J24 Blog

When we bought our J24 it had been abandoned in the Seattle Parks and Rec Marina at Leschi for a few years. The city periodically auctions off boats that haven’t paid their moorage to try to clear out the debt, and we were lucky enough (It felt like it at the time anyway…) to find this J24 listed on eBay, where pretty much no one buys one-design boats, and got a good price on it. When we went down to see it, the boat had a generous share of mold, dirt, and bird crap caked on even after the marina had pressure washed it for the sale. Of course we optimistically saw through all that and envisioned surging to top finishes in the local Tuesday night one-design series that we had previously crewed in.

After buying it we gave the deck and cabin a thorough scrub out with cleaner to de-must the boat and to start the process of breathing some life back into it.

A former owner had decided to paint the deck with a green epoxy coat to make a nice green color theme for the boat. They had managed to apply the first of what probably required several coats to a random 3 foot blob-shaped section of the foredeck before giving up. This left the boat with a transparent dark green swirled splotch on the deck that looked like toxic waste. Nice. It turns out that our boat was pretty well known in our local fleet because it was always easy to identify by that dark green splotch. Later, after our first season of racing we repainted the deck, and for a while no one recognized us. They thought some ringers had brought a new boat to the area. Ok, not ringers… They realized it was us after seeing our sailing performance.

The boat also featured:

Running rigging that was crusty where it wasn’t moldy

The remaining sticky-back portion of a weathered away hull number from a long ago regatta gracing the bows

Every race boat’s favorite one-design optimal “Lines led aft” configuration allowing maximum tripping hazard for minimum ease of raising and lowering the sails.

Half wire halyards. The other half was rotten rope.

Cabin top winches that hadn’t been serviced in years, and conveniently needed a different gauge winch handle than the primaries.

Old bulkhead compass in the cockpit with the reader card jammed sideways in the globe and half the oil drained out.

A port-a-potty. Remember this had been sealed inside a closed cabin for years of hot sun and cold winters. All I remember now is that it definitely didn’t feel empty when we lifted it off the boat, and unceremoniously walked it immediately to the dumpster.

2-3 inches of salad growing on the hull below the waterline. We trusted that their was indeed a bottom in there somewhere.

We initially just replaced the main sheet, genoa sheet and started sailing the boat on Tuesday nights for practice. We would sail around the outside of the area where the one-design fleets were racing and watch and practice handling our boat. We spent the rest of that summer sailing and cruising at least once a week, getting plenty of use out of the boat, and with no idea how very little we were actually preparing ourselves for the boat prep and learning curve that we’d face in racing the boat.

It had a complete set of sails on board including one ancient and one slightly newer spinnaker. The condition of the main and genoa were what you might call “cruising” quality. Soft and dirty and bagged-out from (literally) decades of use might be another way to describe them. That fact did not stop us from deciding to register to compete in the Tuesday night racing series with these sail the next summer.

Rapid escalation in boat optimization, deck layout, handling, and crew work in the next installment…