[Jeff_H]

Ah now you have hit upon a couple of my real favorite topics. I must admit at the ''gitgo'' that I have a tremendous prejudice towards the work of Starling Burgess, who, of course was the designer of Atlantic. I consider Burgess to be one of the great designers of all time. In so many ways he was a real renaissance man creating new ideas in so many fields of endeavor. He is perhaps only rivaled for pure creative genius by someone like Nat Herreshoff. The Atlantic really is an extremely clever design. The knuckle bow really allowed a very flat entry angle and the fairly flat counter allowed a very flat run. These like the Herreschoff S boats would have been rule beaters in the extreme offering much better performance than the rules of their day would have predicted. Proportionately, Atlantics actually had fairly short overhangs compared to some of their contemporaries such as the Resolutes or Luders 16''s.

That said, in an absolute sense, the Atlantic is a pretty long boat (a tick over 30 feet if I remember correctly) for a rating of 171. While I could not find a PHRF rating for the Atlantic, if it does have a PHRF rating of 171 that would not be all that fast a rating for a 30 compared to a J-24 for example which is 6 feet shorter, sailing on a substantially shorter waterline and is only rated 3-6 seconds a mile slower.

Respectfully,
Jeff