Boat Review: Windrose 18

The Windrose 18 exemplifies the successful modern West Coast trailerable sailboats of the 1970s. (Plus, Colin Angus on Rowing the Bering Sea)

All photos by Debra Colvin

While most American yacht design history can be traced to the East Coast, the development of the “modern” fiberglass trailersailer was equally, or even mostly, a West Coast phenomenon.

The flow of cheap oil and virtual rivers of polyester resin led to a boat-building explosion starting in the mid 1960s, and ultimately, a golden age for trailersailing extending until the early 1980s.

While small-boat builders along the Eastern Seaboard were largely churning out classic catboats and traditional or semi-traditional miniature yachts, West Coast designers were adding freeboard, beam, sail area, and alternative keel configurations with near abandon. The end result was a new breed of sailboat—one that remains popular today and has changed little since that decade of development and expansion.

Perhaps no designer is more inextricably linked to the modern West Coast or California trailersailer tradition than W. Shad Turner. The catalog of designs he drew reads like a list of the definitive companies of the era: Santana, Windrose, Lancer, Balboa, Laguna, Schock. Given his prodigious output it’s surprising he’s not even better known. 

Turner recognizes he and his Left Coast peers were part of something special. “We were using NACA foil sections when almost nobody else was,” he says. “The boats went to weather very well—and they were good off the wind too, once we got the bugs worked out. We also sought to make the toolings as modern as possible. We were having fun.”

Turner’s designs so nearly define that time and place that they don’t end up seeming particularly distinctive, but there is a consistent thread throughout most of his boats—raked bows, reverse transoms, and conservative sheerlines, for example.

Turner’s boats also tended to be pretty good performers. His popular Windrose/Laguna 22 rates a 246 PHRF, versus the Catalina 22’s 267. And his Santana 20, maybe his best known, was one of the first truly high-performance keelboats and helped give rise to the whole “sport boat” category.

One of Turner’s smallest cruisers was the Windrose 18, built by Laguna Yachts of Anaheim, California (they eventually incorporated as Coastal Recreation). It was in production from roughly 1974 until 1980.

“The idea was a trailerable sailboat for the start-up market that performed efficiently and was reasonably easy to build. The 18 met these criteria and did well” says Turner.

While the Windrose was a modern design, there is nothing particularly extreme about it by present day standards. Like many boats of its genre it’s a practical collection of compromises favoring easy trailerability, spacious accommodations, and decent performance.

In the early 80s Turner and Coastal Recreation released an updated Windrose 5.5 that featured another foot of beam and a shallow, fixed lead keel—but the older swing-keel models were built in greater numbers.

We had a chance to sail friend Don Kilgore’s 1974 model on Port Townsend Bay.

PERFORMANCE: