John Welsford at Sail Oklahoma!

摘要

Take an H"xl4" map of the United States. Put the tip of your left pinky on Port Townsend, your right pinky on Bar Harbor, and your thumbs will meet in Eufala, Oklahoma. Ask someone in Eufala to define "lapstrake," and you're likely to get a puzzled stare. But in just two years, Lake Eufala's annual Sail Oklahoma!, founded and hosted by Jackie and Mike Monies, has made a big name for itself in the loosely organized circuit of amateur small-boat events known as messabouts.More than 50 home-built wooden boats are pulled up the beach at Lake Eufala for the weekend, and one in eight of these boats is a Welsford design. That's a slightly better showing than perennial messabout favorite designers Jim Michalak and Phil Bolger, the runners-up. There's a Pathfinder, a Houdini, a couple of Sherpa dinghies, and Scamp No. 4, a veteran of the Everglades Challenge. There's even a Welsford version of the popular sandbox-with-rocker Puddle Duck Racer, which Welsford sails to a third place finish in Saturday's 2011 Puddle Duck World Championships.