[Jeff_H]

I don''t put too much stock in this. First of all, I would expect that the majority of people who hire a delivery captain would fall in the subsets consisting of either the wealthier and/or less experienced subset of the sailing universe.

I don''t think that this is a universally correct sample. When ever I have spent time in popular cruising grounds (or even less popular or remote cruising grounds), I have generally found that the majority of distance cruisers are less than 40 feet with very few boats over 42 feet.

With regards to rig, for 30 years the cutter rig has been pushed as the only rig suitable to go offshore. This has been pushed with such a religious fervor that we see folks talking about screwing up an perfectly nice Cal 34 in the belief that its sloop rig is unsuitable to go offshore. It is no wonder that cutters are the most common offshore cruising rig. Does that make the cutter the best rig for offshore work? Hell no. When you look at current thinking on offshore rigs from the best of modern designers, fractionally rigged sloops make a lot more sense for the average cruiser but it is hard to buck the mythology of any religious cult. 8^)

Jeff