Left: the most recent Little America’s Cup took place in Geneva in 2015, Franck Cammas and Louis Viat defending the title they won two years earlier in the UK. With their unmatched success in ocean racing events it appeared that there was nothing the Groupama technical team could not successfully turn its hand to
eight semesters of creative writing!’ After college he and Kim settled in a
small town nearby. Steve also got a Master’s degree in teaching, but ‘I was about as good at being a teacher as I was at being a student.’ Time to figure out a different plan.
Can you canoe? Steve’s boatbuilding career started off with a simple purchase. ‘I found a sailing canoe in City Island, New York. Canoes go upwind at Flying Dutchman speed; really fxx!ing fast. They’re pretty fast [even] when you don’t know how to sail them, but then when you learn how it’s suddenly just…’ for once words fail him. Of course there was much tinkering –
Steve’s parents sailed the 1970 Tempest
Worlds together, but in 1971 Dad signed on his big strong ‘boat kid’ for the next regatta in Sweden. ‘I got to meet Valentin Mankin,’ Steve says proudly, lacing on a Ukrainian accent to add that the three- time gold medallist (Finn, Tempest and Star) told them to move out of the US, because ‘sailing is all fxx!ed up in America. Work your ass off 10 months a year, sail for two. In Soviet Union I work my ass off two months a year, sail for 10.’ Steve laughs at the memory. It’s probably not just coincidence that the
1972 US Trials in both Finn and Tempest were held in Marion, Massachusetts. Steve teamed up with his dad again, and they were the youngest and oldest in the event. ‘We finished sixth or seventh, because we’d figured out how to make a fast Tempest.’ Around that time Steve also remembers
racing the brand-new Laser, ‘enough to get bored with it. Get far enough apart, you’re not going to pass anybody; no one’s going to pass you. So are you having fun sailing? No, you’re really not. So let’s find something that’s fun to sail, really hard and really fast – like a canoe.’
But first, a few life realities ‘Until I was 18 years old I didn’t have any idea how I was ever going to have a career,’ he tells me. ‘Because if you sat me down in an office it was going to be just like school. And I was going to fail.’ Fortunately, ‘something called the arti-
san’s movement’ appeared – which spawned publications as varied as the Whole Earth Catalog and WoodenBoat magazine. Joel and Steve White, son and grandson of author EB White, were using MIT educa- tions to build wooden boats. ‘There was a whole bunch of stuff that said craft is cool. Being a carpenter or a cabinet maker or a boatbuilder is actually an interesting and honourable thing for people to aspire to be.’ That helped Steve Clark realise that
40 SEAHORSE
‘figuring out stuff, and making stuff, is just a fine future for a son.’ Or a daughter, I add. ‘Fortunately my parents were really cool.’
Rowing to Cornell Steve won several rowing championships in high school, which helped balance out any academic deficiencies; as he puts it, ‘One of the ways they talked themselves into letting me into Cornell was that I was the preppie world champion at rowing.’ In addition to having a building gifted
by his grandparents, Cornell was ‘the first college to admit women on a co-educa- tional basis… therefore radical and agrarian at the same time.’ When he first walked onto the campus
Steve remembers telling himself two things. ‘One is that whatever happens here you pretend you’re smart. See how long it takes them to figure out that you’re not smart. The other: you’re going to go to every fxx!ing class. If you go to class and listen the professor is probably going to tell you what you need.’ As it turned out, the less structured university education ‘worked fine for me. Three classes a week – and no homework to hand in.’ He also went to other people’s classes,
especially once Kim transferred from Vassar. ‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, you’ve got to hang around till rowing at five. So you go to a history of art lecture, sit in the back and look at slides – next to a pretty girl!’ Steve still didn’t know what he was
going to do for a career, but he stuck to his two rules. ‘I achieved by the charity of the professors,’ he claims now. ‘They basically gave me credit for showing up every day. And I was clearly capable of having an English degree.’ At Cornell, ‘They say you come out knowing two things: how to swim and how to write. Swimming actually is pretty important, because the number of people who drown is still pretty high. And I got a varsity letter in writing;
and plenty of room for improvement. ‘I was pretty athletic, and I was pretty savvy about putting stuff together. But that boat was breaking as fast as I could keep it repaired. I couldn’t get anyone to build [a new] one, so I decided I had to build it myself. Along the way I sort of got the idea that maybe other people wanted these things too.’ At the time most International Canoes
were constructed in England. ‘I talked to a bunch of people and was going to import hulls and put them together to sell. But that turned out to be a complete cluster, because the people in England couldn’t do anything right. So I ended up importing a whole plug from Germany and getting Paul Hemker to build the mould, who was the only person who would talk to me about it. We designed a construction method that put plywood decks on a fibre- glass hull, which got you something light enough and stiff enough to actually work.’ Hemker built the hulls, because while
‘laminating fibreglass was something I did, pulling stuff out of moulds wasn’t some- thing I really wanted to do then. Which is good, because this was before cored fibre- glass had actually been figured out.’ The boats they built ‘ended up being
pretty fast’, Steve continues. ‘We took them to Sweden for the first world cham- pionship in 1978; I finished second, and I actually beat the world champion [Swede Martin Gullberg] in a race!’ Later a search would reveal that Steve also won the last race, which Gullberg sat out having already won the regatta. And oh, by the way, in 1984 and 2002 Steve himself was crowned IC World Champion.
Back to New England Steve’s first shop was in his garage. Not surprisingly, ‘That turned out to be not big enough,’ so he bought an empty super - market. ‘70,000ft2
for $12,000! It was a
ghetto, but that’s where I learned to build boats – more than one at a time. I built probably 20 sailing canoes, a couple of
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