American Cup Racer

Product detailed description

History on Wikipedia HERE

This schooner with galfoil (a sail with at least one trapezoidal sail ) was built in 1930 in Essex, Massachusetts. The ship was named after the wife of her main sponsor, Gertrude L. Thebaut. The schooner was built at the end of the famous era of schooners used for fishing on the Grant Banks, and these boats hosted the famous America's Cup races. These famous schooners included the Bluenose, Elsies and others. In 1933, during a visit to Gloucester, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister R. Mac Donald.
During World War II, she served as the flagship of the Coast Guard. In 1945 she was sold to the Caribbean as a cargo ship and ended her days on a breakwater in La Guaria, Venezuela.
With her superb solid construction and Frank Paine-designed design, she was one of the best boats of the fishing schooner era, participating in yacht races such as the American Cup Racer.
The dimensions of the actual boat: overall length 40m, beam 7.7m, draft 3.7m displacement 137t, and auxiliary engine power was 180hp.
Many references to this model and other famous schooners can be found on the web. I list some of them below:
Gertrude L. Thebaut
Photos of racing yachts - fisching schooner.
Or here historical shots of Bluenose at the finish of the 1938 America's Cup race, where Bluenose won. More original historical footage on YouTube
About the history of Bluenose, and here you can see that Elsies, Gertrude and others were different boats competing with each other.
The model itself is pretty simple on the whole as was the merits of these ships themselves. By being a large scale model you can implement a lot of modifications and details that are not in the kit. The model can also be realized with several different types of rigging that you see on the boxes from different manufacturers. I will try to add plans of these different riggings in the plans of the ship.