Opposite: a tsunami of talent is gathered together in the Madison Avenue offices of Sparkman & Stephens in 1933. Seen left to right – Starling Burgess, Olin Stephens, Rod Stephens and Drake Sparkman. Three years earlier the new firm had burst onto the scene with Dorade (left) which in her first seasons twice won the Fastnet Race, won the Transatlantic Race at a canter and in 1936 the Transpac Race. Remarkably, in 2013 she would win the Transpac for a second time, nearly 80 years later. Here she is being greeted at the US Navy dock in Honolulu after her ’36 Transpac victory
of 1971, a year after I had witnessed the ‘birth’ of Morning Cloud II, spending some more time in his company and in the company of, what appeared to me, a very large number of naval architects, engineers and draughtsmen, producing a staggering number of sailboat and motorboat designs out of the central New York office. It was fascinating to be a spectator
Roderick Stephens. Since the early 1930s these sons of a Bronx, New York coal mer- chant had dominated the fickle, imprecise science-cum-art of designing sailing boats. Their fame began in storybook style in
1931… and not long after they had both flunked out of college. They entered a 52ft sailboat in a race
across the Atlantic, a yacht of then radical lines that Olin himself had designed. He skippered the boat, named Dorade, and Rod, who had supervised its construction, sailed as first mate. Their father, Roderick Snr, who had thrown economic caution to the winds to finance his boys’ project, went along as a general hand in the all-amateur crew of seven. Most of their competitors were larger and crewed at least in part by professionals – which was the norm back then for serious big boat racing. Dorade won the 3,000-odd mile trans -
atlantic race by an astonishing margin, fin- ishing two days ahead of the next competi- tor in the 10-boat fleet. In a way that was later to become almost a norm of embry- onic young talent maturing into superstar yacht designers, Olin’s career really took off after Dorade’s win. His seventh design, Dorade set a new benchmark that rede- fined how an ocean racing yacht could per- form and indeed what it should look like. When the family returned to the United
States after the finish of the race they enjoyed a triumphant ticker-tape reception along Broadway. Adventurous and suc- cessful yacht racing was a public interest sport in those days, made all the more special by the young age of the Stephens brothers and by the fact that this was their first foray into offshore racing yacht design. The only other time such a wel- come was offered to members of the sail- ing community was when, 56 years later,
Dennis Conner returned the America’s Cup to USA shores after his successful Fremantle challenge in 1987. The Dorade design was indeed a new
generation of ocean racing yacht. Up to this point designs deemed safe to traverse the oceans were heavy and beamy with an emphasis on what were thought to be sea- worthy design features. Dorade blew a hole in this theory with her much leaner, Metre-boat style lines. Essentially what was then regarded as an inshore, sheltered water style racing design rather than one capable of transoceanic passages. This was much in the manner of the
designs of EG Van de Stadt, some 20 years later, that began the development of so- called light-displacement offshore racing yachts, and later still the designs of others, most notably Bruce Farr, that brought about the acceptance as seaworthy of the style of 40ft plus ‘big-dinghy’ ocean racers. In 1931 Dorade won both the Transat-
lantic and Fastnet races. She won the Fast- net again in 1933. Later she won her class in two Bermuda Races and a Transpacific race from San Francisco to Hawaii. Six decades later she received a cosmetic over- haul in 1997 and then a full structural restoration by Buzzards Bay Yacht Ser- vices in 2007. In recent years she’s been an active participant in classics regattas on both sides of the Atlantic. Dorade also sailed again in the Bermuda Race and won the Pacific Cup overall in 2013. To help put the Dorade design into
context in 1931, she was as significant in setting a new trend in offshore boat design as Myth of Malham was in 1947, as Zee- valk in 1951, as Roundabout in 1966, as Ganbare in 1973, as the Imoca 60 style is for trans-ocean racing today. I got to know Olin well in the autumn
during the peak of a magic run of success for Sparkman & Stephens designs. They were drawing so many boats, of so many different sizes and concepts… it was extra- ordinary. It was at this frenetic time in the S&S story that Olin offered me a position as a trainee designer. Perhaps, remembering his own lack of
academic achievements, which had not held him back when he started his career as a draughtsmen for yacht designer Philip Rhodes, he was willing to give me an opportunity to flourish in the S&S offices despite my own lack of formal training in naval architecture. Strangely enough, when Olin was first seeking his ‘correct’ path into yacht design, he turned down a stint at Glasgow University, at the time regarded as one of the best places in the world to learn naval architecture; I ended up doing the same thing some 40 years later. Nevertheless, I turned down Olin’s offer
to work at S&S in New York – not because I wouldn’t have learnt an almost unimaginable amount about yacht design, but because I had already just ‘launched’ my own career as a designer. In fact, it was Olin himself who helped me make the decision to decline his flattering offer, by reminding me of his own experiences and how the big breaks often depended on taking the less conventional approaches. Our paths had in fact crossed some two
years earlier when, as a budding designer and yachting journalist, I was in Breskens with Frans Maas while Olin was conduct- ing sail trials on the second Prospect of Whitby for owner Arthur Slater. Over the years it was generally Rod who
undertook the sailing trials of new designs – his builder snag lists being famous or infamous, if you were the builder, but a key part of the S&S success story as it helped to ensure that new builds were presented at their best to their new owners. On this occasion, however, Olin had a
particular interest in the new 1969 Prospect and how it would perform. Sparkman & Stephens, at the top of their game in the 1960s, had found themselves
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