Catalina 27 as blue water cruiser?

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Gino

John Vigor, in "Twenty Sailboats to Take You Anywhere", lists the Catalina 27 with its fin keel and spade rudder as an offshore passagemaker. Anyone out there ever do any of that? More than once? If so, what was it like out there on the briny when Ma Nature was feeling pissy?
 
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Jack Tyler

A circumnavigation would qualify...

Gino, I recently read one of the series of articles Latitude 38 has been doing on West Coast circumnavigators and it included a description of a Catalina 27 that circumnavigated via South Africa (as I recall) over a 5 or 6 year period. The boat was sailed carefully and with excellent seamanship but suffered no major system or structural damage. It was stock with only a few mods, not going thru the 'rebuild' that David Martin's Cal 25 received during the same time frame. We became good friends with Russ Cobb while recently in Isla Mujeres, Mexico and Russ has taken his Tartan 27 (a centerboarder) over to the Med and back, and currently is headed for the Canal and the South Pacific. It's a boat similar in intended audience and construction to the later Catalinas, as I understand it, and he too had to make one small structural mod to minimize working of the forward bulkhead. I was very impressed with Russ' savvy in what he was doing; I'll bet others had the same reaction to the owner of the Cat 27. Whether that means I or you should tackle such passages with that boat...well, that's an *entirely* different proposition. Jack
 
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