Too easy
The popular myth is that the J Class Ranger, designed by Starling Burgess and Olin Stephens, was just such a fast design that nothing else could compete. Don Street calls that the product of lazy journalism
That Ranger was this ‘Super J’ that blew every other J Class off the course I and many others feel was a handy simplifica- tion that gained much of its later currency because it neatly matched the narrative favoured by the newsmen of the day… ‘Uncle Sam outsmarts them all!’ Ranger did have a very fast hull shape,
but it was not that fast and there were plenty of other contributory factors also working in her favour. Her technological superiority was equally marked in other
52 SEAHORSE
areas: she carried the best mast with enough fore and aft rigidity so that she could disconnect her staysail stay, making tacking her quad genoas much faster; five quad genoas of different sizes, the biggest the Greta Garbo; rod rigging; the three big four-man coffee grinders; she was the only J that had the ability to quickly change headsails; her superb afterguard, Zen Bliss the navigator, Starling Burgess, Olin Stephens, Rod Stephens organising super- fast sail changes, Arthur Knapp, who introduced trimming the ballooner through a block on the end of the main boom, took care of sail trim; Bubbles Havemeyer was an outstanding second helmsman, leaving Vanderbilt free to con- centrate on helming when on the helm and having a good relief helm when he wanted a rest. There was plenty enough to put the 1937 Cup Match beyond doubt that did not come out of that 1930s test tank. For Vanderbilt’s final J Class campaign
Burgess had designed four hulls, Olin four; it is one of the Burgess designs that is the present-day Ranger. The modern J’s Lion- heart and Hanuman are other Ranger designs. None of the three burned up the circuit like the original. The defence candidates delved hard in
every area, not all of them obvious. No one delved deeper than Vanderbilt. Starting in the 1890s all the big Ameri-
can boats used two-speed Herreshoff winches but in the 1920s Merriman entered into the winch business. The Merriman winches were faster but
not as powerful as their Herreshoff rivals. Ranger carried no fewer than 23 winches, the three big coffee grinders plus 20 Her- reshoff winches some of which had come off the 1914-built Resolute. The two-speed Herreshoff winches fea-
tured a pair of what were referred to as slash handles, which extended out of the top of the winch at an angle of about 30°. The long handles gave a crude mechanical advantage of 9:1. By reversing direction the mechanical advantage was increased by a factor of four so the total mechanical advantage became 36:1. The two ‘grinders’ stood up, and either
passed the handles from one man to the other or they ran around in a circle. Two big Norwegians (for most were) could eas- ily put 100lb apiece on the handles, so 200lb times 36 gives you a ‘theoretical’ line pull of 7,200lb – or more than three tons. Knock out the friction and you could still see maybe 4,000lb at the sharp end. In contrast, the first Merriman was
single speed 18:1 mechanical advantage, driven by a long handle. But those Merri- man winches were in reality ‘1.5-speed’. How I discovered this is an interesting
story going back over 60 years! In 1954 while still at university I was hired by the late Sumner A ‘Huey’ Long as paid hand on his first Ondine, a 52ft Abeking and Rassmussen yawl. A month in and Huey fired the skipper and handed me the job (being Huey Long there was no pay rise). Ondine was masthead rigged, and the CCA genoas in those days were 175 per
ROSENFELD/MYSTIC SEAPORT
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