A cat with patches of 3 colours: black, orange, and white. Almost all calico cats are female, because the genes for colour are passed on the X chromosome, and it takes two X chromosomes, each with different colour instructions (one black, one orange. white is coded for elsewhere and isn't sex-linked.), for a calico pattern to result. The rare few male calico cats are XXY or XXXY, and are usually sterile.

My grandmother has burn scars over her entire back. Gently swirling pattern of begonias and other assorted floral-type things. She chose a dress on an August day in 1945 that she gets to wear until the day we bury her. She was miles away when the flash went up, but the doctor had to peel the charred fabric off with forceps and tweezers hours later. They'd never seen these kinds of burns before, where the actual pattern of the cloth transfered to the skin beneath.

Nowadays she wears long sleeved blouses and sweaters even in the height of summer, and my grandfather refuses to let her teach me the language. All I've got from that entire branch of the family tree is the tilt of my eyes and the scars on her back.

Calico is a small scratch built sailing dinghy. She’s not a very revolutionary boat by the look of her hull; in fact the hull is based on a design that is over 30 years old. Her rig however is right at the cutting edge of technology. Calico was deigned as a test bed for new rig technology, her sail and carbon mast were specially built for the boat.

Calico’s hull is built from lightweight fiberglass and carbon fiber reinforcement; her hull is 8’7” and 3’ wide. Her hull is wide, very wide for the boat size with soft chines and a flat dish-like bottom so she can plane easily. Building the hull took about a week. After that the daggerboard trunk and single thwart were added. There are no raised interior seats in this boat, all of the space is right on the single skin bottom. Since there is not really room in this boat for them, you sit on the floor and to windward of the lower mast step slide rail. The thwart is used as a line control center: 1 main sheet, 1 downhaul, port mast cant, starboard mast cant, forward mast tilt, aft mast tilt, 2 traveler lines, and the port and starboard mast cant safety stops. The whole hull is a single skin laminate with a foam-cored deck and transom making the whole structure about 40 lbs.

Rig Design
Calico’s rig consists of a single 5.4 m2 elliptical windsurfer sail and a 19’ carbon fiber mast. This sail allows the boat to sail in very light winds, and by light I mean from 3 to 4 knots up to about 15-20 knots if you really wanted to push your luck. The mast is able to cant 35 degrees to either side of vertical, allowing the sailor to increase or decrease the apparent sail area. When you sail upwind the mast can be canted to windward up to 35 degrees. Canting the mast increases the sail area by as much as 25% this allows the boat to carry a smaller sail or in the case of Calico; sail in much lighter winds. The cant mast also has the advantage of reducing drag on the hull, because it tends to lift the boat out of the water, instead of force it down like a normal mast and sail.

As of this writing Calico is still under construction, I hope to have her finished and ready for launch in early February 2003. Calico was presented here as an example of cant mast technology. I will post an update as soon as she is launched and sea trialed, with the predicted vs. actual figures for weight, speed, displacement and all of the other fun calculations.

Cal"i*co (?), n.; pl. Calicoes (#). [So called because first imported from Calicut, in the East Indies: cf. F. calicot.]


Plain white cloth made from cotton, but which receives distinctive names according to quality and use, as, super calicoes, shirting calicoes, unbleached calicoes, etc.


The importation of printed or stained colicoes appears to have been coeval with the establishment of the East India Company. Beck (Draper's Dict. ).


Cotton cloth printed with a figured pattern.

⇒ In the United States the term calico is applied only to the printed fabric.

Calico bass Zool., an edible, fresh-water fish (Pomoxys sparaides) of the rivers and lake of the Western United States (esp. of the Misissippi valley.), allied to the sunfishes, and so called from its variegated colors; -- called also calicoback, grass bass, strawberry bass, barfish, and bitterhead. -- Calico printing, the art or process of impressing the figured patterns on calico.


© Webster 1913.

Cal"i*co (?), a.

Made of, or having the apperance of, calico; -- often applied to an animal, as a horse or cat, on whose body are large patches of a color strikingly different from its main color.

[Colloq. U. S.]


© Webster 1913.

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