They can be found in almost any yacht harbor—the boats that always look as if they are ready to leave. Out among the perky day-sailors, the fuel-hungry motor yachts, the tall and graceful "gold-platers" of the racing fleet, they bob impatiently at their moorings. They want to be gone.
However they vary in size and construction, they all have important qualities in common. Their rigs and hull designs have made small concessions to the years; they are built for simplicity and safety, for ease of maintenance and sea-kindliness, and the comfort of their crews. Near by, their neighbors wait for an afternoon sail to a convenient cove, a chase around the buoys or an ocean thrash that will strain the speed and strength of modern racing machines. But these are purely cruising boats. Their skippers are cruising men, more concerned with the unchanging requirements of the sea than with the changing compromises of racing-handicap rules. They are satisfied with what are essentially old-fashioned ships, old-fashioned gear. Beached though he may be by responsibilities ashore, the cruising sailor can still feel a certain smugness about his boat. She can take him across an ocean whenever he is ready to go.
Just a few years ago, the men who owned boats like these were usually looked upon as oddballs, dropouts or dreamers ready to up-anchor and take off for the islands—or at least talking about it. They were incurable eccentrics, antiquarians putting in their time refurbishing relics of another age.
Suddenly those old-fashioned boats and their gear seem strangely up-to-date. The cruising sailors seem less eccentric. The boats they have preserved have become objects of envy; now, even the weekend yachtsmen want something like them, and every month the boating magazines fatten with advertisements of new cruising sailboats coming off drawing boards and production lines. On the water, at least, yesterday's tastes have become today's styles.
In an era when too many boatbuilders turn out fresh styles, fresh models, with the alacrity of car manufacturers, the new trend is to try to recapture a piece of the past. More and more builders have come on the market with big, beamy cruising boats. Their advertising copy suggests that what every cruising man wants—and needs —is all the comforts of a small apartment crammed into a fiber-glass hull. But for all the contemporary gadgetry—the refrigerators, the hot-and-cold running water systems, the all-weather carpeting—the lines of the new boats are really close copies of the sturdy old designs in the color pictures opposite.
The husky cutter Quimera, shown sailing home from Catalina, is at once the newest and the oldest of this cruising fleet.
Her hull is a classic; its lineage traces back to a 19th century naval architect named Colin Archer, who was commissioned to design a boat for harbor pilots going out to meet incoming sailing ships. Archer developed a double-ended hull capable of standing offshore for weeks at a time, then making for home shorthanded in steep northern seas.