Well...
Interesting to say the least. I sailed on a Columbia 52, which was in the "little boat" division-which says a lot about distance racing today! This was quite the hot boat in the 70's, and is now owned by one of my buddies from my college sailing team (we were all-americans back in the day). The core of our team has been getting together for the last few Ensenada Races on board and doing extremely well (top 3 overall in the last 2 races).
We have managed to keep this boat very competitive with newer designs-considering we are well over 43,000 pounds and todays 50's are in the 25,000 pound range
This year was much breezier than expected, and while we were the 3rd boat to finish in our section (and several boats rated faster), we could could not save our time enough to trophy over the lighter boats.
Had the expected drop in wind speeds during the evening after our finish occurred things would have been very different, but it just blew harder that night-speeding the slower boats behind us into the finish!
But, that is boat racing, and we had some very exciting sailing-even though we could not surf as well as some other boats.
We confirmed the value of assymetrical spinnakers in heavy downwind conditions (I built an all-purpose A-sail for the race)-this boat is notorious for boom to pole rolling when running deep in bnig conditions, and while it was a handful, the A-sail minimized this to a large degree!
So, 3rd boat in, 6th in class, and a great time was had by all.
BTW- Martins' comments about steering are very well put(as usual)-the more you sail offshore, the more you realize just how critical strong and precise steering is-and that older boats have a LOT of room for improvement in their steering components. The Ericsons more than others can benefit tremendously from newer, bigger, deeper rudders!
Thanks for asking!
