Scows Ask, “What’s the Point of a Bow?”

Where only the brave dare tread, who would design, build and sail a boat without a bow? The answer is Jim Antrim, Cree Partridge and Barry Spanier. It’s not unheard-of because the world of Mini-Transat racers has been dominated by scow-bowed boats for a number of years, and the Class 40 has seen a proliferation of winning scow-bowed competitors.

But would you take one of these cruising? Barry Spanier sketched it out and built it so he and his wife Samantha could try it out, sailing 8,000 miles from San Francisco to Australia. They’ve loved it. Our current, December issue has a letter from Barry and an added discussion from Max Ebb and designer Jim Antrim.

For many years, Barry was also a renowned windsurfing sail designer. So, besides the scow bow, he also wanted a pioneering rig that would be easy for an older couple to handle. He found it with a junk-rigged sail. He recently wrote, “The junk rig will be next. It’s so simple and relatively inexpensive, even when carbon for the best reasons. We could hardly find a reason, for a cruising boat anyway, to diss it. Especially the light-wind performance. And as a lifelong ‘developer’ guy, given the money I would do so much more than this first experiment, now that we have 8,000 miles under our keel. There is amazing potential for improvement. But even what we have now, which is sort of kludged together after each early mistake became obvious, is now working really fine, especially for shorthanded elder crew, as was the original intent. ”

You can read Barry’s letter and the comments from Jim and Max here. What do you think? Is a pointy bow necessary?