Far left: it’s 1930 and the slender riveted duralumin mast on Enterprise took a lot of managing to keep it in the boat; the spreaders are steel. Six years later (left) and Ranger’s duralumin tube is now built using flush rivets. Jumper struts are ‘confidently’ long. Bar shrouds are seen with linking turnbuckles at mid-length. Interestingly, only 25 years ago some of the longest superyacht headstays were still being supplied with linked rod lengths due to the same manufacturing limitations


significantly better in bending. When we first began delivering carbon masts, more than a few customers came back after tough races, saying things like, ‘If we still had an aluminium mast we would have worn it.’) The problem turned out to be the lock


Works into building a new yacht at cost. The boat was of course Ranger. Although


in Vanderbilt’s own words Rangerwas ‘The Super J Boat’, it was in fact a careful refine- ment of everything learnt up until that time. Her mast, an evolution of the early


Duralumin masts, has always been a favourite of mine. It was very clean, made this time with flush rivets. Spreader and other fitting details are worthy of close inspection even by modern aircraft stan- dards. I always enjoy viewing her masthead crane, with its elegant halyard lock, which was displayed for many years at Newport’s Museum of Yachting and is now in the possession of Elizabeth Meyer, whose efforts to restore Endeavour brought about the modern rebirth of the J-Class. Perhaps more effective were Ranger’s


very fair flush riveted topsides, avoiding the distortion of welded plates. Apparently Rod Stephens, visiting every Saturday, drove the builders crazy taking myriad measurements and insisting on reworks to ensure the welded frames’ accuracy. Ranger didn’t have fairing compound so


the fairness evident in all the photos of her was impressive. Vanderbilt remarked that due to her fairness she behaved identically on either tack – though it must be noted that the previous Herreshoff Js were built with riveted bronze topsides and were quite fair in their own right. Ranger was also the first J with all spars – mast, boom and spinnaker poles – in aluminium. She was launched in Maine and it was


decided to step the mast at the yard, then tow the boat around Cape Cod to New- port. The bridges in the shorter trip option through the Cape Cod Canal were not high enough to allow Ranger to pass through with her mast stepped. They could have chosen to tow to Newport with the mast stored on deck, but did not. It is a long, harrowing story but during


the first night of the tow, in relatively calm seas with mild side swell, things went badly


wrong. Just after nightfall, with Ranger rolling gently side to side, her crew began to hear noises aloft that began with ‘tinkling’ sounds. The noise became louder with each passing hour. Soon it was obvious the rig was slowly going loose. During the night the rigging seemed


either to have broken or come apart above the first spreader on the port side (not only was it dark but also very foggy so no one knew for sure, and sending a man aloft was out of the question). In addition to the darkness and fog, a slowly building SE breeze aggravated the situation. Before dawn it was decided to head to


nearby Marblehead in the hope of saving the mast that was now bending almost 90° to starboard with each roll. Just after day- break the mast, now whipping in deep bends side to side, finally broke and, after the crew cut or unbolted it away in quick fashion, sank into the deep Atlantic. Although Rod Stephens very completely


and professionally described the event from his vantage point on the towing vessel, one can only imagine his real thoughts and emotions as rig boss. In All This and Sailing Too Rod’s brother Olin described a call that morning from a ‘very unhappy’ Rod. According to Stephens, when he called Vanderbilt with the bad news, the boss listened quietly then ended the discussion with, ‘Well, now we can go through the canal.’ Rod never knew whether or not comic relief was intended. At the same age as Rod was in the


summer of 1937, I was given the same responsibilities for a 12 Metre mast during the 1970 Cup summer. I had huge worries all summer about things not faintly resem- bling what Rod went through, so every time I think about the story I can viscerally imag- ine the true devastation Rod must have felt. (I am convinced that had that mast been,


say, the modern J-Class Lionheart’s seamless carbon spar it would not have broken. It’s both lighter and carbon is


nuts: as the barrels loaded up they strained (elongated) ever so slightly but still enough to render the nuts loose even though well- tightened under no load. So, as Ranger rolled back and forth, the rigging loaded and unloaded and each time the nuts backed off slightly. That all the fittings were very carefully cleaned and lubed before stepping probably increased the chances of the result (no good turn goes unpunished, right?). With the nuts backed off just a bit, the


barrels were free to unwind until they came off. Ranger’s rigging was, in Rod Stephens’ words, ‘hand me down’ bar rigging from Rainbow’s 1934 campaign. Well, why didn’t the rigging do the same on Rainbow? All I can think of is that Ranger ‘tacked’ that night almost as much as Rainbow did all summer in 1934. And surely regular rig checks found the occasional slightly loose lock nut that was just retightened – no drama. Vanderbilt hinted directly to Stephens


that originally someone didn’t tighten the port rigging enough. Rod disagreed and later in the season tightened the V1 with big wrenches to Vanderbilt’s satisfaction; sailing later that day in moderate breeze he climbed to the mid-stay barrel and showed Vanderbilt it was loose, satisfying the boss. I remember years later an encounter with


Rod at a mast shop I was running in Ger- many in the 1970s. His expression became unpleasant when he saw turnbuckles with lock nuts on one of our rigs in the shop. He explained that high shroud loads can cause such lock nuts to go loose. Then added bluntly that if I ever delivered an S&S rig with such turnbuckles it would be my last. I hadn’t yet known the Ranger mast


story so I was a bit taken aback as Rod was a friend of the family. Dutifully, I never used such turnbuckles again. When I learned later the story of Ranger’s tow, I finally understood. With the conclusion of the 1937 Cup


and the approach of World War II, the J Boat era ended. Super J Ranger was scrapped in the middle of the war in 1942. The other US boats were similarly scrapped for the war effort. At the end of the war no one had the slightest thought of ever again building a J, now a prohibitively expensive endeavour. The America’s Cup went into hibernation.


q SEAHORSE 33


MORRIS ROSENFELD


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