crew but not prepared to be an owner. He lost interest in the boat before it was finished. We finished the boat, put together the crew and were racing it. Steve had got his loan but decided not to pay us. Since we were the ones sailing it with our friends when we walked Steve also lost his crew.
    The boat was never developed or sailed enough to show it's potential. At times it showed great speed. It ended up a little underpowered and if developed would have needed a few feet more mast. There were times uphill with breeze that it really flew. I don't know what Bruce King had done for the board shapes on his boats but the boards on WL were as radically asymmetrical as you could get so they really made lift. With all the beam for stability and the lift from the board when the boat was hooked up it was pretty amazing
    The boat was also pretty darn fast downwind. With the boards up there wasn't much boat in the water, but always super controllable. Did it do 20kt? I don't remember, it sure was possible. At the time we'd come from Hustler which was so fast downwind that we'd become sort of use to going fast and it'd become unremarkable.
    After we left WL the owner listed it with Stan Miller in LB, I think I remember that Alan Johnson, the NS canvas guy sailed it a little. I eventually went to MDR, then back to a Terminal Island backwater as a derelict.
    The weirdest part of the whole story. We're moving to Anacortes, on an island of about 15k people in Puget Sound, in the early '90's. I'm up here looking at property, driving down a rural road in the middle of nowhere and WL is sitting in a farmers field next to the road. Totally bizarre.
    The boat was too radical for it's own good. Without MORA if it had continued to race under PHRF they would of just killed it rating. And the chances of getting he numbers exactly right the first time on a radical boat like that are impossible so without an owner ready to keep throwing money at it, it would never gotten developed.

    And probably the saddest part of the story is that after not getting paid for WL we were so broke that we couldn't afford to keep Hustler and knowing that we didn't want anyone else messing with it decided instead of trying to sell it we would cut it up and throw it away

    I've some hang on the wall pics of it but nothing small to post.
     
  13. Gary Baigent
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    Gary Baigent Senior Member

    Fascinating story, Sean. Have you any photographs or plans, sketches of Wide Load? Or any of those very interesting boats you were involved with? What was Hustler? Get a digital camera and photograph your prints, then post them here.Sounds like important history to me. Cheers.
     
  14. sean9c
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    sean9c Senior Member

    Hustler was a 28' X 8' hard chine plywood boat my brother and I built in our parents backyard around '71. It was designed by our friend Bill Rogers It only weighed about 1800# had a deck sort of like a J24, cambered forward and then flat for the cockpit. It was super lightly built and tiny. If you sat on the inside of the hull under the cambered deck you just had room to sit upright.
    Problem was we were kids with big ideas and no money, so the boat never had what it needed. I think we only ever had 4 sails and some of those were used.
    We sailed it around San Pedro, having fun, when we could then got distracted with other projects, then after Wide Load that was the end.
    It's a shame, I think the boat had a lot of potential just as a speedster, problem was it needed a bigger rig and better keel.
    Unfortunately 2 expensive things.
     

  15. Paul B

    Paul B Previous Member

    Do you recall the IOR rating? I would guess it would have rated more than a One tonner (27.5) of the time.


    I've done some sailing with Alan in the past, and just saw him on Boxing Day. I never knew he sailed that boat. I actually never saw it sailing at all.


    Back in the mid '70s to early '80s there were a lot of weird/wonderful boats built in the area.

    Pete Schoonmaker bought a burned out Morgan 27 shell and put on a plywood deck, Peterson HT keel and rudder, and won a lot of MORF races.

    I think the Teels built a mini tonner that was supposedly a half size version of the Carter 2 Ton Mamie. Didn't seem too fast. Then again, neither was Mamie.

    There was the 42', 8 foot wide ULDB called Gambler that was both slow and ugly.

    A dentist in MdR built a beatiful, bright finished two tonner called Flexible Flyer to his own design. Sadly it wasn't as fast as it looked.

    Of course there was Mike Elias and his Juice. That thing was reconfigured about every year, or even more often. Started as a 34 footer that looked like a slice of pie with a stubby masthead rig. Then a stubby fractional rig. Then a sugar scoop to add a couple of feet. Then a couple of feet more on the sugar scoop. Then a bigger fractional rig. More keels and rudders than you could count. New paintjob a couple of times a year. Totally uncompetitive in IOR, and not really all that fast for its size.

    Harry Moloshco designed and built Drifter. After it was no longer competitive it went down to Mexico and burned to the waterline.

    John Olsen built Typhoon, the 45 footer based on Spencer's chined ideas. Never really got it going.

    CA Derivas built his big, black 52 foot centerboarder Cannibal. It also didn't look right or sail very competitively.

    A guy named Robey had Dennis build a CF37 with the back 2 feet cut off, added a daggerboard in place of the keel, lighterned it by a few thousand pounds, had a really whippy fractional rig, and never went sailing that I ever saw.

    The Duffields built their 60 foot ULDB Native Son that never really got going.

    Those are just the ones that come to mind...
     
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