Chris Bouzaid’s Carter-designed 1972 One Ton Cup winner Wai Aniwa put on another strong performance at this year’s One Ton Cup Jubilee Regatta in Auckland
one comforting thought is that almost everyone else is feeling the same way. It is the time for redoubling efforts. ‘Thus the last part of the race, the return to Plymouth, presents great opportunities for crews that can rise to the occasion. This is the part of the race where most of the tactical errors are made, where one can lose the full advantage of a sudden shift in weather and where one generally is benumbed by “battle fatigue”.
‘The race is not always to the swiftest… Woe betide the crew that stops thinking on that leg to Plymouth.’
threatened to strike unless a proper larder was established, with a working stove.
‘She had no business to be up there’ Rabbit was in England in the summer of 1965 in no small part because her owner wanted to sail there, but also because Britain and Europe were the homes of two celebrated international regattas. One was the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s biennial Admiral’s Cup series, with a dozen or more three-boat teams sailing short and medium-length races, plus the Fastnet. The other event was the annual One Ton Cup championship for boats around 37ft com- peting at the same rating in short, medium- distance and long races. Rabbit entered the 1965 One Ton Cup but was too small to be competitive. The next year an Ameri- can, Edward Stettinius, commissioned a One-Tonner from Carter for 1966. ‘He liked the feel of Rabbit and he laid out his priorities,’ Carter told me. ‘One, he wanted a family cruiser. Two, he wanted to race under the RORC Rule. And three, he wanted to sail in the 1966 One Ton Cup in Denmark. I loved those priorities.’ Tina, with Dick and John Carter in the crew, won the One Ton Cup in a fleet of 23 boats from eight countries. Four of the next six One Ton Cup champions were Carter boats. The fleets were so large and the sailing so close there was even a push to have a One Ton series in the Olympics. Carter was selected to sail on two US Admiral’s Cup teams — first in 1967 in Rabbit II (the team was third), and then in 1969 in another boat he designed and owned, Red Rooster. More curious than the Rabbits, Rooster had a hinged lifting keel and a lifting rudder that, when both were raised, left her with a draft under 3ft. Her teammates, the Sparkman & Stephens Palawan and McCurdy & Rhodes Carina, had the by then familiar Rabbit-type underbodies. Coming into the last race, the Fastnet, with the US in fourth place overall, Carter asked the other US skippers, Tom Watson and Dick Nye, to help him develop a team strategy for the race. ‘They didn’t know what I meant,’ he recalled. Once he explained himself in a
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meeting at the Royal Yacht Squadron they agreed that the 40ft Red Rooster and 48ft Carina would sail near the top boats their size from other top teams, and the 57ft Palawan would spring herself loose. The plan worked. Carina and Palawan corrected out to third and eighth place. As for Red Rooster, she was up with the bigger boats from the start. ‘She had no business to be up there,’ commented the American Bob Bavier, sailing with Palawan, ‘but there she was and she was flying.’ Her shallow draft also allowed her to skirt over a shoal to avoid a head current. She won the Fastnet by 68 sec- onds on corrected time and, with a 2-3-1-1 record, was the regatta’s top point scorer. The Americans won the Admiral’s Cup. Red Rooster was the last boat Carter raced seriously and also, he told me, his favourite because his wife and children sometimes joined him onboard. He remembered a New Zealand opponent mildly complaining following a race in the Solent, ‘It’s bad enough that you beat us, but you had to do it with your wife and kids sitting in the cockpit.’ After the Admiral’s Cup they cruised Rooster along the French coast, tying up to shore at night with keel and rudder both raised.
‘An overpowering emotional experience’
Carter’s engagement with racing was in part technical. A discussion with him can have a few high-concept abstractions, like a debate about modern architecture. That aside, he is deeply, physically engaged with the experience. That much is clear in the description he wrote of a typical Fastnet for Ian Dear’s 1981 history of the race: ‘The boat must be kept at 100 per cent performance even though individual mem- bers of the crew may ebb and flow. Some- one in the crew must keep up the drive. ‘This can be particularly difficult to sustain after rounding the Rock. Rounding the Fastnet is such an overpowering emotional experience it is somewhat anticlimactic to head out to sea again. There is a let-down. It can be aggravated by a sense that one is not doing very well in the race (one never knows for sure). The
Squeezing out the fat
If Dick Carter was not a cheerleader for big-boat racing before the 1965 Fastnet, he certainly was one afterwards. ‘Dick came back to the US to boost international rac- ing with all the enthusiasm of a religious convert,’ Olin Stephens wrote in his auto- biography. Carter’s language was vivid: ‘This is the competition that squeezes the fat out of ocean racing design,’ he said after winning the 1966 One Ton Cup. ‘It’s like around-the-buoys stuff at all times. Even on the 300-mile race you keep going with the same kind of concentration and effort. And it’s a very different feeling.’ When the speaker for the annual meet- ing of the North American Yacht Racing Union (then the governing body of sailing in both the US and Canada) cancelled at the last moment, Carter was called on to make a presentation in the New York Yacht Club model room. His praise of international racing and his ardent support for a new rating rule without national boundaries won wide support. He and Olin Stephens were appointed the US rep- resentatives to the new International Tech- nical Committee that had been formed to come up with a new rule consolidating the very different Royal Ocean Racing Club and Cruising Club of America rules. The International Offshore Rule (IOR) was introduced in 1969 and eventually gained more than 11,000 certificates worldwide. But not everybody was happy. Carter was and remains disappointed that the IOR did not include the CCA Rule’s his- toric ‘base boat’ requirement that the yachts must be capable of comfortable long-distance cruising.
He was frustrated, too, when the Cruising Club of America sponsored research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the aim of developing another measurement system altogether. Out of this came the Velocity Prediction Program and the Measurement Handicap System (MHS), now known as the Offshore Racing Rule (ORR). Carter believes that the IOR could have survived with more support. ‘The IOR rule could always have been changed and improved.’
IVOR WILKINS/PPL
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