Through the summer of 1966 Red Jacket took eleven of thirteen starts on the Great Lakes. That winter she headed south for the SORC and beat more than eighty-five of the best racers of the day across a punishing series of offshore courses through the Florida Straits and the Bahamas.

The result mattered. It was an unambiguous answer to a question the rest of the industry had only begun to ask — whether a cored composite hull could survive, and win, in serious ocean conditions. Red Jacket answered yes, decisively, and the wider yacht-building world rearranged itself around the result.