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Redwings Round the World The Boat
Redwings' Specifications and General Information
The Design: A Formosa 46" or a 45" Peterson 44"? Doug Peterson is one of the US' most famous yacht designers of the 1960's - 1980's. In the late 1960's, he designed Stormvogel and Ticonderoga, two of the most successful maxis of their era (Stormvogel has been operated as a charter boat in Asia over the past few years). His biggest successes were probably the IOR boats he designed in conjunction with Ron Holland during the 1970's and early 1980's which included high profile racers like Ganbare, Gumboots, Imp, Eclipse, Yena, Rubin, Ragamuffin, and Moonshine. As far as we know, his one major cruising design was the Peterson 44" (although some, like the Contessa 35 and New York 40, were racer-cruisers). Peterson was looking to combine the solid construction and comfortable interior lay out of the boats then plying most of the world's cruising routes with some of the go-fast lines of the newer racing boats. With a view to making the boat affordable to a fairly large segment of the would-be-world-cruising community, the boats were built in Taiwan to reduce costs. In addition to the boats built in Taiwan, about 200 were built and commissioned by Jack Kelly Yachts out of California. These boats were generally better fitted out than their Taiwan counterparts. Click here to view a November 1997 Cruising World article on the 44. The design, end product, and pricing appear to have been very competitive and about 800 Peterson 44s were sold. The design was so successful it appears the Taiwan builder, Formosa Boatbuilding, reasoned that the boats would sell themselves without Peterson's name attached, so why not just neatly cut him out of the loop and thereby increase the profit margin. To achieve this, we understand that Formosa simply added one foot to the 44" design (apparently added in the cockpit area where the 44's are a bit short on space) and marketed it as a Peterson 46 even though it was officially called a Formosa 46. There seems to some truth to this as all of our ship's papers indicate that Redwings is a Formosa 46 even though when we bought her there was a Peterson 46 emblem on both sides of the transom. In general, these boats are referred to as Peterson 46's - at least the two others in Hong Kong and the several I saw in Singapore were. About 200 were built. However, Doug Peterson has reportedly never received any royalties for the design. However, Kelly Yachts also made a stretched version of the 44 which was actually 46 feet. The design apparently had significant deck and keel differences to the 44 and also a materially different interior layout and it seems Peterson did receive royalties for this design. Most of the details of this "F'in" story were provided by "Chas from Tas", Asia's most experienced delivery skipper with over 650,000 ocean miles to his credit who happens to know Doug Peterson personally. So it must be true (ish)!! Thanks also to Bob Hawk, a Peterson 44 owner and net surfer who stumbled on our site and e-mailed us some additional information. Check out the Peterson 44/46 Owners Page. Sign up to be on the mailing list and you will frequently hear from other Peterson owners. Ship's History: There is a Story Here Redwings.... what's it mean? Who knows? Anyway, its better than "Hanky Panky", the name the boat started off life with. Hanky Panky's owners were, according to the Certificate of British Registry that came with the boat when we bought her, Greek. Apparently, they became bored of indulging in Hanky Panky and sold the boat in 1987 to a Scottish couple named Alistair and Christine. The couple was running a charter business of a sort in Turkey aboard a Moody 34 called REDWINGS (we found an old copy of a charter brochure for this Redwings among the ship's papers). Alistair and Christine renamed Hanky Panky (our Redwings) "Red Sunset". It seems they were going to try to run both boats at the same time. Perhaps this proved too difficult as they changed the name from Red Sunset to Redwings about a year after they bought it. Shortly thereafter, it appears they went broke and the boat was repossessed by the bank. This is where the previous owners, John and Caroline, stepped into the picture: Buying Redwings was quite a sudden affair. I'd been looking casually at magazines and assembling a list of wants and must-haves, and had got as far as putting a one-page description of what the boat had to be like for agents to respond to. I'd sent out a load of these (50?) and we'd got a lot of junk back, mostly entire listings from agents. We'd seen maybe three boats, all unsuitable in one way or another, when I got a fax one Wednesday evening from an agent in Mallorca about Redwings. He said it was everything we wanted, but a little bigger (we were looking for 38-42 feet). A bank repossession, the price was right (30k sterling). He faxed a surveyor's report, one year old. I bought the air tickets Thursday, we flew Friday, got drunk until very late Friday night with friends in Barcelona, and met the agent in Barcelona airport on Saturday morning. He flew us down to this little yard in Spain a few miles from Gibraltar in his private jet, and we got two hours to look her over, hung over. She was ashore, no batteries, no way of checking the engine, plumbing or electrics. The previous owners were unknown, and there was no documentation other than the registration book. We had to decide on the way back. We said yes. So from hearing about her to committing was under 4 days. John and Caroline then sailed her back from Spain to Italy where John was working for NATO, cruised around for a bit and substantially upgraded the boat, and then left in April 1991 for their Atlantic crossing en route to San Diego where John had a new job waiting for him. In early December 1991 they arrived San Diego. Within a year they had another crew member when Casper was born followed by Alex in late 1994. In March 1995 the family, (two sons and two cats), and their crew Todd, left San Diego for a Pacific Crossing enroute to Singapore where John had yet another new job waiting for him if and when he ever arrived. They sailed through French Polynesia, down to Australia, through Indonesia, and finally arrived in Singapore in October, 1995. The boat rested in Sabana Cove, Malaysia for one year, before I saw her in late 1996. And the rest is our history.....
Redwings came with good running rigging for the most part. John had installed Harken roller furling for the headstay, and a Harken Batcar and traveler system for the mainsail with single line reefing. These systems have worked very well in general. With the battcars, the main travels up and down the mast on little cars with 20 or 28 ball bearings in each so its easy to hoist and easy to drop: essential for short-handed sailing. This, combined with the single line reefing, make it very easy for one person to shorten sail underway under cover of the dodger. One minor problem with the systems has been that under extreme loads, the plastic ends on the cars sometimes smash off resulting in the sail pulling away from the mast in places and ball bearings going everywhere. Hopefully we have rectified this problem by purchasing aluminum ends for all of the cars. We fitted them in Israel. The ends were ridiculously expensive at US$40 per pair (and we needed 12 pairs), but the delron ball bearings are 90 cents a piece and its obviously a real pain when there is a breakdown so I think its money well spent. Our storm trysail and storm jib were made by Neil Pryde Sails in Hong Kong. We wanted day-glo storm sails and UK did not have the fabric and special order would have been prohibitive. Simon Pickering, who represented Neil Pryde in Hong Kong, gave us a quote 30% below that of UK's quote for white sails and was also able to provide us with the orange color we wanted. Simon also provided us with all of our new Harken gear for rigging the boat for spinnaker use as well as our Forespar spinnaker poles, reaching strut, and boom vang and Syd Rigging (all new sheets, halyards, and guys). Simon was the most service oriented and effective person we worked with during the refit in Hong Kong and without him and his team, we never would have made it out of Hong Kong last year. He has also provided us with support and parts during our trip and is always able to match West Marine prices. Simon has since moved to UK Sails but I'm sure can help out on anything yacht-related in HK and can now be contacted at simon_p_hk This section and the following section, is still under construction. Back to Redwings Homepage Copyright © All Rights Reserved by Aaron Henderson and Colleen Duggan |
