William Van Allan Clark Jr, seen during the build of his groundbreaking C-Class Beverly, which swept all before it in the US trials to select a boat to challenge the British holders of the Little America’s Cup. Clark’s design was the first use of alloy cross beams in the class, replacing a traditional plywood bridge-deck. Sadly the waters of the Thames Estuary were less kind to the US team, which went down 1-4 against Hellcat II sailed by no less a team than cat pioneers Reg White and Bob Fisher (they never stood a chance – ed)
first beat the Australians with ‘that’ C-Class cat in 1996… Cogito continued to dominate until 2007, when Canadians took the coveted trophy north.
Rhodes Bantams and an International 14.’ By 1981, though, he and Kim were ready
to move back to the east coast. ‘We wanted to have kids, and we didn’t want to have them in central New York… didn’t want to have to explain why you weren’t going to have a snowmobile and a shotgun.’ They chose Rhode Island to raise their three children; it’s in between their two childhood homes – and also historically significant. ‘My mother’s family is descended from William Harris, the bane of Roger Williams’ existence…’ and one of the founders of what became the Ocean State. In 1680 Harris was heading to England
to resolve land disputes when the ship was captured by an Algerian corsair. ‘He was enslaved,’ Steve says, before raising his hand to answer another rhetorical ques- tion: ‘Who here has a slave in their family?’ That leads to an insightful comparison of slavery in different countries. Though we’re well off topic already I can’t leave out this comment: ‘The British Navy looks an awful lot like slavery to me. OK, you’re in a bar. You get captured, you get put on a ship and held there at gunpoint, until they let you off. That’s a fxxk of a lot like slavery…’ though, unlike the American version, ‘it’s not permanent and inheritable’.
Before Vanguard there was Quarter Moon Rhode Island has been a boatbuilding hub since that British Navy was still trying to ‘enslave’ the locals, and Steve set up a com- pany called Quarter Moon. He says the goal was to ‘build more recreation-focused boats, but the price points were all wrong. ‘We built these lovely things called
Delaware Duckers…’ a duck-hunting boat ‘you have to sail over open water, row, pull up into marshes; operate in the thing all day and then get home. So it’s probably a pretty good use case, right? A far more exhaustive testing process than we’re ever going to do in the modern world.’ Steve built lightweight cold-moulded
Duckers, which both carried more weight and were easier to cartop; ‘everything
42 SEAHORSE
about it is gonna get better. The problem was that the customer would have paid $1,500 for a boat like that, and we couldn’t buy the materials for 1,500 bucks. ‘One of the classic moments was when I
showed up with a Ducker, and a guy said, “I was gonna buy one, but you weren’t at the boat show the year I went.” When was that? “Oh, 1986.” Dude, I’d have starved to death three times over by then!’ He was ‘trying to figure out what to do
next’ when he came up with a concept for a simple doublehanded boat that could handle people his size. ‘The FJ sucks and the 420 sucks; there has to be a better answer. So Bob [Ames] drew this thing that later became the Vanguard 15, and soon I was actually tooling it and paying for the moulds and everything else.’ But first Steve would follow his passion for speed on what became a major detour.
Fabulous and frightening Steve was only nine years old when a C Class catamaran first made a family appearance; his father sailed in the 1962 Little America’s Cup. ‘This is a fabulous thing; fxx!ing frightening at that point, but fabulous. So all of a sudden that whole stream of early catamaran development is going on, and I’ve got a front row seat.’ By 1968 his father’s final catamaran had a solid wing… though sadly that ‘destroyed itself in a cold front’. As soon as Steve and Kim settled in
Rhode Island he began working with Ted van Dusen; ‘learning how to actually build hot shit composite stuff. I started this composite mast business with Ted, and was working with him on other projects as well. I built a bunch of components for the C-Class Patient Lady V.’ Steve first raced the Little America’s
Cup in 1985, but even a brand-new design wasn’t enough to beat the Australian team. ‘The last boat I built at Quarter Moon was Patient Lady VI,’ he explains, pointing outside towards the sheds where all of his hulls are stored – which of course includes Cogito. Duncan McLane and Erich Chase
Not going to lie down Like many major life pivots, Steve’s pur- chase of Vanguard Sailboats was part hap- penstance. ‘I was looking at building college dinghies so I called up Peter [Harken] and said, “Does the college dinghy business suck or not?” And he said, “Oh, it’s pretty reli- able… 100 boats a year, something like that’ and this is before Title Nine (“unlimited access to participate”) a law which Steve credits with the huge growth of US scholas- tic sports in general and sailing in particular. ‘The answer I got back from Peter was
that, yeah, it doesn’t suck, but you’re going to have to beat us at it, and it’s going to cost you a pile of money because we’re not going to lie down.’ Steve’s father had recently died, ‘So I
said, “How much?”’ The company wasn’t really for sale, but ‘they gave me a fairly attractive price. I basically put half down and had a chance to earn the rest out. A leveraged buyout! We moved the business east, and I made one of the best decisions of my life…’ He stops. ‘The best decision was marrying Kim,’ he says. ‘The second best decision was calling up Chip Johns and saying, “How would you like to do this with me?”’ One reason Peter and Olaf were willing
to sell off their boatbuilding business was because, as Steve puts it, ‘the 470 class had screwed over Harken. They were building 300 to 500 new 470s a year, the dominant producers.’ Class rules stated that ‘you had to measure your plug, and the plug had to be half the tolerances of the finished boat. What they didn’t say was that the mould has to look like the plug.’ According to Steve, another builder
‘took the plug, built a mould and fxx!ed with it: straightened it out, pinched it – then they said, “Oh, it was just out in the sun and it sagged.” There was no way you could build that boat off a legal plug. And when Harken said, time out: how about you enforce your fxx!ing rules? the 470 class said, Oh, no.’ That started what he calls a cheating war, which ‘basically poi- soned my relationship with the 470 class’.
Building better dinghies Finns were supplied equipment through the 1992 Olympics. ‘We built 40 for Barcelona,’ Steve says. ‘The secret of the
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 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112
