Jaguar 36 Stories ?

[Rubikoop]

Originally Posted by akmike

The boat is so easy to sail I just can’t imagine what issues caused Rubikoop to proclaim it “the worst performing cat he’d ever sailed.” I’d be interested in specifically what they were. My cat is equipped with all those “goodies” as well and routinely leaves bigger cats on the horizon [/COLOR]

I'm not sure what "easy to sail" has to do with performance. If a J36 is truly easy to sail, why the need to backwind the jib and/or ease the main to get it to come around? Of all the cats I've sailed on, the J36 was the worst performing of the bunch. Specifically, slowest on all points of sail, widest tacking angles and slowest to accelerate out of tacks or from a puff of wind. Bottom was clean, sailed like I sail other cats in typical local conditions. Maybe I should have used the word "poorest" instead of worst. It's not my intent to offend anybody. But for the sake of discussion, if I sailed on 20 different cats, one of them has to have the poorest performance, correct? That doesn't mean it's unacceptable or dangerous, just not as good as the next best one. Sailing performance is just one aspect of any boat.

My rudimentary understanding of the history of the brand is that the manufacturer has been in and out of business, or filed bankruptcy, a couple of times. If that is correct, it wouldn't seem too hard to imagine that there could be a large variation between vessels. Maybe the one I've been on has a different rig. Maybe the mast is shorter. Maybe the stub keels are full of lead from a frustrated SA monohull boat builder. Who knows? What I do know is that it is very slow under sail and everyone else that I know that has been on it has the same comment. Hearing akmike say that his boat sails wonderfully and is faster than larger cats makes me wonder why this one under-performs.