... all this started a cold but sunny winter day in December some years ago, when I came for the first time into Manfred’s office to discuss a major real estate and investment project. More than by the first drawings of the envisaged project my attention was at that time attracted by a beautiful wooden star class model with an obviously original sliding gunter rig, which gave the office atmosphere something unique and exiting.

Motivated by publications like James Keesling’s “A Star is Reborn” (http://www.starclass.org/artman/publish/article_36.shtml) in which he states that “this is really better than finding a Harley in a barn!”, step by step and glas of red wine after glas of red wine, we developed the idea and vision to find an old wooden starclass, the older the better, to be refitted and saved from being rotten.

On top of that, we developed the idea that it would be a great experience and challenge to find out how the first stars performed and were handled with the old gaff rig. To our knowledge, there was (except in the exibition of the Mystic Seaport Museum) no starclass existing and no boat on the water with an original gaff rig anyway. We would have to fit the old starclass hull with a gaff rig of the original dimensions, which, as it can be seen on the historic photos of the early starclass times, was a sliding gunter rig, fitted on many racing dinghy classes in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century.