WestSail 32? Yes Please!

Zagato

Zagato

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I have just come across these, if I ever wanted something bigger (very unlikely!) This would be on the short list, apparently their are still some hulls out there that need fitting out.... Oh yes please :D

When my kids draw a boat it looks like this. A classic and quite a few for sale around $40,000. I could live on that quite happily :)

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250px-Westsail_32_off_North_Cal.jpg
 
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They are the 'Marmite' of boat designs - Some people like them, most . . .

Their nick-name in the States is 'Wet Snail 32' which incorporates references to their size, seakeeping ability and speed.

They are nothing like any of the Pardey's boats.
 
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We were parked alongside one in Cascais a few years ago. It was crewed by a pair of young liveaboards who had just done an East-West crossing from the US through some pretty horrendous weather. It was a beautiful and extremely capable-looking boat.

westsail.jpg


- W
 
TimBennet said:
Their nick-name in the States is 'Wet Snail 32' which incorporates references to their size, seakeeping ability and speed.

They are nothing like any of the Pardey's boats.
Click to expand...

I can certainly see them being slow, with all that wetted area and not a massive rig.

There's definitely a strong aesthetic resemblance, even if perhaps the lines are not actually that similar.

Pete
 
Zagato said:
I have just come across these, if I ever wanted something bigger (very unlikely!) This would be on the short list, apparently their are still some hulls out there that need fitting out.... Oh yes please :D

When my kids draw a boat it looks like this. A classic and quite a few for sale around $40,000. I could live on that quite happily :)
Click to expand...

The good old Wetsnail. In Hong Kong I kept a Cheoy Lee for some years on a mooring in Deepwater Bay - on the next mooring was one - dark green colour hull. They really are pretty slow, compared to almost everything else.

In 2000 we came back to England and by 2004 had semi-sorted out the house we bought (don't buy listed buildings) and were looking at boats. At Mylor Yacht Harbour, a few boats away from the Jeanneau we bought, was the same green Westsail - still with her RHKYC registration number on the bow.
 
Rather sail a Westsail from Hong Kong than a Jeanneau! (If I had to - come to think of it I'd probably ship it!) ... great underwater shape, slow yes but never did Colin Archer any harm.
 
The Westsails were a product of the sixties and seventies on the west coast of the USA. They did for hippies (of all ages) there, what the Wharram cats did for us hippies here. They offered the dream of low cost bluewater cruising to what where then, little known and unspoilt lands. You can see the slogan in those brochures 'Drop out and see the world'.

A lot were home finished from bare hulls but went on to achieve notable voyages. They were the sea going, life style equivalent of the VW campervan - to their aficionados they were perfect but to those who didn't 'get it', it was a mystery why anyone should want to travel in something that was so cramped and with such poor performance. The cockpit was also only a foot well and there was nowhere to sit comfortably. Love 'em or hate 'em.

But double enders have had a long tradition in the USA; Atkins in the thirties designed several drawing heavily on the Colin Archer theories of sea worthiness. Bill Crealock then simply redrew them for GRP production in 1969 to produce the Westsail 32. But the designs biggest short comings was it was a pure double ended and had too little 'buoancy' aft. But the love of double ended boats endured in the minds of Americans so Crealock and then the younger designers like Bob Perry and Chuck Paine continued to work on double ended designs with boats such as the Crealock 34, 37, etc, the Valiant 40 and the (in the UK) Victoria 26 and 30, combining their double ended form with much more favourable hull lines, allowing both better sea keeping and higher hull speeds.

The Pardey boats are transom designs with their inspiration coming from the West Country work boats here in the UK. Not the same parentage at all.
 
The Perfect Storm book/movie features a W32. Which survived unattended having been abandoned midstorm at the insistence of the crew. IIRC it was eventually washed ashore...and towed off?

Wet, possibly.
Snail-like, Ive heard that a few times...
But unseaworthy? Looks mighty fine to me:)

Inexpensive, solid, modest inside maybe, depends where one is coming from I guess.
 
Blueboatman said:
The Perfect Storm book/movie features a W32. Which survived unattended having been abandoned midstorm at the insistence of the crew. IIRC it was eventually washed ashore...and towed off?
Click to expand...

Story is open to interpretation.

From wiki:

Its story is clearly based on the events surrounding the Satori, which are also dealt with in Junger's book; Junger's version of the event, however, is contested by the owner and skipper of the yacht, who was not interviewed for Junger's book, but is supported by the two crewmembers on the Satori and the Coast Guard rescuers. The film highly fictionalizes the story of the Satori; it renames the boat Mistral, and leaves its crew anonymous, making no explicit claim about the "true" identity of the boat.
According to the owner's son, the Satori never made a 360° roll (which would likely result in severe damage to the boat's rigging), although it had two knockdowns, during which it lay on its side for about 30 seconds (capsized). The Satori owner indeed wanted to continue to sail, whereas his two female crewmembers sent off a Mayday call over radio. One of those crewmembers reported that she was so convinced that she was going to die that she wrote her name down and put it into a plastic bag so that her body could be identified when it was finally found. The Coast Guard declared the voyage manifestly unsafe and ordered everyone off-board — including the unwilling owner. While the owner was never tested for his blood alcohol level, the crewmembers described him as drunk and the Coast Guard officials who picked him up reported he smelled of alcohol. The Coast Guard first tried to take them on board via an inflatable boat. Only after the inflatable boat was damaged when trying to approach the Satori did the Coast Guard send a helicopter, which is a much riskier approach as a rescue swimmer must jump in the dangerous seas. The Coast Guard helicopter did not try to lower rescue gear onto the yacht (as shown in the film, where it gets entangled with the mast), but rather asked the Satori crew to jump overboard to meet a rescue swimmer in the water. After the Satori crew was on board the helicopter, the crew of the damaged inflatable boat were rescued. Different from the film's narrative, this helicopter was not identical to the National Guard helicopter, which later had an emergency landing on water and lost a crew member, Rick Smith. Still, according to the owner's son, the Satori was later found unharmed at a Maryland beach, having sustained no damage after the crew left her. However, not only could no one ensure this would be the outcome at the time of the Storm, the fact that the boat survived does not prove that the people would have survived the storm.
 
^^ The boat was named Satori. She survived the storm and washed up on the beach in Assateague, Maryland.

Satori3.jpg


There were some comments about Westsails being from the west coast of the United States. Most were built in Costa Mesa, California, but a few were built in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.
 
Actually sailed Westsail 32 friend has one in Emsworth,didnt think it was that slow but gear was heavy to a modern boat,tiller heavy,powered by a 28hp Perkins.Apparently it was sailed over from the States.
 
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