P23 - Owner's Review
by Tom Curley

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Bill Shaw design, 3,000 lbs. displacement, 1,200 lbs. of lead in external long?ish fin keel, external rudder with tiller, freestanding aluminum mast. Mine is hull #39 of 42 built in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Very basic cabin, though roomy (sitdown headroom) with porta?potti somewhat private. Basically a dinghy hull shape. All fittings are the best hardware and overall the boat is of the highest quality throughout, typical of Pearson. I've made a few changes: built a folding v?berth forward to use that space a little better, covered the interier fiberglass hull with coconut husk matting (looks and feels better than it sounds!), added an Apelco 260 depthsounder, a small solar panel to keep the battery charged, added blocks at the mast base and ran all reefing lines aft to the cockpit, added a Garhauer rigid boom vang with control line aft to cockpit, used SparTite at the mast/deck collar, added an anchor roller and 16.5 lb. Bruce anchor to the bow, replaced the old Honda 7.5 (a 4?stroke, but an unreliable piece of crap despite their advertising) with a gem of a Nissan 9.9 outboard. I also replaced the original Hood main this year with a 7 oz. 2+2 batten main from Sound Sails in Port Townsend, WA ? my mistake was not going crazy with a lot of roach, now that the topping lift has been replaced by the rigid vang. As usual, too conservative! As part of the new sail, which was VERY sticky with the 7/8!' sailtrack, I installed StrongTrack from Tides Marine, which slides over the existing track and works *much* better. Cheaper than new track and Battcars, but not inexpensive. I also replaced the mainsheet traveler with a Harken midrange bearing unit with 4:1 purchase, which works wonderfully. All that's really left to do is add retractable lazy jacks. Is this my last boat? NO. But it's a great boat on which to try things like rigid vangs and so forth ? small enough to be less expensive, just big enough to be safe when it gets rough. I love the freestanding cat rig ? mostly I go out after work for a few hours by myself, and it's hard to imagine a better singlehander's boat. I've been as far north as Port Hardy, British Columbia at the north end of Vancouver Island (last summer, spent a month aboard, and had a great time!) and as far south as Puget Sound goes, but never out in Mother Ocean. It's a coastal cruiser. Back in'82283 these boats were about $15k which seems like a lot ? maybe that's why they only made 42 of them. They're a good buy on the used market. Low maintenance, sophisticated simplicity and high quality, small enough to be inexpensive to moor yet big enough to be fun with some friends along. It sails like a large dinghy ? which is really great.