USA-26 One Life J/99

Doyle Sails has this great app where you can design your new spinnaker. If you need to waste time, bookmark it on your phone and start playing. You’ll look up 5 minutes later and realize more than an hour has passed…

By my way of thinking, the spinnaker design is going to set the color scheme of the boat. I was gravitating towards red, white, and blue and tried pretty much every combination on a spinnaker I could think of.

And while I really liked these designs (especially the second one), as we cruised Dragonfly this last summer, we also paid attention to ‘boat things’ that came in red, white, and blue. It rather saddened me to realize other than Old Glory itself, pretty much any red/white/blue color scheme was quickly going to fall over the line into ‘tacky’.

So, I was pretty lost until Kris — who found the Doyle app as fun as I had — sent me this:

Blue is my favorite color and any time I wanted to build a cool car from my Lego set when I was a kid, I hoarded the blue and black legos.

Any good design should also inspire. What really made me love Kris’ design is the inspiration it gave me for the hull art. If you remember the J/99 comes with a black bowsprit, and you imagine the black pattern in the center of her spinnaker design as the bowsprit sticking out with the bow below it, you can start to see the beginning of what might be some pretty striking hull art.

Not too long after Kris sent me her design, I sent her back this:

And that, folks, is our A1.5 and A2! (And the genesis of One Life’s hull art!)

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