[Jeff_H]

Tom (TSenator)you hit the nail on the head as I see it on most counts. One minor point here, I actually own a Farr 38 (technically a Farr 11.6) not a Farr 37. The Farr 37''s started life as IOR race boats. The Farr 38''s started life as family coastal and offshore cruisers. They proved to be good race boat in their day but that was not their intent. They actually have almost the same interior layout as the Catalina 36''s and 38''s but their hulls shape, rig, engineering, and deck layout and hardware choices, were clearly designed to provide very high performance for that era. Although you can still race these boats pretty successfully under PHRF, at the club level anyway, they really are not race boats. Most Americans are not all that aware that before Bruce Farr moved to Annapolis, he designed a whole series of wonderful, very high performance, coastal/offshore cruisers. The 11.6 was one of the more successful somewhere around 150 of these boats built world wide. (I also realize that is a tiny number compared to Catalina but when you consider that the boats were mostly built in New Zealand and South Africa that is a pretty big production run in a small sailing market.)

Regards
Jeff

BTW By any chance did you ever live in Englewood, New Jersey? I grew up with two brothers Vincent and Tom Senator.