Legendary designer Olin Stephens has seen it all in 100 years of race design.
Early in my yacht design career, I was offered a job - as a trainee engineer, naval architect - by Olin Stephens of Sparkman & Stephens. The S&S design firm was at the height of its design powers at this time - creating winning designs of every imaginable size for the newly formulated International Offshore Rule. (IOR) The year was 1971.
Olin and his, not inconsiderable design team, had just completed the drawing work on the second Morning Cloud for the then Prime Minister of the UK, Edward Heath. I turned the job offer down. I was already deeply involved in designing, but I had just embarked on my own racing yacht campaign that was destined to form my own career.
You can never do these things alone and the design and building of a winning Half Tonner involves a lot of friends - I didn't want to let them down by swanning off to start a career with S&S.
Did I make the right decision? Who knows, but I like to think I managed to take a tiny sliver of the design ethos that has driven the S&S brand for so many years. Olin Stephens, the most remarkable living advocate of yacht design, turns 100 this month. I celebrate his enormous contribution to the development of sound offshore racing yachts and vessels in general, suitable for pleasure boating at sea.
Olin always pushed the frontiers of racing yacht evolution, but he never lost sight of the fact that to win you had to finish and that a boat configured for ocean racing should be able to look after its crew in adverse weather.
He also mixed engineering and innovation with common sense and a very healthy respect for the environment that his creations would have to survive in. This healthy mixture is sometimes missing on some of the offshore boats of today.
Appropriately, in Olin's 100th year, we have the first signs that a new International offshore measurement rule is starting to gain acceptance as a legitimate replacement for the much maligned, and long since defunct, IOR which Olin - together with fellow American race boat designer Dick Carter - wrote and formulated in the first place back in 1970.
The IOR did a fantastic job for many years fuelling an explosion in International offshore racing that made the various 'Ton Cups' - the Grand Prix events of their era. The International Measurement System (IMS) was supposed to seamlessly replace IOR, but the much vaunted Velocity Prediction Programme (that was supposed to evaluate the performance potential of all of the competitors), proved to be too complex.
VPP was unpopular and type forming in a rather unsatisfactory way. The void left by competitors leaving IMS has resulted in the IRC (Once called CHS) - a rule conceived for club racers - being hijacked by the ‘money-is-no-object' Grand Prix boys.
Well by the end of the 2008 season we will know if the Offshore Racing Council (responsible for running the rules of ocean racing) have come up with a winner in the new ORC International Rule. It is again VPP based, but I hope that it will encourage a much broader base of design type and that it will rate fairly the new generation of light, heavily ballasted and stiff boats.
All this leads nicely to the absurdity of canting keel yachts being allowed to compete in offshore races under the technically bereft IRC rule. At best CHS - now simply rebranded IRC - employed guesswork when assessing new design features, but this 'guesswork' was always weighted to penalise new 'go fast' developments, until real race data became available.
This did not have the effect of putting people off development projects, but it did protect the established fleet from being made obsolete by extreme design trends. This healthy state of affairs has now been undone by the acceptance in the IRC rating office, that type forming is acceptable. It isn't and shouldn't be encouraged by this rule.
On the canting keel issue, Cowes Week organisers have said they don't want the boats to compete unless they lock their keels amidships. All the authorities are doing in instigating this ban, is recognising that the rule is not being harsh enough on the new technology. Perhaps they should let them race, but handicap them to ensure they don't waltz off with all the prizes, thereby giving the rule back to the club racers, where it belongs.
The wisdom accumulated by Olin Stephens during his century of life, the majority invoved in race boat design, would come in really useful in the on going legal battles that the America's Cup is embroiled in. As the designer of no less than six AC winners, starting with the mighty J Class Ranger in 1937, he would assuredly be able to bring some gravitas to the table, a sense of history and more than a modicum of common sense.
But meanwhile more fuel is added to the ongoing court battle between Alinghi and Oracle, by the Kiwi's attempting to sue the Swiss for the fact that they were led to believe an event would take place which now, of course, will not!
Various loss of earnings figures are being banded around by Grant Dalton, team leader of Team New Zealand, as he attempts to keep the Kiwi challenge afloat. It really makes you wonder what sort of medication the Alinghi Principle, Ernesto Bertarelli, was on when he embarked on his attempt to rewrite the AC Rules!
The cry in the entire Middle East boating region is lack of berths, followed by lack of destinations. But it would be fair to say that this logjam currently impeding the sale of yachts and motor boats could have been avoided with some foresight from the originators of all of the waterside developments.
Hard to believe that when Dubai Marina was dug out of the sands and plans were announced for the Jumeirah Palm, that boat marinas weren't considered.
Indeed, I remember one realtor telling me, when I enquired about a mooring for the town house I was being shown in Dubai Marina: "There are no plans for berths and anyway, boats would spoil the view of the water!" Thank heavens the powers that be woke up (albeit slowly) to the massive potential for boating in the Gulf or else the boat builders would be even more stranded, than they are at the moment.
Better known in the Middle East for his powerboat designs for Al Yousuf, Julian Everitt has a successful design practice that has produced many race winning racing yacht designs over the past 30 years. He has also been Editor of the Royal Ocean Racing Club's magazine Seahorse and a columnist for Asian Marine. Email:
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