Opposite: seen in the context of a 12 Metre of circa 1967, such as Sparkman & Stephens’ famous Intrepid, with her truncated transom and snub bow overhang the profile of Shamrock IV, designed in 1913, is already starting to look surprisingly contemporary. Above: Shamrock is relaunched in Brooklyn following modifications including fabric – and quickly banned – fairings added between mast and mainsail. Resolute sits astern
Shamrock IV to sail a 30-mile reach, which was her fastest point of sail. (There were complaints that Adams was second- guessed that day by the boat’s syndicate manager.) This left Lipton needing just one victory
to take the Cup home. His hopes were torpedoed, however, by his disorganised operation and lack of preparation. One day Lipton got his wish when a
fresh wind blew in. The irony was that there was too much breeze. His boat was built to sail fast and safely in 18kt, not 25. Shamrock IV’s crew flat out refused to start for safety reasons. Five knots less, and fewer whitecaps, and they could have raced and Tommy Lipton could well have taken the Cup back home. The Deacon proceeded to calmly steer
Resolute to three straight wins to keep the Cup in New York. Lipton came back once more in 1930.
In the first match under Marconi rigs on both boats, and the first one sailed at New- port (which this time the New York Yacht Club imposed on Lipton without negotia- tion), he lost badly to the brilliant organ- iser Harold Vanderbilt, who had learnt a thing or two about management when he was on the Resolute syndicate in 1920. ‘I canna win, I canna win,’ Lipton muttered. That could have been said too by
Charles Nicholson, who did so much to create modern sails and rigs. In 1934 his extraordinary Endeavour,
designed to the Universal Rule’s J-Class, was fast on every point of sail and also won the first two races easily. Then her huge lead in race three vanished when skipper Thomas Sopwith panicked and was passed by the defender Rainbow, sailed by Harold Vanderbilt, who had all but given up. With new life, Vanderbilt and Rainbow
then won three straight races and the America’s Cup.
Why bother with a gaff? By 1934 the new Marconi-Bermudian rig had taken over much of American sailing. At first change came slowly. Some of the most successful innovations were made by designers and builders who, like Charles Nicholson, had experience in aviation. Wind tunnel tests of wings and sails at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated the importance of a high aspect ratio in a foil, with narrow long wings and narrow tall sails often proving superior to stubby short ones. One of these designers was W Starling Burgess, an aero- plane builder (like Nicholson) and also a pilot who went on to develop a number of very original and successful Marconi- rigged boats, including the popular Atlantic Class One-Design and three America’s Cup defenders that beat Nichol- son’s J-Class boats during the 1930s. These advantages were not limited to
new designs. In 1917, when several owners in a fleet of club one-designs on Long Island Sound took a chance and converted their boats to the rig, they quickly discov- ered new qualities in their boats. The ones with Marconi rigs pointed higher, were faster most of the time, were easier to steer, and the sails were so much easier to handle that they could get by with fewer crew. In 1920 Yachting magazine published
an article favourable to the new rig by a respected New York Yacht Club member, Butler Whiting, under the headline, ‘Why Bother with a Gaff?’ The new rig breathed new life into old, traditional boats that did not quite qualify as yachts. On Barnegat Bay, along the shore of New Jersey, a 20ft skimming dish called the Sneak Box, originally used for hunting wild fowl in the marshes, experi- enced a racing revival when the old rigs were discarded in favour of towering new sails and spars. Writing in 1927, a Sneak
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SEAHORSE 31
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