The ‘terrible twins’ Clarionet (left) and Roundabout were both commissioned to fit the RORC’s new One Ton Rule. After taking some earlier tentative steps into the genre the two near-identical 1965 designs marked Sparkman & Stephens’ first real commitment to the concept of a fin keel plus a skeg-mounted rudder. The two boats were fast but they could also be tricky to control, especially when pressed hard downwind, and scenes like this were far from uncommon. Olin Stephens was sufficiently encouraged, however, to use the same separate keel and rudder configuration with his new 12 Metre Intrepid in 1967… the rest, as they say, is the stuff of legends


challenged by a new young American designer, Dick Carter, who, like Olin, had little formal training in naval architecture. Having won the Fastnet Race in 1965 with his first ever offshore design, Carter cemented his reputation by winning the One Ton Cup in 1966 with the steel-built Tina, built by Frans Maas. Olin Stephens was intrigued by the use of steel construc- tion in a racing yacht built to the RORC rule and realised that Carter was exploit- ing rating gains from the material under this particular rating system. The 42ft Prospect of Whitby was designed to take advantage of this rating anomaly, but she was something of a departure for Olin in terms of ballast-to-displacement ratios. The first day of the trials was windy –


perhaps more windy than is welcome for a first sail – but in any event Olin returned after a couple of hours ashen faced. The new Prospect had none of the upwind power associated with past S&S designs. In these empirical days of yacht design,


so-called trimming ballast was an everyday norm for optimisation, but Prospect was in need of a little more than trimming ballast… Over two days Prospect gained 6,000lb of displacement with added lead internal ballast. What began as a fairly typical medium-freeboard S&S design now became a low-freeboard flying machine with all of the added weight significantly reducing the freeboard. But this was another classic example of


Olin’s pragmatic approach to the art of creating a fast sailboat to a particular set of rules. Prospect went on to be hugely successful on the racecourse, placing second


48 SEAHORSE


overall in the 33-boat, 11-nation Admiral’s Cup fleet of 1969. The sanguine experi- ences of launch day were now long forgot- ten, though they had been somewhat remi- niscent of Olin’s pragmatic approach to his very first ocean racing design, Dorade, which had floated 3in deep when first launched. (The answer to that particular problem wasn’t extra ballast, but simply to repaint the boot top 3in higher!) Another example of pragmatism or


perhaps expedience was Cherokee, Olin’s second 6 Metre design, in 1929. Soon after her launch she was measured and found to be overweight, so much so as to fall out- side the 6 Metre rule. Possible solutions were to marginally reduce sail area or ballast; but Olin’s solution was to order 18in of hull length cut off the back. This produced the desired reduction in weight without compromising the performance. The name Olin has often given rise to


romantic speculation that he and his brother came from seafaring Norse or Viking stock. In fact, the Stephens family emigrated from England in the 17th cen- tury, settling in the Guilford area of Con- necticut. As far as is known, no forebears of the brothers, except their father, had any interest whatsoever in the sea or in boats. Olin’s interest in boats began at the tender age of five when he and his four-year-old brother became excited spectators in motor - boat racing held on Lake George, where the family would spend summer vacations. Olin rapidly became an avid sketcher of


motorboats, inspired by the racers on the lake. Indeed the family’s first serious boat was a 30ft motorboat which further


cemented the boys’ interest in what was to become, only a few years later, a lifelong dedication to the creation of the finest boats, sailing and power, in the world. The brothers’ introduction to wind


rather than powerboats was anything but plain sailing. Yet the difficult performance characteristics of the 14ft centreboard dinghy Corker, which their father bought primarily as a convenient way to get to the local shops, proved an inspiration to Olin and Rod to improve; and through this they became addicted to the technicalities of sailing and the esoteric art of boat tuning. In fact, all through their teens it almost


seemed as if father Roderick was deter- mined to buy boats that didn’t sail well, as if to put the boys off sailing. A succession of boats, Corker, Token, Trad, Sou’wester and Scrapper, ranging in size from 14ft to 45ft, were all enthusiastically championed by Olin and Rod to their father, only to be soon rejected by them due to poor perfor- mance. In reality Roderick Stephens Snr was in fact, albeit inadvertently, slowly fostering a belief in both Olin and Rod that they could not only improve an exist- ing boat, but dare to dream of designing altogether better yachts from scratch. Early on, when they were still boys,


Olin and Rod competed with one another to design and build models to outdo each other. Rod was generally more meticulous and enjoyed the process of the build. Olin simply wanted to get his ideas on the water as quickly as possible. Generally Rod’s design ideas proved to be faster! It was a fortuitous meeting at the Larch- mont Yacht Club, after returning from 


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