From: kendeeley [kendeeley@email.msn.com]
Sent: Monday, October 18, 1999 9:47 AM
To: Bill Henderson
Subject: shark stories found on aol newsletter

A reminiscing shark owner Remembering a George and his  Boat : 

In April the sailing world lost a pioneer, with the passing at age 73 of George
Hinterhoeller. Settling in Niagara-on-the-Lake Ontario after immigrating
from his native Austria, he designed and built one of the first production
fiberglass sailboats. 

The Shark is a 24 foot, 2,000 pound planing keelboat,
popular not only on Lake Ontario, but in Europe as well. Its quality
craftsmanship and blazing speed eventually caused over 4,000 units to be
built. Hinterhoeller went on to be a major player in C&C Yachts.;

Personal Experiences; I owned Shark #589 for a couple of years, before
moving on to a larger boat to better; accommodate my growing family. I raced
the Shark with my then-wife and a friend. We were all novices and this was
our first racing boat. As we started a downwind, point-to-point race we
found ourselves in the fleets third tier. I gave the tiller to my wife and
went up on the foredeck to help get the spinnaker flying. Once it was set we
started to move quite smartly; so much so that we were about to rear-end the
boat ahead. To avoid this, I turned to my wife and called "come-up." She
obediently dropped the tiller and started up toward the bow. She looked
quite puzzled when I passed her, as I dove for the tiller, to prevent the
collision. It was a great lesson in; the need to learn the lingo of
sailing.

That summer we cruised the Shark a couple of times, once by
ourselves and once with our five children! We had a delightful sleighride 20
miles down Lake Ontario from Rochester to Pultneyville. Docked at
Pultneyville Yacht Club that evening the four youngest kids shared the two
quarter berths, arrayed feet-to-feet, while the oldest slept on the floor of
the cabin and my wife and I shared the vee berth. Before turning-in we
actively discouraged them from drinking anything. The next day dawned to the
sound of surf the wind had changed and this enabled us to reach back home a
most unusal thing on Lake Ontario; 

My mentor in Sharking was Jack Lee, a fellow member of Genesee Yacht Club, 
in Rochester, New York. At that time (1970) we had a fleet of five Sharks. 
Jack was an early agent for Hinterhoeller and sold a number of the-then 
revolutionary design. He still owns and sails Hammerhead, Shark #188.; 
The Shark was his first one-design sailboat and introduced him to three
decades of pleasure racing one-design dinghies and keelboats.
Several of his newsletter columns can be found in the AOL Sailing Library,
where they are available for downloading.