Posted by Tom W Clark on 10/15/10 - 7:06 AM
#18
Joe -- You have completely misunderstood what I wrote. Let me try again.
In response to my suggestion that your 1971 Sport 13 may have had its Perko stern light added later, you wrote:
Whaler did not use the Perko on the 13' until 1976 as you state.
I bought my 13' in early 1975 if I remember correctly.
Why or how could someone know that Whaler was going to use the Perko in 1976 when they bought the light in 1975?
What does not matter is knowing what Whaler would end up using in 1976. A guy buying a stern light in 1975 is in no way limited to what may, or may not, happen in the future. How can a guy know the future? He goes to the store and buys the stern light off the shelf. It happens to be a Perko light. There is no connection to what Whaler is doing. He might have bought an Attwood stern light and then your Sport 13 would have had a Attwood stern light on it when you bought it and you might be trying to convince everybody that Whaler was using Attwood stern lights in 1971.
I am merely making a point about the
possibilities, about what might have happened. I do not know how you Sport 13 was configured with from the factory and neither do you. We are merely speculating here.
What we do know without any argument is that there are no Whalers in an any factory literature shown with a Perko stern light until 1976 and every small Whaler I have ever seen that was made before 1976 that has an original stern light has had the Kainer, whose globes are very hard to come by.
From this I conclude that Whaler used Kainer stern light until 1976 and then started using Perko stern lights after that.
Who knows? Maybe Whaler ran out of Kainer stern lights one day in 1971 and had to send somebody to a chandlery to pick up a substitute and it happened to be a Perko.
Maybe your boat had a prototype Perko stern light?
The other observation I offer from my not insignificant years of Whaler study is that after 30, 40 or 50 years there are damn few Sport 13s out there that still have their original stern lights. Most have been replaced at some point.