Sail trainer

Iwas once walking a dock and I saw a marvelous looking lapstrake skiff rigged as a gaff sloop. I wasn't surprised when I learned it was a Bill Garden design. I was surprised when I learned it had been designed for a local yacht club's junior sailing program as a trainer. This little skiff would have looked right at home on Bligh's Bounty, but I just couldn't see it as a way to introduce kids to sailing. It must have weighed more than 400 pounds. A couple of years later I ran into a friend who owned the marina that was home to these quaint sail trainers and I asked him how the boats were doing. He said they were a disaster. He spent most of his time running around in his launch towing them back to the marina. We are always looking for the perfect sail trainer that can take up where the perennial Optimist leaves off.

For years juniors have moved from Optimists to 420s. But designer Jim Taylor of Marblehead, while involved with his son's junior program, noticed that the jump from Opti to 420 was too big a jump for most juniors. It's kind of like "handing a new driver the keys to the Porsche." Juniors need a boat that has more stability and more forgiving sailing traits than the 420. This new Taylor design is targeted at fitting right into that niche. The 380 would be a transitional boat.
The Transit 380 weighs 230 pounds, and that's light enough so a couple of 110-pound kids can muscle the boat on and off a dinghy dock. Certainly if you are using a dolly and sailing off the beach it's even easier. The ideal crew weight is 220 pounds. Jim sea-trialed the new boat singlehanded. Jim's up in weight from his days as a swift soccer player but he is now the perfect weight to simulate the weight of two kids. The new boat is close winded, stable and very forgiving to sail. The reaction from the juniors when asked how the 380 compared to the 420 was that the 380 is much stiffer.

Capsizing is a problem when kids are learning. In Puget Sound our year-round water temperature varies between 48 and 52 degrees, so you have to pick your swimming days very carefully. Even then you want to spend just enough time in the water to cool off and not enough time for hypothermia to set in. Capsizing is the easy part. Righting the capsized boat, especially if it has "turtled," or gone 180-degrees from upright, is often very difficult. There is no such thing as "turtle-proofing" a boat but Jim has addressed this by using a closed-cell foam pad sewn into the head of the mainsail. There is enough buoyancy in this pad to prevent the mast from sinking. This is a huge advantage over the 420, which can turtle quickly if you are not fast and agile enough to get up on the weather rail as the boat goes over. The deck and cockpit design of the 380 is contoured to avoid scooping up much water when righting the boat.

The simple rig has a spinnaker and close sheeting angles for the jib. The spinnaker bag stows in a recessed area just forward of the mast on a flat that extends aft to just beyond the forward end of the centerboard trunk. There are two troughs tooled into this sunken flat that are conveniently located to hold the spinnaker pole. The side decks are contoured so that you will be as comfortable hiking as you will be sitting on the cockpit seat. For sailors my size you might be even more comfortable sitting on the side deck. The cockpit is self-bailing even at low speeds and the boat can be left on a mooring during rainy weather without swamping.

Precision Boat Works in Palmetto, Florida, builds the 380. The company has worked with Jim Taylor on a long series of successful designs. It will be fun to watch and see if their combined effort on this new sail trainer takes off. I wish them all the best.