Rare bird - A Beneteau First 260 resource

In the final act of making sure we were getting 100% of the performance potential from BlueJ, it was time to get a bespoke mid-weight runner made. Prior to this, all of our kites have been hand-me-downs, bought online for around $300. While often without patches or tears, they were usually 20+ years old and soft. I wanted a deep running kite that would hold air. So I reached out to my sail-maker, Somerset Sails. After a short discussion, we agreed on an 0.75oz AirX tri-radial runner, in solid blue. Was going to look like this: While it was being made, we did our training and tune-up races with our old kites. Then one day in our crew FB page, our sailmaker posted this picture, saying it would ship that same day! The UPS page said it would arrive with any luck on Thursday afternoon, right before our race. I tracked it all the way in, and on thursday at noon I happily surprised the crew with this picture: The breeze was forecast in the 8-12 knot range, perfect for breaki...

After being in denial about the state of the bottom of BlueJ, I decided this spring to take the plunge and have the whole thing redone. We had done everything else (sails, traveler, rigging, crew) that we could to the boat to make her faster, and we always felt that there was more speed to be had. Be every year, the timing (or the finances!) seemed off, and we just sanded a bit, and splashed some more Micron CSC on her and call it good. This year was going to be different. So in the first week of April, I trucked BlueJ to Marine Fiberglass in the Twin Cities, probably the best place to have race-boat work done on your bottom. The plan was to: Soda blast to bare gelcoat and iron Treat the iron keel with Ospro rust sealant Seal the keel with Interlux Interprotect 200E Fair the keel with thickened 200E Barrier coat the bottom and keel with 200E Paint everything with VC17m The first job was the soda blast, which will remove ALL old paint but not touch the gelcoat. Amazing. I ...