I think someone has given you some mis-information. There was a Santana 26 and a Clipper 26 but as far as I know there never was a Santana Clipper 26. (The Clippers were built by Clipper Marine and I believe that their serial numbers began CM.)
The Clipper 26 was an early 1970''s trailerable with a swing keel. When I was in college in the early 1970''s I worked for a company that sold Clippers commissioning these boats and teaching new owners how to sail them. I am reasonably familiar with these boats.
In the early 1970''s there were a lot of manufacturers of extremely inexpensive trailerable boats. Most were solely designed to be cheap to build with little concern about the longevity of the boats in question. The Clipper 26 was typical of this genre that was very popular in the early 1970''s but which seems to have dropped in popularity today.
These were pretty poorly constructed boats that offered a lot of room for the dollars. They were constructed using chopped glass construction that was pretty poorly done. We had quite a few major glasswork problems on the new boats that would suggest very poor quality control at the factory. They used a lot of non-marine plywoods and materials in their interiors and in general looked good as new boats but were pretty shoddy. I can''t imagine that one would be in very good shape after all of these years but I could be wrong there if the boat had light use and was carefully maintained and upgraded.They sailed reasonably well in moderate conditions, but did not offer much in the way of performance or seaworthiness.
In constrast, the Santana 26 was a nice little fin keel, spade rudder boat that offered good sailing performance through a wide range of conditions. While not exactly a paragone of boatbuilding virtue, they were much better constructed than the Clippers. Santanas were (and still are) Schock Boatbuilding''s performance
line of boats. They were generally more sophisticated designs than the Schocks and somewhat better detailed and constructed.
Jeff
Linear Mode
