
It shared the same rig and sail plan, and many of the same hull and under-body characteristics. It too, was radically ultralight by the standards of the day at less than 11,000 pounds. It shared many of the same characteristics, and 71 boats were built to become a premiere one design fleet on the West Coast. George Griffith took delivery of hull #1. The same George Griffith had collaborated with the same Bill Lapworth on a prototype for the Cal 40 which was also built in Cost Mesa. It is, perhaps, worth remembering that the Cal 40 did not spring fully formed from George Griffith’s imagination onto that cocktail napkin. Splendid summary, thank you! It is extraordinarily impressive that almost 50 years later the Cal 40 remains an icon: a formidable racing boat that is also a sea-kindly and practical cruising boat without bad habits
#Cal 39 knot a clew for saile movie#
Shaman the movie star: The Cal 40 Shaman appears in many of West Marine’s West Advisor videos and articles. And no list of modern-era Cal 40 accomplishments is complete without mention of the husband/wife team of Stan Honey and Sally Lindsay Honey onboard Illusion. Green Buffalo and Red Head, from Richmond Yacht Club, have won at the top level. Azure, Rodney Pimentel’s Encinal-based program, has been consistently near the top of the fleet in Bay, coastal and Pacific races. And the boat continues to rack up trophies in big ocean races too, as San Francisco Bay-based Cal 40s have continued to place well. Cal 40s have twice achieved the record of being the biggest one-design fleet ever in the biennial Transpac Race, with 14 boats in 19.
#Cal 39 knot a clew for saile plus#
The Cal 40 has endured because it is not only a relatively quick downwind raceboat, but also a sweet-sailing light cruiser that, in the words of Cal 40 owner Stan Honey, “has no bad habits.” It steers beautifully under autopilot - plus it is rare to find a tiller-steered 40-ft sailboat, especially one with a light helm. Folks spend multiple years and a quarter of a million dollars restoring Cal 40s and fitting them out with the latest sails, gear and electronics. Try searching for Cal 40s that are for sale on Yachtworld and other sites, and you’ll likely come up empty. Here is Shaman moving a lot of water molecules out of the way as she surfs to First in Class in the 2008 Pacific Cup, under the ownership of Steve Waterloo.įast forward to the present, and today the Cal 40 has attained true ‘cult’ status as a design that is sought after, restored and passed down through multiple generations of families. Griffith and Lapworth unsuccessfully shopped their design around to several California boatbuilders, experiencing polite rejection until they showed the plans to Jack Jensen, who agreed to build the boat on the condition that Griffith could guarantee orders for at least ten boats. The design that Bill Lapworth created, at 15,000 pounds, was considered questionable, radically light and dangerously underbuilt by many of the yachting authorities, not to mention its being built out of the avant-garde new boatbuilding material of fiberglass, referred to as “extruded snot” by the esteemed L. And behind this wing of a keel, way back, was a separate “spade” rudder. Griffith’s sketch showed a flat-bottomed, radically ultralight hull, lithe and canoe-like in shape, but with a brutal, trapezoidal 6,000-pound wing stuck to the bottom. Griffith observed that sailing dinghies, like the International 14 class, were extremely maneuverable with their rudders hanging on their transoms, unlike the typical 40-footer of 1962, which was a full-keeled, heavy beast with the rudder swinging on the back of the keel.

George Griffith, a successful racing sailor and member of the Los Angeles Yacht Club, reportedly drew the outline of a new kind of racing yacht hull on the back of a napkin, and showed it to his friend, naval architect C.

The Cal 40 was created as the combined work of three men.
