Rare bird - A Beneteau First 260 resource

In the past we have struggled with the performance of the First 260 in lighter airs. It's clear that with her fixed non-overlapping jib and large wetted surface area, the boat was never going to be a superstar in light (3-6 kts) conditions, but we knew (or hoped!) that we could make the boat faster. While some of the tricks are common for many boats (lighten the boat/crew, keeping weight off the transom, etc, one of the biggest and 260-specific changes we made was switching to a dedicated set of rig tunes for light airs. We are now quite happy with her performance in the light. As we do this on our First 36.7, we attempted to do so as well on the 260, but in hindsight we failed to make enough bands to allow the rig to be quite loose in light airs. It was (and still is!) quite a work in progress as there is no official tuning guide for the boat, and the general guidelines for swept-fractional rigging setting makes for a setup WAY too tight for light airs. The KEY is to allow t...

As the skipper of a boat that races a lot of windward/leeward courses, I have long thought that the optional(!) First 260 traveler was less than ideal. Too short, too low, too hard to work. So I set out trying to work on a better solution. The trick was that the placement of the cockpit lockers made a wide bar problematic. But a wider, higher bar was the ideal solution, even if it meant some compromises in other areas. The first clue came when I found a picture (below) of a First 260 in France that had been modified with a cockpit-wide traveler. This is interesting because it has the bar mounted in the ONE possible place where it does not interfere with either the lockers or the wooden seat rails, and is still under the boom. Ideally, it is exactly at boom end. I had thought of this as an option, but it took seeing it done once to commit me to action. It has the effect of shrinking the driver area by about 4 inches. The tiller clearly had to be cut shorter, but the bar looked good. S...