Bigger ideas
In 1970 Carter formed a design company, Carter Offshore, with offices in a former wartime anti-submarine watchtower at Nahant, Massachusetts, near his family’s Greek Revival home. ‘We were only a few miles from Boston, but it was like the coast of Maine,’ Carter said. His head drafts- man, Yves-Marie de Tanton, recalled the view on the night of his first visit in the dead of winter: ‘It was a beautiful sight. Snow was flying, waves were crashing.’ Carter Offshore came into existence in a period of unprecedented, euphoric opti- mism in the boating industry about the future. In this spirit Dick Carter kept com- ing up with new projects, making arrange- ments with builders in Greece, Poland and elsewhere. Soon enough Tanton was working in the Tower with other young, talented draftsmen, including Robert Perry, Chuck Paine, Mark Lindsay and Doug Peterson. All went on to make their names as designers or boatbuilders. Paine was a Brown University-educated engineer with an ambition to design boats but no place to do it. ‘I’d drawn and I’d drawn and I’d drawn, but still there was no job,’ he told me. His computer experi- ence when he was in the Peace Corps helped him get the job in the Tower. ‘I met him three days after I came home from Iran. He hired me on the spot, on the first interview. Dick was very good to us. I am very glad to hear he is still alive!’ The standards were high. According to Tanton, ‘It was never a question of not
pushing as far as possible.’ (Tanton him- self, Paine told me, ‘is the world’s greatest draftsman’.) ‘Dick had the ideas, and he would turn us loose,’ reported Perry. Lind- say remembered a constant excitement in the Tower. ‘It was so much fun working with those guys because ideas flowed so easily. Dick was the dream guy. His ideas were so much bigger than anybody else’s.’ The office’s custom raceboats included the handsome English Admiral’s Cupper Frigate, the Kiwi One Ton Cup winner Wai Aniwa, and Italian One Ton cham- pion Ydra, one of the first racing boats designed to ‘beat’ the IOR rule. One of Carter’s strengths, said Paine, was his abil- ity to recognise when a hull distortion for rating gain sacrificed too much boat speed. Stock racer-cruisers included the Carter 30, 33, 37 and 39, plus the North Ameri- can 40, which was popular in the Great Lakes. At the smaller end were the Carter pocket-cruisers with swing keels, while one of the biggest boats was Edmond de Rothschild’s 60ft racer Gitana V. And then there was the improbable 128ft solo racing schooner Vendredi Treize. She was designed to a rating rule, but it was not the IOR. ‘The challenge was finding the maximum speed for minimum amount of energy expended,’ Carter told me. ‘She was really interesting because the size of such a boat is determined by how much sail one man can handle.’ All of this (and more) energy was flow- ing through the Tower – and then came the Arab oil boycott of 1973-74. As the
world economy froze banks called in loans and cancelled lines of credit. A decade after he designed the odd-looking little Rabbit Dick Carter turned the page again. He told me in February, ‘Today I’m absolutely cut off from the ocean racing scene. I’m illiterate about racing.’ But at 87 he remains appealingly boyish in appear- ance and demeanour, and he is still intensely focused in his thoughts and con- versation. He spends much of the year on Cape Cod, where he occasionally sails a Widgeon dinghy on Buzzards Bay, with summers in a centuries-old house in Eng- land’s Cotswolds in the rolling hills of southern England, where the word ‘design’ tends to refer to the work of William Morris. His old associate Bob Perry once said of Carter, ‘He’d rather study 16th and 17th century history and cruise along the English coast.’ Now there is no thought of cruising. ‘It’s no accident that the house is not near the ocean,’ Carter told me. Today, as he gathers material for the autobiography he wants to write, Dick Carter takes obvious pleasure in talking at length about the time when he was obsessed by designing and sailing: ‘The thing I’m most proud of is that I improved the breed. To me it was all about the validation of ideas.
‘In time I found that racing was not interesting at all. I wanted to do other boats. I wanted to do a cruise ship under sail.’ The one problem, he said, was how to fit the masts under the Verrazano Bridge over New York Harbor.
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SEAHORSE 43
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