Hardy survivors of the fiberglass revolution

Thirty-five isn't old, unless you're talking about sailing magazines or, I suppose, strippers, in which case it's ancient. At that ripe age, SAILING is America's oldest sailing magazine.

The nearest competitor for that title is the racing magazine Sailing World. One of its forebears actually appeared a couple of years before SAILING (like SAILING, its genesis was in the Midwest, that unlikely but consistently fertile birthplace of sailing enterprise), but it suspended publication several times while changing owners and names. So when we're in a mood to be ultraprecise, we say SAILING is the oldest continuously published sailing magazine in the United States.

This sailing magazine is distinct among others not only for its age. There's the extravagant page size-a luxury to which, after all these years of being the biggest, we seem addicted. And in an age of frenetic turnover of magazine ownership, there's the fact that SAILING is still owned by the same small, independent company that founded it in 1966.

SAILING may be unique among magazines, but it certainly isn't among other survivors of the sailing industry. Many of the boats that were spawned by the fiberglass revolution have passed their 35th anniversary and are still going strong.

That revolution, of course, is what made SAILING and other sailing magazines possible. Before sailboats could be replicated affordably and abundantly in plastic, the world of sailing wasn't big enough to support a pure-sailing magazine. A couple of all-purpose boating magazines served sailing and motorboating enthusiasts.

The best of them was Yachting, a literate periodical of record for yachtsmen, which had a stable of splendid writers. I grew up devouring everything they wrote about sailing.

None of those writers, who expended their handsomely crafted words on painstakingly created, custom-built, plank-on-frame wooden boats, foresaw that one day hulls would be made quickly in molds out of a magical material that would give boats the ability to live forever, or close to it.

During times when the sailboat-building industry turns down to a southerly heading, you might hear some rueful longings for "the worm." If this creature of black humor existed, it would eat fiberglass boats the way teredos drill into wooden vessels, reducing the ever growing inventory of aging but seaworthy, desirable and inexpensive used fiberglass boats that compete for buyers with new ones.

The sailing market, fortunately, has grown enough to support a fresh influx of new boats to complement the old ones that never die. The boats of today are superior in ways too numerous to enumerate here. Yet, the boats that date back to the year this magazine was founded and before remain a rich resource. You can see boats that were advertised in our first issues, Pearson Ensigns, Commanders, Tritons and Vanguards, Cals, Ericsons, Bristols, Morgans, Columbias and others, sailing everywhere today.

By contemporary standards, they're low tech, but still they are testaments to technology that worked. Thick and heavy sandwiches of glass and resin they may be, but these hulls are strong and enduring at age 35 and older. Some are prone to blistering, which can usually be repaired, but the worm that can penetrate them has yet to evolve. And in their way, these vessels that have spread the joys of sailing with their easy availability, remain outstanding performers.

I'm partial to today's elegantly engineered performance boats. I love their thin, light hulls of exotic composites, molded in shapes that were once impossible for builders to achieve, that provide speed and responsiveness unheard of when this magazine was born.

Yet many sailors don't value those qualities as much as those offered by some vintage fiberglass boats. The old boats aren't as fast, but they are seakindly and forgiving and, with their modestly scaled sailplans, easy to handle. Not needing a lot of weight on the rail, they can be raced with small crews. It takes a bit longer to get from here to there, but many sailors would say that's a good thing, allowing more time aboard boats that are such a pleasure to sail.

When SAILING was born, wooden boat owners were still wont to denigrate fiberglass boats as Clorox bottles and such. Today some of the boats they laughed at are classics admired with the same fervor that a perfectly preserved or restored wood boat might inspire.

The mention of plastic classics brings to mind a boat named Bantu, a Block Island 40. With her perfect brightwork and dazzling white hull looking as though it just popped out of the mold, she's an icon of the very dawn of the fiberglass era. Hardly a museum piece, this is a functioning icon. Her owner has fitted her with state-of-the-art electronics, black molded sails, the whole nine yards of performance goodies. What is most remarkable about this boat, now well into its fifth decade, is that in long-distance races she regularly beats the fastest, highest-tech boats of the new millennium, including mine. I have found that it is easier to be a gracious loser when the winner is a gracious survivor like Bantu.

I will have to say I am more generous now than I once was toward boats of Bantu's era. I raced my first Chicago-Mackinac Race on a Rhodes 41 built in 1965. She was solidly built and nicely finished, and quite good looking in the way of Phil Rhodes' designs, which were distinguished by their deep, springy sheerlines and long overhangs. But I was appalled by her performance. Getting upwind was an excruciating exercise that required, more than anything, patience. And when the boat got going in a strong breeze downwind, it began rolling gunwale to gunwale like an amusement ride gone bonkers. After spending what seemed like several normal human life spans getting from the starting line to the finish, I made a vow to never race on a boat like that again.

I regret the vow, made by a young, callow sailor. Now I take a more kindly view of traditional fiberglass yachts.

My enlightenment, however, didn't develop fully until June 2000, when I received an e-mailed news release announcing that the Newport Bermuda Race had been won by a boat named Restless, a 35-year-old Rhodes 41.

What a fine age to win one of America's premier offshore yacht races. What a fine age for a sailing magazine.