A Skookum New Year

Offshore Racing Kicks Off the New Year

Happy New Year from all of us at B&B. It’s an exciting time to be alive and there’s never a dull day in the boating world. To kick off this year there, an exciting small boat race is unfolding right now, and another one is hot on it’s heels that you might want to follow. Yesterday the B&B team got the chance to see one of the race boats and it’s sailor before he heads off to Antigua for the start in a boat that he built from a B&B kit!

If you haven’t heard of the Mini Globe Race or the Globe 5.80 class boat then you’ll want to get caught up because the start is one month away and will take the sailors of these small plywood boats about a year to complete their circumnavigation. Fifteen boats are entered and two of them are built from kits produced right in our workshop (#157 and #79) Read all about it and follow the race at minigloberace.com. But there is also a smaller globe5.80-Transat race underway right now in the same class which you can follow here. This race ends where the mini globe race begins in Feb. See their route below.

While the boat is not our design we are pretty familiar with it. About four years ago B&B was tasked by Don McIntyre, (the creator of the class) with 3D modeling the design and producing a set of CNC kit files for it. The design itself is the work of Janusz Maderski who created the boat specifically as a low cost option for offshore racing to combat the endless out-spending spiral of higher performance offshore racing classes. As a class boat, the kits and plans-built boats are identical, so they all come out equal. Since May of 2020 when the kit was launched B&B has produced 7 kits for US builders but hundreds of plan sets have been sold to date. More on the kit here. The same kit files are used all over the world by CNC cutters to produce kits for builders who want a leg up on building one.

Yesterday in Oriental, NC where Josh is doing his final checks before heading down to Antigua we had the pleasure of catching up with him and seeing the boat. Josh built the boat in Seattle but has family in Arapahoe so he trailered her here to do his final preps before heading to the start. Keith of Towndock.net graciously provided his Bluejacket powerboat for the outing we we followed him out into the Neuse while Graham got to hitch a ride on the 5.80 with Josh, no doubt offering some wise words.

Seeing one of the 5.80s in the flesh was cool enough, but seeing one that is entered in the Mini Globe Race and built from parts we cut was icing on the cake and an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. More pictures here.

The boat performed very well and Josh and Graham put her through her paces in flat water with a decent breeze gusting into the teens. She’ll see much more excitement in open water but she slipped right along making full use of her ~19 foot waterline.

Josh did a really top notch job finishing out the boat with all the bells and whistles. The inside is gorgeous and quite spacious as you can see in the video below.

Check out Josh’s entire build blog of the boat (required by the class) here with some great pictures of what it takes to build one of these. There is also a great interview of Josh’s Journey with the 5.80 put together by Kayleen from All About Spray.

And as you might have guessed, yes Josh is accepting donations to help offset the cost of his race and we think there ought to be a B&B logo on the side of his boat so we plan on chipping in a bit to his campaign. He’s self funded and out of money so if you’re interested you can too.