Racer-cruiser

When I was a kid I always loved the designs of C&C. They were always the coolest looking production boats, and they regularly won races. Today, I'll wager that many of you don't even know who the two "C's" were. I'll tell you. They were the two Georges: George Cassian and George Cuthbertson. George Cassian died quite young, and George Cuthbertson is still with us, but not involved with yacht design anymore.

They were a formidable team that combined a great sense of what made a boat fast and at the same time what made a boat look good. I still think they produced some of the very best looking production boat decks ever designed. The next time you walk by an old C&C 39 stop and look at that deck. I even tried to copy that deck on a 56-footer I designed. I got close but not close enough to rival the original.

Today the C&C line is built by Tartan Marine in Ohio and the design team is now an in-house group headed by Tom McNeill. I am happy to say the company has continued the tradition of making each C&C model a great looking boat.

The new C&C 101 is a 33-footer designed for racing, but it has a reasonable interior so that it could easily serve as a racer-cruiser. I don't have an exact DWL length, but if my estimation is close, the 101 has a D/L of 136. So it's not a really light boat but it's way short of medium displacement. The L/B is exactly 3.00 so it's a beamy boat but shy of fat. The plan view shows the beam carried well aft and a fairly full line to the bow plan.

Overhangs are minimal and rocker is moderate. The keel is an L fin-bulb combo drawing 6 feet 6 inches and weighing 3,350 pounds for a 41% ballast-to-displacement ratio. The rudder is a deep fin with unidirectional E-glass skins over a carbon fiber rudder stock.

The accommodation plan is simple. There are double quarterberths aft. The galley is minimal with a very small icebox. The chart table is small, and you apparently sit on the head of the quarterberth as a nav seat. The port and starboard settee berths are slightly offset and the drawings do not indicate any dining table. The head is adequate, but when the V-berth area is closed off, the people sleeping aft will not have access to the head. But this is not intended as a cruising boat. This is a racing boat that happens to have some accommodations.

The double-spreader rig features a carbon mast and an aluminum boom. The spreaders are swept 14 degrees to outboard chainplates. There is a centerline retractable carbon fiber bowsprit. The SA/D is 26.61, and that's enough horsepower to drive this boat along aggressively in light air.

You can see where the 101 differs from the family cruiser-racer in the deck layout. In this design the cockpit takes priority over the accommodations. This is a big cockpit, almost 12 feet long, with bench seats forward, and the mainsheet traveler spans the cockpit sole just aft of the seats, and the transom is wide open. The tiller is composite and carbon fiber. The side decks are broad and uncluttered. This will be a comfortable boat to race.

Maybe that family cruiser-racer is getting a bit sedate for you. You have been looking at various sport boats but you aren't sure you are ready for that degree of physical effort in your racing. The C&C 101 could be the answer. It has the features of a sport boat with the displacement and stability to make it a forgiving boat to race. It has the sail area to guarantee sprightly performance.

The earliest C&C I can find is the C&C 31 built in 1967, but it was in the early 1970s that C&C really made its name. That's a long run for one brand.