Escape Expedition Wins First Everglades Challenge
Article By George VanSickle
Background
George "VanMan" VanSickle participated and on the very first Watertribe Everglades Challenge race, and won sailing this Escape Expedition. It was a heavy weather year, he capsized a couple of times and broke his mast twice, having to jury rig it along the way. He gave me some neat info about the boat below.
Q - Shorty
From what I understand, that hull has been made by a couple of different companies and sold under a few names. Do you know much about the history of it's manufacture?
A - VanMan
Well, a little snippet anyway. The Laser 2 (which had quite a history prior to this) was consolidated under the Sunfish-Laser company by Peter Johnstone in the 90s. He bought the rights to manufacture the Zuma, sunfish, laser, laser2 and Daysailer dinghies and produced all these from a manufacturing facility in R.I. Eventually he developed a vision around the idea that sailing was too inaccessible to entry level sailors. It was an elitist sport and the entry level equipment was too difficult to attract novices.
Escape sailboats was born from the idea of an extremely easy sailboat, a board boat, to buy, own and sail. Peter developed the first Escape as the first rotomolded polyetheylene sailboat, with a very simple rig, designed by Gary Hoyt, an innovative sail and rig designer.
To launch Escape, Peter sold most of the Sunfish-Laser designs to Vanguard sailboats. The laser, laser 2, sunfish all went to Vanguard. The Daysailer went to a former manufacturer of that class in Rhode Island. In the process, he retained the rights to duplicate the Laser 2 hull form under a different name. This became one of the early Escape models in 97, the Expedition 14.5. Essentially a Laser 2 hull with the Gary Hoyt, Smart Rig. Likewise, the Zuma became the Escape 12.5 with a similar rig. Except for the Expeditions, the original Escape rotomolded boats had grey hulls and the Smart Rig.
Unfortunately, the Expeditions were a transitional boat. The market for a reletivley expensive to produce hull with a Smart Rig turned out to be quite limited and the Expedition 14.5 and 12.5 stopped production after about a year. They were replaced by an expanded lineup of rotomolded Escape designs (much cheaper to mass produce) of different lengths and rig variations. These hulls were very stable, easy to sail and very durable.
Eventually the Expedition rights went to Catalina, who sat on the designs for a year or 2 and then started producing them with a different rig yet again, with a different name.
Peter Johnstone sold Escape Sailboats to Johnson Outdoors, who moved the company to Michigan to combine with another small boat company they owned. The rotomolded hulls were produced somewhere else (Georgia I think) anyway - but Escape ceased to be a 'sailors' company.
