What Makes a Racer/Cruiser?

by Kimball Livingstone, SAIL magazine on 13 Dec 2007 At the King's Cup in Thailand, Frank Pong's maxi, Jelik, cleaned up at the top end of IRC, but that's no cruising boat. On a completely different wavelength in the exotica of tropical regattas in 2007, there were charter boats from Sunsail that raced, but those are not race boats. Then here came Fred Roswold in his cruising boat, out from Seattle and roaming since 1996, winning the whole IRC Class 3 shebang overall. And Wings was designed and built with no thought for anything except racing.

Wings is a Peterson 43, a Two-Tonner, as they were known back in the day. It's the sort of warhorse that would have been campaigned by the leading pros. Fred and Judy Roswold have owned the boat for 20 years, and their experience bears out an assertion made often by another Seattle guy, designer Bob Perry. It goes something like this: 'If you want to go cruising and not spend a fortune on the platform, buy an old IOR boat. They're cheap, they sail well, and yes, they have issues with their downwind sailing qualities, but if you're cruising you won't be pushing the boat hard enough to experience that.'

Roswold says, 'Bob and I are old friends, and he is right on. Wings is an easy boat to sail. With a reefed main and a #4 blade and a windvane, you just go. There are lots of nicer boats out cruising. They have nicer cockpits or nicer interiors (Wings was given new appointments, including a new galley, for cruising), but the one thing I have going for me is that the boat sails really well. I've done nothing to screw up that valuable quality. Doug Peterson says he's amazed that I'm cruising the boat, but it works.'

In the years since they left Seattle, the Roswolds have taken 'time outs' from cruising to work�he does something technical involving software installations for banks�and most recently they took time out to live and work for a year in Bangkok while the boat lived in Singapore. Now they're back on the move. 'It's possible I might work some more, but I'm not looking for it,' Roswold says. 'We love Thailand, and we'll cruise this peninsula and then go�somewhere. We're on the fast track for Europe. I figure we'll get there in, um, 10 years, see east Africa first, then maybe Dubai and Qatar.'

We already know the Roswolds like Thailand. And the rest of Asia? 'The State Department tells Americans not to go to Indonesia, but everyone I've talked to says it's a great experience and the people are wonderful; everyone except the officials, but what do you expect? They have cruisers coming through on the sly and not checking in, so they come to expect that. And it's a huge country. They don't need the business of a few hundred cruisers.

'The Raja Muda Cup in Malaysia�I wanted to do that, but it was hard to find crew who could take the time. I didn't realize that you can do that one as a casual entry. Now that I know, I'm sorry I didn't do it shorthanded.

'The Philippines�we went there twice, for about three months apiece, and I guess that says something.'

The Cruising Life: Pearls of Wisdom

When I spoke to Fred Roswold, he was on the run in Kata Beach, headquarters of the annual King's Cup regatta, on the island of Phuket. He had just come back from a mission to buy some replacement part or another and needed to install it on the boat right away because other things were happening in the afternoon. He remarked: 'I know people who have given up cruising because they just plain got tired of fixing the boat. But I think the real reason most people get out is that they don't like sailing. For years they're caught up in getting ready, and they don't discover that important fact until they leave.

'Once you get out here, you learn that the kind of boat you have is less important than the kind of people you are.'

Thank you, Fred. And what kind of people are you?

'I'm a cruiser.'

Racing your ex-racer. Got it.