RAGTIME

In the 1960s, her rivals called her the “Black Box” and a “plywood New Zealand freak boat.” The 1967 Sydney–Hobart Race Committee banned her as unfit for ocean racing. But as INFIDEL (her original name), she won the Keelboat Fleet Championship in New Zealand that year, beating the long-dominant RANGER.

Then a pair of new American owners took the big, sloop-rigged sailing canoe to California and renamed her RAGTIME. Already a decade old, she surfed 2,225 miles from Los Angeles to Honolulu in the 1973 Transpacific Yacht Race (Transpac), and out-dueled the reigning champion, the maxi WINDWARD PASSAGE, for line honors. She did it again in 1975. “RAGTIME was a new breed. She turned a lot of heads,” remembers Mark Johnson, who owned and skippered WINDWARD PASSAGE in those years.

Bob Steel, a veteran West Coast racer who has sailed aboard RAGTIME since the 1970s, says that amid the fiberglass and aluminum revolution in racing sailboats in the 1960s and ’70s, RAGTIME and WINDWARD PASSAGE proved the enduring viability of wooden boats on the grand-prix circuit. “She’s still turning heads and winning races over a half century later,” Steel says. In early 2025, RAGTIME emerged from a nearly three-year refit.

“She was born to race,” says her ninth and current owner, Tina Roberts. “And that’s what she’s doing and will do.”

To read the rest of this article:

Click the button below to log into your Digital Issue Access account.

Read the Issue

No digital access? Subscribe or upgrade to a WoodenBoat Digital Subscription and finish reading this article as well as every article we have published for the past 50-years.

Subscribe Now