DORADE
H
Top: Matt Brooks at the helm of Dorade Above: A page from the 1934 scrapbook Olin and Rod Stephens (pictured) prepared for their grandmother
10 CLASSIC BOAT MAY 2012
annah Riley spent a large part of last winter analysing a tattered piece of 82-year-old, blue-dyed, woollen cloth. A textile conservator and restorer from California’s Asian Art Museum, she is charged with
replicating the item, a small flag with an artistically cut white seahorse in the middle of the field. She eventually sourced a similar woollen bunting from a manufacturer in England, dye testing it for the proper colour match. The embroidered maker’s label on the hoist is even being reproduced by a machine.
Riley is on deadline. She is a critical part of a team competing in this year’s Newport to Bermuda Race. It may seem unusual to have a textile conservator on a race team, but this is no ordinary campaign. This is Dorade. The team are seeking to match the attention to detail and meticulous preparation that enabled Rod Stephens to win this race in 1932. After a one-year refit, her third in recent times, Dorade is stronger than ever and ready to tackle her new owner’s ambitious goal of completing all the major ocean races of the 1930s and 40s – Bermuda, Transpac, Transatlantic and Fastnet – that launched the career of one of the world’s most successful yacht design firms, Sparkman & Stephens. When the crew hoist the Stephens family’s racing burgee to the top of her varnished mainmast on 15 June, it will not only signal the legendary yacht’s return to ocean racing, it will mark the dawn of a new genre of
competitive classic yacht racing. Led by the Europeans with the well-polished Mediterranean circuit, the scene has led to the restoration of hundreds of significant racing yachts from the past. Yachts of fine pedigree, drawn by the likes of Fife, Nicholson, Watson, Stephens, Alden and Rhodes, to name only a few, have been scooped up and restored to top form. Around the globe, however, these greyhounds that predominantly raced distance in the ocean during their heyday, are kept in museum condition and only taken out coastwise in day-racing that contains as much pageantry as mark roundings. Save for the Transatlantic Classique, now on its second running, most classic events, and the boat owners, shy away from such aggressive racing.
OCEAN RACING Starting this summer, Matt Brooks, Dorade’s latest steward, hopes to change that mystique and build a critical mass for oceanic classic racing. “When I bought her, the boat was fine for the intended purposes,” says Matt, a Californian who bought Dorade in 2010. “[Edgar] Cato saved the boat by replacing all her frames. She was in fine shape for inshore sailing.” But Matt had another idea. “I wanted to take her out in the ocean and repeat her early race history and other ocean races.” This concept is now commonly referred to in the Dorade camp as “Matt’s crazy idea”.
PREVOIUS PAGE CORY SILKEN
PAM RORKE LEVY
BILLY BLACK
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