Less than 80 Feet Sailing

St. Roque, 72’ Pilothouse Sloop

The concept: a blend of classical beauty and functional logic — beauty in the guise of long overhangs and a towering ketch rig; logic in the guise of a vessel that can be sailed easily shorthanded and maintained without an army, a boat that remains simple and comfortable to be aboard.

The decks are clean, proportions apt, accommodations understated and practical. Brightwork topside is kept to a minimum, even the welds are unfaired. Simple clearing ports are in the bulwarks instead of elaborate plumbed scuppers. But the vessel is what it wants to be, what the Owner calls “rough and tumble with good bones.”

The pilothouse just aft of the mizzen — “the heart and soul of the boat” — sits Fifelike in the stern sections; the structure is a copy of the pilot station on a genuine down-east lobster boat. A generous fantail often adorned with director’s chairs. Forward, the cockpit and main companionway, then acres of uncluttered deck.

Inherent is the shorthanded component, and the sailplan with its ambitious mizzen points to great jib-and-jigger capability for all those times when you want the horsepower but don’t have the muscle aboard to wrestle with 800 square feet of mainsail in close quarters against a stiff breeze. The main is conventionally hoisted on slides. A broad carbon fiber Park Avenue boom allows you to drop the sail under control in its lazy jacks at will. The mizzen sports an in-mast furling system aft, the jib an electric Harken furler forward.

Below, traditional aesthetics reign. The interior is flushed out with white paint and teak trim, beaded paneling here and there, over/under bunks for the kids and a portside double for the owner’s cabin with a head that includes a full-size tub. A simple longitudinal galley is aft of and beneath the companionway, opposed by a walk-in engine and mechanical room. Three steps up and you’re in the pilothouse, with its businesslike steering station and settees flanked outboard port and starboard by pilot berths in the hips.

St. Roque is a strong boat with good bones, designed in the Corinthian vernacular and optimized with modern thinking and contemporary equipment. She’s a boat conceived around a family that enjoys sailing together and bringing along friends, a family with the wherewithal and fiber to pursue this in the daunting context of 71 feet.

 Principal Dimensions