First of all, for the record I think that it is fair to say that I do have a prejudice towards boats that sail well in a wide range of conditions. I find boats that do not sail well to windward, or are not very good sailors in moderate to light conditions, or that are not especially stiff in a breeze and do not have a sail paln that can be finessed to make up for the lack of stability very frustrating to sail and my view really pretty dangerous when things get ugly.

I have actually spent a fair amount of time earlier in my life sailing on a OI36. I spent a fair amount of time earlier in my life making repairs on OI36''s and 33''s. I have spent a lot of my life sailing past these boats like they were standing still in a wide range of boats. I was part of a crew sent out to rescue one that could not beat clear of the mouth of the channel at the Wilmington River in a good breeze, when their engine packed in and had ended up blown down and hard aground on the spoils of the channel.

I genuinely believe that were varying degrees of quality of assembly of these boats over the manufacturing life span of these boats. I know how poorly the hull deck was assembled on the boat I helped to repair and I know that there are owners of later boats who swear they were better built than that one I knew. I know how much more these boats flex when driving one hard into a seaway than a boat intended for that purpose and I know that fiberglass fatigues when it is repetatively flexed. I know that boats that are built to take that kind of abuse have a system of frames, bulkheads and longitudinals that are glassed in to provide the necessary rigidity that thick glass alone cannot achieve and on the boats that I sailed that level of structure was not present. I have watched an Out Island 41 take a knock down to something approaching 70 degrees in conditions that were not that extreme (25 knot winds and 7 to 8 foot seas).

I firmly believe that the early boats were intended to be inexpensively built for a short life in the charter trade and I aonly suspect that later boats were marketed differently.

You are new to the sport. You are buying a boat that you hope to learn to sail on. The sailing characterics of these boats are such that there is a small likelihood that you will learn to sail well. You might get from place to place using sails and engine as the conditions permit but there is a lot more to good seamanship and highly developed sailing skills and it is in the clutches that those skills can mean life and death.

While I see Morgan Out Island owners on the internet swear vociferously about how much they love thier boats, in my experience talking to the experienced sailors who own these boats, I don''t hear such claims of sterling virtues. It drives me crazy when I hear some one say things like weight translates to stability. As someone who has actually designed boats and has spent a near life time studying the behaivor of boats underway, that kind of poppycock drives me crazy. When weight is in ballast held low in the boat, it translates to stability. When weight is in heavy sloppy glasswork and telephone pole spars, it translates to a 105 degree righting angle of positive stability and that is not my idea or any regulating bodies idea of an offshore boat, especially for a newcomer to the sport.

I do not think that the OI 41''s are total junk. I do not think that their naval architecture is as bad as many a bot being sold as blue water capable. But I also think that there are better boats out there for the money and that has nothing to do with snobishness.

Now that is only my opinion and the nice thing about the internet is that there are a lot of diversity of opinions. You can sort through them and if one does not work for you, it is easy enough to move on to one that does.

Good luck in what ever you do.
Jeff