Improving the breed
John Rousmaniere catches up with a very much alive Dick Carter… one designer who during the 1960s and 70s really did change the game
Fifty years ago, in August 1965, a novice yacht designer from America with boyish looks and no reputation outside dinghy circles quietly slipped into Cowes in his unusual little boat and proceeded to turn ocean racing on its ear. His 34-footer Rabbit was rated near the bottom of that year’s Fastnet fleet, yet she beat 100 of the 150 other boats around the 608-mile course and won the race on cor- rected time by a comfortable 42 minutes. The sailing world was enchanted.
‘Rabbit’s effort, in fact, deserves to be long remembered,’ decreed the normally unsen- timental yachting writer Jack Knights. With her ‘hot crew trimming sheets by the minute’ she won the Class III start and proceeded to leave what Knights called ‘the ordinary boats’ far in her wake. The Carter boat seemed anything but ordinary. When Olin Stephens looked back on this period in his autobiography, All This and Sailing, Too, he wrote, ‘The postwar period seemed to offer little that
40 SEAHORSE
was new in sailing yacht design.’ The typical early-1960s ocean racing yacht was seriously heavy, with a long keel, an attached rudder and a sail plan featuring a big mainsail and small jibs and spinnakers. Rabbit, however, had her rudder way aft under the stern, and sepa- rated by several feet from a small, stubby keel that sprouted its own rudder (Carter initially called it a ‘flap’).
The hull looked so like a much smaller boat’s that Carter described it as ‘a partial dinghy type’, with its wide beam, round sections, low wetted surface and light displacement (for that time) of about 13,000lb. Her rig seemed backwards, with a tiny mainsail and vast foretriangle. The mast looked like a dinghy spar: a narrow aluminium tube with the halyards inside, the stays attached internally (without tangs), and no running backstays. ‘Even the 12 Metres don’t do it like this,’ Carter was assured by sparmaker and 12 Metre sailor Ted Hood.
Olin Stephens was so impressed by the flap and separate rudder that after dis- cussing them with Carter and testing them in the towing tank he put them on several of his own new boats. One, the 12 Metre Intrepid, proceeded to make a clean sweep of the 1967 America’s Cup. Soon there were flaps (now renamed trim-tabs) on fibreglass cruiser-racers everywhere; Dick Carter quickly became one of the dominant yacht designers of the era, with
consistently high finishes in the world’s two premier international offshore events, the One Ton Cup and the Admiral’s Cup. All that – and, still, very little was known about Dick Carter other than that he designed some of the most innovative and successful boats of his time, and that, while he lived in New England, where he most liked to sail was old England. One boating magazine at the time called him ‘the Mystery Man in US yachting’. Half a century later Dick Carter remains even more of a mystery – so much so, in fact, that some people are certain that he is dead. ‘Is someone aware if Dick Carter is still alive?’ asked a blogger in 2012. ‘I think that Dick Carter may have passed away in 2007’ came one response. This was con- firmed by Carter’s own former chief draftsman, Yves-Marie de Tanton. Tanton learned how wrong he was when he ran into Carter at a memorial service for Ted Hood in 2013…
When mutual friends put Carter and me in touch recently I called him up on the telephone. He said right out, ‘I’m not dead. I just turned the page.’
Uffa’s boys
‘I didn’t intend to design boats,’ Dick Carter told me when we spoke in February in the New York Yacht Club library. He didn’t intend to sail, either, until he attended summer camp on a lake in New Hampshire. ‘After passing the dreaded
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72