"I'm really looking forward to the MNC Battle In Bamma Round 2
I've sailed in every Mutineer Nationals since 2002 except 2015. This will be my lucky 15th MNC."

I plan my summers around this event. Every year I look forward to seeing old friends (some of whom are getting older and older, myself included). MNC truly is a Reunion. Come once, and you'll look forward to seeing your new friends in the future.

I am impressed each year with the increasing skills of the sailors. Come to MNC and you will improve your sailing in a week as much or more than you would day sailing all year long.

There are many friendly, knowledgeable people at MNC. Get any question answered, from which line is best to use for a mainsheet or a full-length halyard, to the best technique for slow smoking beef brisket.

A Buccaneer sailor many years ago said going to Nationals was a chance to sail in new, world class venues. If we were golfers we'd dream about playing Pebble Beach. This is a chance to sail Browns Creek on the Tennessee River out of a secure harbor and spend the week at friendly Browns Creek Sailing Association which has wonderful facilities.

In Colorado today it's 50 degrees and raining. At Browns Creek the first week of October it's blue skies, steady breezes and averages a high of 81 degrees, with water temperature in the 80's. People pay big bucks to go the Caribbean for sailing in weather like that.

Get there any way you can!
Gib Charles

I attended my first nationals in 2010 after it was on the verge of being canceled. It was good to put a face on those Yahoo email address. My excitement carried over to the next year so I decided to invite everyone down to Grapevine Lake for the 2011 MNC and the 40th Anniversary of the Mutineer. It was a big success! I was the only mutt on Lake Grapevine at the time but we had had a total of 13 boats attend from 11 different states. From that beginning, Grapevine Sailing Club has grown one of the largest Mutineer Fleets in the country. We have found and rebuilt over 20 Mutineers since 2011. We currently have 15 boats still in the area and an average of 8 to 10 boats racing in our Mutineer Series Events.

Come for the tight racing, great camaraderie, and great food. Join the fun this year at BATTLE-IN-BAMMA (Round 2).

Chad Harris

Do you realize what a gem the Mutineer is? Most of us have come to own our Mutineers because we inherited them, they were given to us by family or friends because they didnt have time for them, we found them abandoned in some field, and a few of us actually bought them. For most of us it was also our first boat, and our introduction into the great world of sailing. We took these little boats and cleaned them up, fixed them up to the best of our ability, knowledge, and budget, then we set off to learn how to sail. In some cases, mine in particular, the boats became an obsession. When I started sailing my boat I noticed that there werent many like mine around. I found the community of Mutineer owners on the Internet, and in that group a wealth of knowledge on the boat, and dinghy sailing in general. Every minute of free time was put into the boat and sailing. I was having a blast. I thank God that I have a very understanding wife that allowed me to pursue my new hobby. I am now on my sixth Mutineer. This one was given to me. It had been sitting under a tree near the lake for FIFTEEN years. With this boat I got some of the old brochures and a copy of an article from Motor Boating & Sailing.
I found this article very interesting. It was titled, Chryslers Lively Little Sailing Machine. In it the reporter, Christine Brown, was invited to test sail a Mutineer with Roy Bacon. Roy was the Chrysler National Sailboat Manager, and an international racing skipper. Christine was a reporter for the magazine, and a novice sailor. The article started with a little history about the boat and the builders. The boat was introduced in August 1971, and it was developed by the three man team of Rod MacAlpine-Downie, designer; Dick Gibbs, boat builder and sail maker; and Roy Bacon, international racing skipper. It then went on to talk about the boat. The boat was initially intended to be marketed as a beginners daysailer and trainer, but with the extensive features such as the roller-furling jib, spinnaker, foredeck launcher tube, boom vang, hiking straps, hiking stick, jib haulers, and more, this was no beginners boat. If anything, it was a racer trainer. All of these features were considered innovative, and leading edge in those days, so the fact that the basic design was never changed, and that many of the innovations are found on most of to-days racing boats says a lot about the designers. The article went on to talk about the test sail, and it shared a couple of Roy Bacons racing tips, (youll have to catch me on the race course to find out about those), but the overall consensus was that the Mutineer was a fun little boat to sail, and that it should please a variety of people.
This test sail was done in a brand new fully rigged boat. There are not a whole lot of those today, but the same holds true for our old project boats that we have resurrected from wherever we acquired them. I have come to find that it takes a special kind of sailor to take a dilapidated old, abandoned boat and carefully bring her back to life. Its a lot of work, and sometimes it gets very frustrating, but when its done, its almost like shes a part of you. I have several other boats now, from a Catalina 22 to a Sunfish, but none are as much fun to sail as my Mutineer. When I sail my other boats it feels like work, but when I sail the Mutineer, I feel like I am a part of that Lively Little Sailing Machine.
Rey Garza is the former Secretary of the Mutineer Class Association and lives in Austin Texas. He is also an original founder of the Mutineer Class Association and has served the MCA in a variety of roles.

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Join us for the 2017 MNC "Battle In Bamma" Round 2. Come & Learn From Your Mutineer Family.

Revival of a Class
Article By: Ian Wells


I am a newcomer to the Mutineer fleet. I have owned a Mutineer for a year and half and sail it with my family on our local Long Pond - 1/2 mile by a hundred yards. Even though I sailed competitively a lot when I was younger (in 505s, Fireballs, Daysailors, International 14s, GP14s, FJs, Yflyers, 420s etc) I had not given much thought to racing in my Mutineer, until Gib came along and "encouraged" my son, Todd, and I, to travel to the National championships. When I sailed regattas 30+ years ago, they were tremendous fun but solo affairs - I'd see a few friends, make a few friends. Mutineer racing is nothing like that.
Friendly Mutineer sailors ourselves are reviving the class made up of
boats that had been dispersed to cottages, lakes and ponds across the
country - and we are doing it by using the Internet. Todd and I had not
been members of the Mutt group until just before the regatta.
Let me tell you our story. Firstly, this regatta was too far away to trail
our boat, so we flew in. We had no boat until Gib put out a request on the yahoo group list - was there anyone who would consider lending a boat to an experience sailor? . Gordon quickly, generously, replied. Gordon is a novice sailor who had put in serious amount of work upgrading his newly purchased Mutt into sailing trim. He would be willing to have someone to try out his boat and tune it up. He would learn from the experience and get face to face assistance. But we had no way to get to the regatta from Washington DC and another request went out Friday night for carpooling. Tim replied - since he was also flying in, he volunteered to pick us up and drive us down to the regatta. It turns out a navigator was handy to have in the final few miles of back lanes to the yacht club!
So Sunday evening we met up with Gordon and spent the next 24 hours working on his boat, adding telltales, barberhaulers, windvane, tightening this and that. All 8 mutineers were lined up on shore and it took me a while to figure out why everyone was so friendly to people they had just met - and of course most people (except Todd and I ) had NOT just met. Everyone knew each other from the Yahoo Mutt group. Everyone (except me) had good ideas for setting up everything on these boats. So tools went back and forth, as did ideas, suggestions, and of course, beer.
When I perused the Mutt group list, after I got back, I was amazed to see what I had been missing. When someone came up with a way to set up better jib furling or fixing a rudder, detailed photos appeared on the web page. Everyone was told of common things that break, and advised to fix them while upgrading the boat. When our mainsheet block pulled out on Tuesday, the procedure to fix it was quickly told to us. No exploration or guessing what to do. The group knew.
Racing was fun and competitive. I am no end impressed with the friendliness and competitiveness of Mutt sailors. Its wonderful to race under a first class Race Committee, with 8 Mutts on the line, on the Chesapeake with daily, warm weather, sea breezes and a 30 mile fetch. Long Pond this is not!
Todd and I were pleased to hold onto third place by the end of the week, and our boat got faster during the week because of tuning assistance from fellow Mutineer sailors - the ones who had been reading the Mutt group postings (if only we had been reading all along!).
So the mutt group list has enabled Mutt sailors to find each other. The
mutt list has created a community that 15 years ago could not have existed because these boats have been mainly dispersed to cottages and backyards and lakes and ponds, one by one.
The Mutt list also has enabled each of the boats to be similarly upgraded and tuned with the result that the boat speeds were very similar - a key ingredient for great racing since the racing becomes a matter of skipper and crew skill, not a matter of who purchased a gadget or knew a weak point before everyone else.
But mainly the Mutt list has created a widening community of people - one I'm pleased to have found - a community with a common love of improving and racing our boat, the Mutineer.
This is the Mutineer Revival.

Taking the Prize by Jason Schuster
- A noob's perspective on the joys of learning to sail!
What is the prize? In case you haven't read any of the Master & Commander books or even watched the movie, the seafaring men aboard a Royal Naval vessel would claim a prize by defeating their enemy and taking their ship and all the valuables aboard it. The same would be true for pirates like our-selves, with the exception that pretty much any ship was game and a candidate for capture. One might say all this was before our time and such prizes don't exist any-more today. Certainly true but there are still lots of prizes to be had as you captain or crew your Mutineer on the water. You might now be asking yourself: Really? There's treasure to be had while sailing my Mutineer? ...but the only cannon on my boat is a logo on the sail, what enemy vessel can I capture with that? OK, so perhaps the definition of a prize has changed greatly since those good ol days, which is why I thought it was high time a discussion was had on the types of prizes available. One of the most obvious prizes sought by many is the National Championship title/ trophy. Certainly a great prize to be captured, but with my sailing skills I would have to resort to old days pirate methods and physically steal the trophy to put it on my shelf. So, if you're not planning on breaking into anyone's house to get a trophy what else is there? It's really quite simple, and I'm positive all sail-ors of any level would agree with me that sailing just for the love of sailing is the greatest prize of all. Sailing for love of sailing! Arrr! that's a cheesy thing to say, but really this is why I own my boat, just getting on the water and getting the wind to move me around is pure bliss. This simple accomplishment alone is an amazing prize, but there's more. Once the basics are figured out, there's that darn wind that I wish I could read better, boat handling techniques to refine, teamwork to smooth out, and always more knots to learn to tie, a whole new language of sailing terms to learn, and man would it be cool to fly a spinnaker, and that's not even touching upon rigging strategies, upgrades, canvas work, and on and on Tied for first place of the greatest prizes is that there are other people that love sailing just as much as you and I do, and if you can believe this, they own a Mutineer also! The camaraderie alone would be a great reason to attend the Nationals, but once again, getting there may not be possible or even interest you, but there's no need to despair, you don't have to only hang out with fellow Mutineers, next best choices would be our big brother Buccaneer's or even little sister Pirateer's, but really who cares? Sailing is sailing and all the local sailors I have met are just as cool. It's easy to see why a lifestyle can revolve around sailing or be purely contained within it, but whatever your level of sailing enjoyment is don't forget to stop and enjoy the moment. With all the Nationals and regatta talk on the group, I wanted to step back from all that for a moment and remind everyone that there are amazing adventures and prizes waiting for you right on your own lake! Jason Schuster Grand Island, NE Home Lake: Johnson Lake I learned to sail about 2 years ago and just bought my Mutineer (and first sailboat) last year, August 2010. As a noob sailor and Mutineer owner, I rank higher than a landlubber but just below a scurvy bilge rat. The prizes I'm after are very simple and rather basic, but none the less great achievements in their own right.

Jason Schuster Grand Island, NE Home Lake: Johnson Lake I learned to sail about 2 years ago and just bought my Mutineer (and first sailboat) last year, August 2010. As a noob sailor and Mutineer owner, I rank higher than a landlubber but just below a scurvy bilge rat. The prizes I'm after are very simple and rather basic, but none the less great achievements in their own right.