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It really depends on the specific boat. Boats like the Brewer 12.8, Bristol 41.1, Hood 38, Tartan 34 for example, are fully ballasted boats that should have goodf offshore capabilities. Boats like a Macgregor 26, Catalina 22, San Juan 21 which are swing keel boats, generally lack the kind of reserve stability that I would want if I were going offshore.
Tartan 37''s are generally considered to be self-righting, but I have found them to be a little tender and very rolly at deep reaching and downwind sailing angles. That is a motion that I really do not like and so for myself would not consider them good offshore boats (I personally do not like rolly boats) although for many people these have used these boats offshore with reasonably good success. I also consider their sail plan to be a real pain in the butt for short handed cruising.
The Tartan 37 rig was heavily influenced by the then popular IOR racing rule. As a result it carries a sail plan that has a small very high aspect ratio main sail and depends on very large headsails in light to moderate winds. That is backwards of the current thinking towards larger mainsails, fractional rigs and smaller bearly overlapping headsails for short handed offshore designs.
When you have a rig that depends on larhe headsails for lighter to moderate conditions, you end up either carrying a larger sail inventory to deal with the full range of sailing conditions or else resorting to adding a removeable jibstay and staysail, or else motoring more than is ideal at the lower end of the wind range and being overpowered at the upper end.
Modern fractional rigs are easy to depower rather than reef and their headsails work well through a wider range of windspeeds. When it comes time to reef they shorten down to very snug masthead rig with a sail the size of a staysail already flying.
Jeff
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