Red Jacket, the 40-footer that became the first Canadian boat to win the SORC and launched what would become C&C Yachts, will be back on the racecourse this summer under new ownership, after her future had become worryingly uncertain.
“In Canada there are two significant sailing vessels in my mind, the Bluenose, on our dime, and Red Jacket,” says Brian Post, who purchased the storied boat with his sailing buddy, John Salasny. He said it only took them a moment to know they would buy her to prevent her from being “disposed of or falling into hands that couldn’t care for her…I’m excited as heck to sail her.”
“Everybody thought it was an old 1966 racing boat that was falling apart. But we took a quick gander, we were only on the boat a minute, two minutes, and there was nothing wrong with it,” Salasny says. “So we took a shot at it, right?” Only one other bidder made an offer, he says, and they would have moved the boat out of Canada. “That boat shouldn’t be leaving Lake Ontario. That was part of our proposal, that it would sail on Lake Ontario, and we would show it.”
The legend surrounding Red Jacket is that during a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, sailor and contractor Perry Connolly asked his friend, George Cuthbertson—then half of a young design firm with George Cassian, called Cuthbertson & Cassian—to design him “the meanest, hungriest 40-footer afloat.”
The result was a boat that changed the yacht racing game in several ways, says Rob Mazza, who started his career as a yacht designer in the 1960s with C&C Yachts and has become Red Jacket’s de facto historian. Unlike the full keels and attached rudders prevalent at the time, Red Jacket had a separate keel and spade rudder, reducing wetted surface and improving maneuverability. The Cal 40 had spearheaded this idea in 1963, Mazza says, but Red Jacket “consolidated that concept.”
To save weight, Erich Bruckmann built her using a radical new method, fiberglass with a balsa core. Common materials for racing boats at the time were wood, aluminum, and steel, Mazza says, so this sandwich construction—common today in boatbuilding as well as aeronautics and other industries—was cutting edge.
“Red Jacket also helped promote the idea of being a straight-up racer,” Mazza says. “She was somewhat controversial at the time because she didn’t have a full table, etc.; she had nothing forward of the mast except sail storage…the only accommodation for crew was pilot berths for the off watch.” (For more details on Red Jacket’s history, see Mazza’s story “Anatomy of a Legend” in Good Old Boat magazine’s September/October 2021 issue.)
After crushing the competition during the boat’s first season on Lake Ontario, Connolly took her to the 1967 SORC, where she narrowly missed winning overall; in 1968, she returned with an all-Canadian crew and took the overall trophy home. Her performance immediately led to the creation of C&C Yachts—an amalgamation of Cuthbertson & Cassian, Bruckmann Manufacturing, Hinterhoeller Yachts, and Belleville Marine—which would go on to become a leader in production boatbuilding.
Red Jacket continued to race until her last owner, Peter Milligan, passed away and bequeathed her to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, Ontario, in 2021. It was intended that she be used by the museum to take people sailing. “But it got complicated when the museum decided to take ownership of a 350-foot steamer,” Mazza says. “Red Jacket didn’t fit into their long-term plans after they accepted that. So they offered it for sale.”
However, no one made an offer on the boat, and word began to spread that she might be scrapped. That’s when Post and Salasny called the listing broker, whom they knew and had worked with, and asked what was going on. “Within an hour we had put in an offer,” Post says.
Post and Salasny have been sailing friends for years and both have owned several boats for racing and cruising, among them Niagara 35s, a Kirby 30, and several C&Cs including the C&C 121 that Post bought just last year. They’re both hands-on boatowners who already this spring were busy prepping Red Jacket for her latest debut.
“We had to update some wiring and fuel lines, but other than that it’s in really good shape, so we’re just going to polish it up and get it launched by the end of the month,” Salsany said in early April. They planned to sail her in the feeder race and long-distance race at the Lake Yacht Racing Association Regatta in late July, this year year in Rochester, New York, and then the Mimico Cruising Club race from Toronto to Kingston in mid-August. “We’re just kind of easing into this. We really just want to keep the boat so people can see it.”
To that end, they will berth Red Jacket front and center at Prince Edward Yacht Club in Picton, Ontario, and they hope to be able to take some of her many fans sailing.
“We never realized that a lot of people have never sailed on it,” Salasny says. “They’ve seen it, but they’ve never sailed on it. We’re planning on bringing it to places and showing it.”
June/July 2024
