Cup heritage?
Returning from the Bermuda Race in 1958, as our family cutter Nimrod V (ex and again Blitzen) was passing Block Island we were excited to see two America’s Cup contenders appearing out of the fog that was just burning off in the noon-day sun. It didn’t take us long to figure out it was 1938-built Vim (same year as Nimrod) practising with their trial horse Gleam. That was day one of what became for me over 50 years of sometimes obsessive inter- est and participation in the America’s Cup. Following today’s America’s Cup, with
28 SEAHORSE
the absolute highest level of equipment with hydrofoils and demanding composite structures, it’s fun for me to reflect on my own life and its participation in hydrofoil and advanced composite technology. In 1958 my brothers and I were follow-
ing 12 Metre news closely. Three boats were being built, Olin Stephens-designed Columbia, at the Nevins yard in City Island, Phil Rhodes/Jim McCurdy-designed Weatherly at Bill Luders’ yard in Stamford and Ray Hunt-designed Easterner at Graves in Marblehead. A fourth was Vim which had been sailing on Long Island Sound as a semi-cruising boat for years with the Matthews family. Two others, Gleam and Nyala, had also
been racing but were not entering the Cup campaign. A third, Nereus (née Northern Light and built alongside Vim in 1939), was taken out of mothballs to serve as a trial horse to Columbia. For the Cup trials Vimwas stripped of extraneous equipment and was a deadly serious contender with Bus Mosbacher at the helm. Luckily, as a Long Island Sound yachts-
man himself, my father knew most of the players, both designers and sailors. During the New York Yacht Club cruise that year we got tours of all the boats on a lay day.
The guy who showed us around Columbia was a very friendly 21-year-old MIT student named Halsey Herreshoff. My father also worked at Grumman
Aircraft where, with his considerable pull as ex-chief test pilot and now chief engi- neer, he had Grumman build some slick bonded aluminium/honeycomb spinnaker poles for Weatherly and Columbia (and, natch, one for Nimrod V). That pull was to help my own efforts as
chief engineer for Intrepid 12 years later in 1970. During my early 1960s schoolboy years
I worked for a company that built hydro- foil boats. Still a year or two away from grad school, I became fascinated with hydrofoils, observed everything I could and decided that I’d like to be an engineer because I wanted to design and build hydrofoil boats. In the mid-1960s after graduation I also
took a job at Grumman and eventually ended up on the F-14 fighter aircraft design team, in the small five-man Horizontal Stabiliser design group. Lucky for me the project was ambitious: it was to take advantage of the emerging boron-epoxy composite technology. As earlier with hydrofoils, I was hooked
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