“The Joy of Sailing a J”- by Gaston Moonen

Gaston Moonen- is a current owner of a J/27 and J/145 in The Netherlands and his family has a J/120, too. 

Enjoy Gaston’s story about how they fell in love with sailing a long line of J’s over time.

“If there is anything that got my family and me into fast cruising it is J/Boats. I started sailing at the age of nine when my father, an agricultural entrepreneur in the most land-locked province in the Netherlands, took his family– with five children- on a two-week sailing course. A few weeks after, he purchased two dinghies and the subsequent winter he ordered his first yacht, a Van der Stadt Design.

My mother, not feeling comfortable on any boat, showed greatness in allowing this, something she has continued doing until the present day, including never lacking interest in the tales of sailing adventures we bring home.

I got to know J/Boats when I was studying at the University of Minnesota and saw J/22s competing against each other on Lake Minnetonka in 1990. I have never lost that image!

That same summer of 1990, my father, my brother Martien and I test-sailed several sailing boats of different makes in the Netherlands. This included the J/35, which a dealer had just brought to Dutch waters as an example of J/Boats’ bigger models.

It did not take us too long to decide in favour of a brand new J/35, Then, and actually for every subsequent boat purchase, we used three main selection criteria: first, the boat had to be fast - no speed, no fun. Second, it had to be rock solid, both in build and equipment. And third: when, after a weekend’s sailing, you took a last look at the boat, the boat should make you think, each and every time: ‘What a beauty!’ Although we did not know it then, this last criteria is very much in line with what I once heard in person from Rodney Johnstone, saying: ‘Half the joy of owning a boat is looking at it.’

Fast cruising is what we mainly did with our J/35 Jam Session. This ranged from trips to Normandy, including the Channel Islands, to fjords in Norway and also doing a ’Round Britain,’ but then in cruising mode, enjoying the shore’s great beauty. Most often we shared, meaning that one crew would do the first half of the trip, another crew the other half, always with at least a few family members on board. We truly loved our J/35, and not only because we were overtaking boats that were much bigger. We loved it also because it was such a comfortable boat to sail, which may come as a surprise to those who have only seen a J/35 and not sailed it. There was comfort in its stability, comfort in its straightforward set-up, also on the inside, and comfort in its ruggedness. While we pushed it hard occasionally, nothing broke, everything did what it was supposed to do. It had the finger-tip control in combination with thrilling responsiveness to wind and sea conditions that we knew from dinghy sailing.

While fast cruising was its main destiny, we occasionally raced. I really got to know how much fun this was when I studied and worked in Manhattan in the early nineties and was a crew member sailing in Long Island Sound with skipper Dominique. Great fun, on a J/35 in a one-design fleet of about 20 boats. That’s where I got hooked on one-design racing, truly boat-to-boat racing. On my return to the Netherlands, this translated into the purchase of a J/22 and taking part more and more often, together with my wife Anne Marie and two friends, in J/22 one-design races, culminating in joining the 1995 J/22 Worlds in the Netherlands. While our results were poor, the fun we had and our learning curve were steep.

Having started families of our own, we decided it was time for something bigger and time to join the J/sprit revolution that J/Boats triggered in the nineties. As a sailing family we looked for a boat with ease of sail handling downwind, while still applying the other three criteria mentioned above, the first one having become even more nuanced, i.e. we were not only seeking passage-making speed but also excellent performance in upwind conditions. Our experience had shown that when sailing on the North Sea, beating against the wind somehow occurred more often than sailing downwind, and that pointing high was so much fun when gaining on other boats while enabling you to keep your engine hours low. So early this century we roamed boat shows and all the family members involved came to the same conclusion: it had to be a J/120. To get a good idea of the details of our newly-ordered J/120 we visited the J/Composites shipyard in Les Sable d’Olonne in France, just as we had visited the TPI shipyard on Rhode Island for our J/35 in the nineties. Besides the warm welcome we received from the Johnstone’s and others, this gave us amazing insights into how J/Boats is able to blend innovative new techniques with solid craftsmanship.

What makes sailing on a "J "so typically "J"? A few reasons that leap to mind are:

• ‘Feeling’ the wind through your boat: every puff is translated into speed and/or higher pointing;
• Staying in touch with the elements: the low freeboard/topsides at cockpit level contribute tremendously to sailing, feeling close to the water, yet remaining dry;
• Walking on the deck of any J you feel the solid ‘build’ of the boat;
• The set-up of things, be it on the deck or inside, makes sense. One quickly relates to this ‘common sense,’ reflected in design and execution, built on experience. This common sense approach is also the stepping stone for innovation, the Johnstone family not only thinking about changing a product but how people relate to sailing, how that changes and what this requires to optimize the joy of sailing;
• Whenever I see a J it is a joy for the eye and it gives you a great feeling to sail on one of these gems yourself! After all, who wants to sail on an ugly boat?

Still today, our J/120 does what we bought it for: providing many enjoyable family sailing hours across generations, with my father at the age of 85 still sailing on it, or my brothers and sisters, and our children, cousins or the like-minded, joining in. And every trip is a new adventure.

Probably my wife and I are the worst infected by the J-fever, having bought a J/27, called Jiggy, in 2004. We use Jiggy both as ‘get away from work’ on a nearby lake and as a pocket racer in winter race series in the Netherlands, leading to pleasant podium ascents with a boat of 35 years in mint condition.

For a good two years now, my wife and I and our three children are also the proud owners of the J/145 Ilderim, the fifth J in the family of J/boats we have sailed extensively. While providing more space, more speed, and also more draft, our J/145 ticks by far all the boxes we are looking for in a sailing boat - and even more, providing a fast, robust and comfortable yacht of timeless and striking beauty that offers an excellent and safe basis for memorable family fun sailing adventures.

From the very beginning, the Johnstone family has understood what it takes to make this happen for our family, and many others. Enjoy your J!”

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