In 1972 I had a summer job working for Baxter and Cicero Sail Makers in California. While I was there, my dad called and asked what I thought about a PT-30 sailboat. There was one racing with us that was doing well, so I said I thought it was a decent boat. It turns out my dad had found a used one at the Fort Worth Boat Club, and he bought it. The PT-30 was built in Fort Worth, so there were three at the Boat Club, which made for good racing.
Before you can really understand most of the stories involving the sailboat named “Feather”, you need to know something about the boat. For those of you that sailed in the early 70’s, all I have to say is that it was an early design to the IOR rule. If you’ve never sailed one of these monsters, I’ll explain.
The IOR rating rule was intended to encourage racing boats with more interior volume. The assumption was this would make them good cruising boats. Therefore, they had higher than normal sheers and wide beams. Then one of the length measurements was to take a string equal to the maximum width. You would start at the bow holding each end of the string at the sheer and move aft until the string was tight around the hull. This would be the forward girth station. The same process was repeated at the rear to determine the aft girth station. The distance between the girth stations was used as a proxy for waterline length. The result of these girth measurements was to encourage very pinched ends, particularly in the transom. This gave you a small cockpit. To make matters even worse, the main traveler was just about in the middle of the cockpit, and the rudder was transom hung with a tiller. It took good coordination to have two people bringing in the genoa, someone trimming the main, and someone trying to drive. If you didn’t learn the steps to the dance, you could catch an elbow when least expected.
The calculations for sail area favored genoas over mains, so you ended up with mast head rigs. The J measurement (distance from bow to mast) was 13 ½ feet, which made for a really big fore-triangle and a not very big main. You need to remember that the most advanced sail cloth available for genoas at the time was Dacron, so sails had a fairly limited wind range. The result was a large number of sails in the sail locker. Feather was 30 feet long and we carried a high clewed drifter, light # 1, heavy # 1, #2, #3, a reaching stay sail, a mast head stay sail, ¾ ounce chute, and a 1.5 ounce chute.
The last funny measurement for the IOR was the initial stability. They took the spinnaker pole and extended it out to the side. Then a weight was hung from the pole. The more the boat would heel for a given weight, the better for the rating.
The synthetic lines were not available yet, and with all these sails requiring some way to set them, the rigging was a challenge. Feather had 2 wire internal genoa halyards and 2 Dacron external spinnaker halyards. That’s four mast head halyards to keep straight. Then there is the pole topping lift and stay sail halyard at roughly 50% hoist. We did most of our sailing at Eagle Mountain Lake, so we had a lot of sail changes in any given race. Heaven help the fore deck that didn’t know how to keep the halyards straight.
Another fact about Feather was that she was one of the first PT-30’s built. She was originally intended to have a trim tab on the keel. However, the IOR rule changed to put too much of a penalty on trim tabs. The keel had already been poured, so they just filled in where the tab was to have been with fiberglass. This meant that Feather’s keel weighed 500 pound less than the later keels (4500 vs. 5000 pounds). As a result, Feather always carried one more reef than the competition and seemed to accelerate a little faster in light air.
Now to put it all together, you have a 30 foot boat that weighs 10,000 pounds, is 10 feet wide, has pinched ends, and is initially tender. Let me tell you, this is not a combination you would want in a cruising boat. In light air, the low wetted surface and large sail plan meant good performance once you got the mass moving. The fun came when the wind got over 15 knots. When you tried to reach, the initial tenderness meant the boat wanted to heel too much. This resulted in some spectacular broaches as the wide beam would over power the rudder. On a run the spinnaker was much larger than the main, which unbalanced the sail plan. This combined with the pinched ends meant the boat was going to roll, and I mean roll in a big way. There were many times we went down wind dipping both rails in the water.
To complete the picture, the crew was made up of a bunch of my friends that had never sailed anything other than dinghys. Let’s just say the crew earned the name “Feather’s Gremlins” that first year. With time they became very accomplished, but some of the early adventures with the chute were memorable to say the least.