Opposite: the Carter-designed Ydra won the 1973 One Ton Cup – a particularly notable event because it also featured the debut of young designer Doug Peterson and his light and blisteringly fast Ganbare. Left: with a novel flat underbody Carter’s successful 1973 Admiral’s Cupper Frigate still looks aggressively modern to this day
tion! I was trying to get insights into this mysterious thing. I had to analyse every- thing.’ He began by deciding how races are won, which he thought would indicate what type of boat to design.
swim test, I was ready to solo when I heard the camp counsellor express confidence in me. That’s something I’ve never forgotten.’ Later he raced a small boat off his family’s summerhouse on Cape Cod and took the occasional cruise (an adventure during World War II, when coastal waters were often closed by anti-submarine nets). Dick and his brother John moved on to the International 14 dinghy. The 14 appealed for three reasons. First, over- rigged and skittish, it was the perfect school for ambitious young sailors com- peting on a US racing circuit that included two other yet-to-be yacht designers, Bruce Kirby and Bill Lapworth. Second, the 14 originated in England and the Carters were hearty Anglophiles. And third, the 14 guru was Uffa Fox, the colourful Isle of Wight sailor-designer-boatbuilder whose books were absorbed by Dick and John. ‘We all read Uffa,’ Dick told me. ‘The reason we got an International 14 was because of Uffa’s books.’ The brothers did well, and in the off-season Dick raced in the intercollegiate dinghy circuit on the Yale University team that won the US national championship in 1950. But all this time he was nursing an ambition to sail in British waters. ‘Uffa’s books led to the 14, and the 14 led to racing in England.’ On military duty with US Air Force Intelligence in Germany, he contrived to go on leave and race an Uffa- designed Firefly dinghy at a championship regatta in England. He made the top 10 in a 90-boat fleet. ‘It didn’t bother me that I didn’t win,’ he assured me. ‘I came away with a conviction that I’d fulfilled a dream in sailboat racing – and also one involving some complicated logistics.’ Back home and a civilian again, he dropped sailing to take graduate courses at Harvard in litera- ture, history and art, developing a passion for Romanesque architecture.
After several years ashore he turned the page again and bought a 33ft Dutch-built fibreglass Medalist sloop designed by Bill Tripp with the intention of going cruising. Soon enough he realised that what he really hungered for was competition. (‘Racing is like malaria,’ he told me. ‘You never get rid of it.’) He and this first
Rabbit won the Storm Trysail Club’s big early-season race down Long Island Sound and around Block Island.
He and a couple of novice friends then
took Rabbit south through snowstorms to compete in the Southern Ocean Racing Conference. They were doing well in the 400-mile St Petersburg-Fort Lauderdale Race around the tip of Florida when the jib halyard broke. Again Dick Carter had no regrets. He was now a passionate believer in ocean racing. ‘It’s a sailors’ race,’ he said at the time, ‘an outstanding test of coping with the problems that come up in a true ocean race.’
‘Everything came together’ He built on that experience by sailing on another Medalist in the 1963 Fastnet, finishing fourth in Class III in tough condi- tions. ‘We had two on the tiller but could barely hold it. After we crossed the finish line the owner asked me what we could do to the boat to improve her handling. I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Change the boat! I’d never thought of racing that way before. It was always tac- tics and strategy and sail trim in one-design sailing. But his question got me thinking: maybe I could design a boat myself. That started everything. I decided to put a draw- ing on paper. I had no training as a naval architect or an engineer.’ (That wasn’t entirely true. Carter had taken a drafting course at Yale, but because it ended before drawing curves, that was no help.) He squeezed a drawing board into the bedroom with the collected works of Uffa Fox and a handbook on drafting and calcu- lations entitled Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design. He wanted to return to British waters, so the new Rabbit was designed to the RORC Rule, yet it did take him a while to put pencil to paper. When the Maas yard in the Netherlands agreed to build the boat of steel, Carter insisted on placing a deposit – ‘not for you,’ he told Franz Maas, ‘but for me.’ All the same he was making slow progress toward the agreed-upon October deadline when Maas, who must have been reading Carter’s mind across the Atlantic, asked for the lines plan a month early, in September. ‘That got my atten-
From the early days of yacht racing onwards most sailors were certain the key to success was close-hauled speed and pointing ability, especially in a fresh wind. Carter conceded that beating is important in shorter day races, yet he believed that there tends to be more reaching and run- ning offshore, usually in the lower range of wind speeds. He gave his new Rabbit a small wetted surface and a generous sail area, with a big foretriangle in which to fit a variety of spinnakers and jibs as condi- tions changed. ‘Everything came together,’ he told me. ‘The RORC Rule gave a bonus for shallow draft and another bonus for steel construction. I wanted lower wetted surface, so that led to the separate rudder.’ Rabbit’s first serious test was the 1965 North Sea Race. ‘When we changed the watch,’ Carter told me, ‘I came on deck and saw that we were sailing away from the entire class. I glanced below and saw that all the off-watch were not in their bunks. They were standing in the cabin, looking out of the window at every boat we passed.’ The usual arrangement, according to one of his regular crew, Sandy Weld, was this: ‘Dick was at the tiller, very calm, very cool. He knew what he wanted. He never yelled.’ The boat was laid out in accor- dance with Carter’s philosophy of ‘simple, simple, simple’. Said Weld, ‘He was not high on the new stuff. No fancy wind instruments, just simple foolproof yarn tied to the stays.’ There was a radio direc- tion finder, and also a depth sounder that worked so inconsistently that Carter at times delegated a crewmember to take soundings by leaning over the lifelines and feeling for the bottom with a boathook. Rabbit did have two custom devices: a roller-reefing system that shortened sail quickly without distorting the mainsail, and an unusual bow pulpit secured to the deck abaft the headstay to minimise chafe on the genoa jib. The reefing equipment worked well, but the bow pulpit got Rabbit disqualified from a race before the 1965 Fastnet (without a hearing, adds Carter). Although Carter likes to talk about cruising comfort, living conditions when racing were somewhat improvised. According to one story, crewmembers came down to the boat and discovered two objects on the wharf: the galley stove and a case of peanut butter. The sailors carried the stove back onto the boat, reconnected it and went home. When they returned the stove was on the wharf again and the peanut butter was in the galley. They
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