POTTER WITH A LATEEN RIG?

Our editor-at-large Larry Brown is 75 now…an increasingly ancient mariner. He’s sailed various Potters since the early 1990s.

- Larry Brown

If the winds around you are strong…

In the waters around Cape Cod, the winds are often gusty. Buzzard’s Bay, off one of our flanks, is known for its “afternoon hurricane.” If I lived in a place with milder winds, my thinking might have been different but one afternoon in 2004, I borrowed a Sunfish rig and improvised a way to hang it from my standard Potter 15 mast. It heeled much less than the standard rig and pointed quite well. At the time, I was campaigning my Potters in waters all around the USA and writing about the boats in several magazines. Consequently, I had a sweetheart deal with the company. I’d design some interesting variants of the Potters, sail them in all sorts of photogenic locations, write about them…and keep the boat. So I convinced the company to try a lateen Potter.

A PVC tube was drilled through the cabin’s forward edge and glassed to the floor of the bilge and to the cabin overhead. The mast was socketed into that. No stays. The halyards were routed through blocks flanking the mast, to cleats at the aft-cabin bulkhead. They made no other changes.

We got the boat just before departing for an expedition to the Rocky Mountain lakes. HMS Marine shipped me the boat with a sail cut back from the standard 75 square feet to 55. I never understood why—and got a full-sized sail made as soon as I returned.

If you usually single-hand…