Colored Gelcoat J/80's

J/80 Hull #12 

Report by Peter d'Anjou

In the early days of J/80 construction circa 1992 - 1997, Tillotson Pearson, the original builder offered colored gelcoat hulls. Today, a few of those older colored boats survive.

Hull 9 is for sale in New Orleans after spending most of it's life on Lake Champlain in VT, Hull 12 is up in Toronto, an active member of fleet 20, and there are others, and yes we’d like to know if you have one. We’ll even accept awlgripped or painted boat pics but we’d really like to showcase these older boats

We even asked Jeff Johnstone about these and he told us, “In the early/mid 90’s TPI still offered colored hulls, then moved away from it, as the dark colors didn’t stand up to the UV very well.”

Somehow there is an unfair bias in the class that I don't share against anything other than white. The bias includes being picked out for “over early” violations or being identified more easily on the race course by your competition are real. I even had a person looking to buy a J/80 recently say to me, “it’s a little to old, a little to far away, and a little too blue” - and pass on the opportunity. 

I'd like to thank Toronto fleet captain David Doyle for pointing these out to me. So if you have one of these classics, send a pic and the hull # to me at pjdsail@gmail and we are happy to showcase them on this site.

This old Toronto boat, now raced in Port Dover on Lake Erie, was light gray gelcoat before it's current light blue awlgrip job.