Hughes Columbia Columbia 5.5 & Sabre For Sale & Buying Center

"This sleek one-design racing sloop and daysailor was designed for the most discriminating yachtsman who loves the combinatio of top performance and beautiful sailboat design. By taking Sigurd Herburn's original 5.5 meter hull design ""Carina"" and adding International 5.5 World Champion George O'Day's ""Minotaur,"" Columbia naval engineers created the Columbia 5.5. Molded in fiberglass we have created one of the most sophisticated racing yachts in this country at less than one-half of what an ""Open 5.5"" would cost. A real ""One-Design"" that performs with the same speed and characteristics as ""The International 5.5.""

The International 5.5 Meter website. and the 5.5 Meter Fleet USA Website. Northern California Class Association 5.5 Meter website. Yacht designer Bruce King left Columbia for Ericson Yachts. Ericson soon came out with a 32 footer. Rumor has it...

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MORE ON THE COLUMBIA 5.5 METER

Your February article on the Columbia 5.5 design deserves some comments as to how the class came about. I was a college student in Southern California in the early '60s when I saw an ad for a 5.5 Meter located in Newport Beach. At that time, the 5.5 was the largest and only open design class racing in the Olympics. Being an Olympic aspirant myself in the Finn class, and having never even seen a 5.5, I thought I'd take a look.

It turns out the 5.5 was named Carina, and had been built in Norway for the '56 Olympics that were held in Finland. Her owner was Bus Mosbacher of Galveston, who took a bronze medal with the boat. (Mosbacher would later win fame in the America's Cup, winning with the four-year-old Weatherly in '62, and the Intrepid in '67.)

I never found out why Mosbacher had brought Carina to the West Coast, but when I saw her she had not been used for quite a while and was in need of some TLC. I made an offer that I thought they would laugh at - and ended up with the boat. She dressed up beautifully, of course, and in the ensuing years I sailed her all over the Southland when I wasn't competing in the Finn. However, the only organized racing I could do with Carina was PHRF, and that was not what a onedesign racer like myself or a thoroughbred like Carina was particularly adept at. But I have some great memories of sailing Carina. Unique among them was a slide from the West End of Catalina to Alamitos Bay on a typical summer afternoon. Carrying the oversized spinnaker in a 25-knot westerly with an enormous rolling swell provided a thrill that was truly awe-inspiring.

During the second or third year I owned the boat, Columbia Yachts contacted me regarding their desire to use Carina to strike a mold for a one design class. Their objective was to come up with an alternative to the popular PC class, a boat of similar proportions that had been built in Kettenberg's San Diego yard since the early '30s. Columbia Yachts had originally tried to buy George O'Day's Minotaur, the radical gold medalist in the '56 Olympics, but they could never come to terms. Carina was a convenient and probably more sensible solution, so they used it. It pleases me to no end to see that now, some 40 years later, the class based on a boat I owned lives on."