Doug Peterson’s 1973 breakthrough One Tonner Ganbare spelt the beginning of the end for Sparkman & Stephens in the IOR fleets, along with other older-established firms who now looked more to production boats and large custom cruisers – many successfully. But the S&S One Tonner America Jane II was a better reply to Peterson’s ideas than was thought at the time. With a return to Olin’s favoured U-shaped bow sections America Jane was a big step forward for S&S, but sadly a poor sailing performance at that year’s One Ton Cup disguised the boat’s potential until it was too late, by which time S&S had reverted to their previous (slower) shapes
of builders who needed detail drawings. If they didn’t know how to build something as simple as a companionway hatch, for example, then they weren’t good enough to build the entire boat. This approach by S&S to detailing led to the famous concept of so-called ‘type plans’, issued by the design office but allowing the builders to interpret the drawings and apply the appropriate dimensions as they saw them. Common sense was the prevailing ethic and the Stephens brothers used this to shield them from rogue builders who can prove ruinous to a designer’s reputation. Getting to spend time with either Olin or
Rod was always a privilege. Whether it be watching them work in their respective roles within S&S, interviewing them about their latest creations or just having philosophical chats about the esoteric art of yacht design and the relative position of science and maths within the framework of drawing a fast, seaworthy and balanced yacht. I remember one such occasion aboard a
spectator craft off Newport Rhode Island watching a selection trial for the USA One Ton Cup team. One of Olin’s latest, Columbine, was strutting her stuff and I asked him how her design, with a relatively beamy and sawn-off back end, had come about, compared with his longer and finer ended Lightnin’ design. His reply surprised me, but then again perhaps not given Olin’s love of art and the application of aesthetics in the creation of a ‘complete’ design. He began with a question. ‘Do you
remember last year we did a little Quarter Tonner called the Northstar 500?’ I did, so Olin continued. ‘The design wasn’t so effec- tive as an IOR Quarter Tonner, but I did like the look and proportions of it, so for Columbine we used as the starting point of the design the Northstar 500 profile. ‘The design was, of course, suitably
scaled in regard to displacement, beam, draft and rig size, but the aesthetic value was maintained.’ An interesting triumph of art over science from a man who had spent his entire career – already some 40 years – pondering the potential dichotomy of science versus art in raceboat design.
52 SEAHORSE Back in 1957 Olin had observed that
sailboat design had started as 90 per cent art and 10 per cent science and that some day he hoped it would be the other way around. His assessment by the late 1950s was that the ratio was now closer to 50/50. Other somewhat philosophical conver-
sations I had with Olin tended to take place during the annual IOR conferences, around November time in London, which dealt with all sorts of administrative ele- ments of international offshore racing but were fundamentally of interest to yacht designers and owners as the key time when rule tweaks were applied by the Inter - national Technical Committee of the IOR. As one of the three original yacht
designers involved in writing the IOR towards the end of the 1960s, Olin kept a keen eye on how the rule was being exploited and if amendments were required to curb extreme developments. When, with the input of Ricus van de Stadt and Dick Carter, Olin began framing the IOR as a single offshore rule to replace the somewhat divergent RORC and CCA systems, he could hardly have imagined the way the rule would encourage develop- ment and with it the explosion of interest in highly competitive offshore racing. By the start of the 1970s Olin’s scientific
approach to fast boat design was being challenged powerfully by a new breed of lightweight dinghy-like designs that paid scant attention to the concept of evolution- ary progress. Indeed, fuelled by a rapid increase in boat-for-boat level racing, started by the reintroduction of the One Ton Cup in the mid-1960s under the RORC rating system, a whole new breed of home-grown level raters of different sizes were appearing. Leading the development charge, which
was to prove decisive in the future direction of offshore racing, were the Quarter Tonners. Small, and therefore relatively inexpensive, they encouraged a whole new breed of young yacht designers to have a go at creating a winning offshore racer. Many, like Olin, had not completed formal naval architecture school but were super keen to
see if their imagination could outwit the science of Olin’s International Offshore Rule. This is indeed what transpired but Olin, as pragmatic as ever, took the devel- opment of the ‘offshore-dinghy’ very much in his stride. He certainly never allowed the S&S design practice to follow this route, but rather acknowledged incremental changes to hull shape and displacement in line with the evolutionary design philos - ophy that had served the firm so well. But revolutionary or at the very least
quantum leaps also played their part in the hugely successful S&S history, starting with Dorade and perhaps finding ultimate expression with the 12 Metre Intrepid in 1967. Dorade, in her time, was as different from the prevailing norm of ocean racer as were the early Quarter Tonners to the S&S style in the early 1970s. Intrepid marked the biggest change in Metre boat design since the rule came into being in 1906. Olin’s lack of formal training, both in the
finer points of naval architecture and indeed drawing itself, proved a major factor in shaping his career, his brother Rod’s career and indeed the direction of travel for the S&S organisation. Not being tied down to the finer points of completing a set of drawings no doubt helped free the mind of the young Olin after he quit the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology after a single term of learning about naval architecture. The relevance of big ship design had been lost on the creative spirit of a mind obsessed only with the lines of yachts and how the nuances of hull shape might impact on both speed and seaworthiness. A brief illness caused Olin to leave MIT,
but it also gave him the space to decide not to return. Dorade was very much a product of an unrestrained mind. I know that young yacht designers constantly look around at what works and what the con- ventions of the time are, but then, if you are like Olin, you think, I’m not going to follow those routes. I’m going to take a chance and do my own thing. A success like Dorade, of course,
demands a successor; then the revolutionary zeal has to be channelled into careful
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