I just received this e-mail today. You never know who is in your backyard
dreaming of excitement.
Rob,
I got your address from an email that Stewart Waugh forwarded to me. He
mentioned that you are building a Swift! That is the most exciting news
I've heard around here in a long time. Fill me in: How's it coming? When
will you splash it? Anything I can do to help out? Any way I can help
enough to get a shot at sailing the thing? Can I have one too?
Sorry, got ahead of myself. My name is Paul Carson and I sail, usually the
Soverel 39 "Runaway" out of Eden Isle. I've sailed all my life, but was
away from the sport for about 8 years for various reasons. Couldn't stand
it, so now I'm back. I'm a bit rusty, but it's coming back to me. The
closest I've come to sailing a skiff is that I raced Thistles for about 4
years. I always wanted to take a clunker Thistle, put a trapeze, better
foils, spinnaker launcher and sprit and sail it singlehand. In fact, when I
was in college I put a bigger rig on a Snipe and rigged it so that I could
control mast rake and heel angle while underway, took out all the corrector
weights, floorboards, etc. to lighten it up and raced it non-spinnaker at
GFLYC. Won the series despite 2 capsizes. The big skiff movement happened
while I was not paying attention, so you can imagine how cool I thought they
were when I saw them. Holy Cow! People were custom building exactly what I
had always wanted to do with spare parts. Now that I'm back to sailing in
Arkansas, I've spent a lot of time thinking about ways to get more new
people into sailing and I think that a radically exciting boat that is
affordable is going to attract more young people to the sport than the
traditional "new sailor" boats which are notoriously sedate. Looking more
toward the mountain biking/snowboarding demographic than the golf and tennis
set that we typically attract. Nothing wrong with those folks, I like golf
just fine. But there is no reason that both can't be embraced.
Anyway, I am really interested in your project and would love to see any
info you've got. Look forward to meeting you at the lake. -PC
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