John Hanks J Class Secretary and his J 24 Ranger
2007 was a great year for the J class, and appears to only be the beginning. More activity is the norm now and boats are being started and completed coast to coast.
Boats are not the only increase, as Bob Sennott completes his 1/16th scale Whirlwind mold and making commercially available, for the first time ever a correct scaled version of this boat. The mold is due to be ready to produce within the next two weeks.. so that means that Whirlwind will be out before Puxatony Phil.
Following close on the heels of Whirlwind is the new Ranger mold from Bob as well. This means that the following molds will be available to potential J Class skippers:
GRP Shamrock
Blue Crab Shamrock
Sennott Endeavor
Sennott Whirlwind
Sennott Ranger
(pictured below is the new Ranger plug under construction)
There was at one time, a Rainbow mold somewhere on the East coast, a Ranger mold in Miami, Kem Dunnebacke has a Ranger mold in North Carolina that produced a couple of boats in time for the 2005 NCR held there. There are more than a dozen new Endeavor hulls being built now and several Shamrock hulls also, so next year at the NCR in Mystic we could see not only a large fleet, but several new faces as well.
I am also looking into the feasibility of gathering the drawings for all the boats in our class and making them available here on the website with proceeds to go to the class treasurey.
If you have information or pictures involving the J Class I urge you to send them to the webmaster here so that the we can keep the website up to date and as current as possible.