Tartan 10 Sailboat Review, Specs, and Listings

Design and Construction

The Tartan Ten is a 33-foot fractional sloop with a fin keel and spade rudder, carrying 3,340 pounds of lead ballast in a 6,700-pound hull. Her hull is solid fiberglass aft of 5 feet forward of the transom, where it transitions to a 1/2-inch balsa core except in the bilge, which is stiffened by a grid of hollow, hat-shaped fiberglass floors and stringers. That grid also receives the deck-stepped mast's compression post, a configuration rare in non-trailerable racers because it affords less control of mast bend. The hull-to-deck joint uses an inward-turned hull flange overlapped by the deck, topped by an aluminum toerail, with a strip of aluminum glassed under the flange and the whole seam bedded in butyl tape that remains soft for the life of the boat. Before leaving the factory, each hull is floated in an outdoor pool and 50 to 100 pounds of lead is glassed 5 feet forward of the mast so she sits on her lines, with molded flotation marks preventing later tampering with trim.

Rig and Handling

The deck-stepped mast sits in a cast aluminum collar and uses a "safe" section, though it is not anodized—early boats wore clear lacquer, later ones black paint. Shrouds pass through the deck to chainplates anchored on a heavy fiberglass tab rising from the topsides inside the main cabin. The primary winches are Lewmar 30s, and a tiller provides steering, as suited to a boat this light. On the first 150 or so hulls, jib and spinnaker halyards are wire and exit above the hounds. Schaefer booms on the first 70 boats suffered bent reefing hooks; Kenyon booms followed, using clew slugs rather than an outhaul car for leech tension. Under PHRF she rates from 123 to 132 depending on the handicapper, and her IOR rating sat near 28.5.

Accommodations

This is a racing interior first. Headroom is just 5 feet 2 inches and the cabin is dark. There is no icebox, no built-in stove, and only a small chart table, with a hand-pump sink on the port side. The standard head is a portable unit stowed under the forward V-berth, which itself runs a comfortable 6 feet. The cockpit stretches 9 1/2 feet for crew room. After hull #160 the main cabin's berths gave way to fixed berths with a combined backrest and leeboard, one of several major interior changes at that point. On boats before hull #200 the water tank sat under the starboard quarterberth and fuel under the port, a layout later reversed to fix sink drainage.

Known Issues

The earliest boats carried the worst defects. The first 100 hulls saw the original hollow stainless steel rudder posts bend too easily; Tartan states every such post was found and repaired by inserting a second post inside the original. In the first 90 boats the floor grid was too flexible and poorly attached, and Tartan claims repairmen were sent to fix every hull earlier than #84. The first 83 boats crushed the compression post area until a 5-by-4-by-1/4-inch aluminum plate was added beneath it; a tester on a hull in the 150s found the post moved off the grid onto the hull itself. Many owners report chronic deck leaks where the shrouds penetrate. Two chainplate tab delaminations occurred in the first 100 boats, and dimpling was corrected near hull #270 by widening the tab from 12 to 18 inches; by hull #200 the core under the tab was removed to bond it to the outer skin. Pre-#200 hulls also saw excessive drivetrain vibration and shaft coupling failures, and pre-#200 tank placement caused sink drainage trouble.

The Verdict

The Tartan Ten is a purpose-built one-design racer with a deep Great Lakes pedigree and a builder that aggressively chased down early structural faults. She rewards a racing-minded owner who accepts a minimal cabin, and punishes a buyer who ignores hull-number-specific defects.

Pros