A very special article in Duckworksmagazine

Here's the link.   Please take the time to read it.

 http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/14/columns/guest/jackie/index.htm#.U4OUDS8Q5D0

A little background, way back when the Texas 200 was in its early times, a very simple class of boat called a "Puddleduck Racer" was created, and caught the imagination of a lot of small boat people.
To describe it does not really do it justice, but its 8ft long, 4ft wide, a true "box" with the only curve being the fore and aft curve in the bottom.
The rules started off as very simple, just the bottom 10 inches of the hull had to conform to a standard curve and you could do what you like with the rest, so there were some very imaginative interpretations of the concept.
I designed one, at Sail Oklahoma I had a good time sailing Kiwi Duck that the Monies built . Fun little boats and much better sailers than you'd think.

A group of "Puddleduckers" decided to have a try at completing the "Texas 200", thats not a race, although we all know that two sails within sight of each other makes a race no matter what people say, but its a 200 mile run up the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from near Corpus Christie down by the Mexico border to a spot near Magnolia Beach near Houston.
It takes 5 days, days of extreme heat, high winds, sand and shallow water, narrow cuts, big ship traffic and camping on the shore along the way. You carry all of your stores and camping gear with you, remember that these are very small boats!
Its arduous, hard work, and an 8ft plywood box is not what you'd normally pick for the event, but they all finished, and in good spirits at that.

With cancer taking some of our friends, and threatening others, a group has got together to sail those plywood boxes up that hot and windy channel again, hoping to raise money for cancer research, hoping that their contribution will help to save lives.

I wish them all the very very best, Sail safely guys, my thoughts are with you.

John W