The perennial flyer… Dorade leads her class (left) at the Voiles de St Barth Classics Regatta in 2013 where she finished first overall. Following her third modern refit, again at Buzzard’s Bay Yacht Services in Newport, RI, she went back afloat in 2011 in the hands of her latest owners, Matt Brooks and Pam Rorke Levy, who after a gentle start then ramped things up in spectacular fashion. The 2013 season stands out, in which the 85-year-old S&S design won her first Transpac since 1936… winning overall against both modern and classic rivals. The same year also brought a clean sweep in the Caribbean, Dorade winning overall in Antigua, St Barts and St Maarten. In 2015 she revisited (above) the Fastnet Race – which she last won in 1933 – finishing second in IRC2 and seventh overall
was then undertaken with blinkers on: carefully but speedily, and without being tempted to ogle the undoubted distractions Solway Maid would be hibernating along- side. The task, to get home to much missed family as quickly as possible. Twenty-five years ago had Dorade
arrived at the yard from the Pacific North- west USA – where she had been gently revived from potentially terminal slumber by Mike Douglas – before I departed for home in late 1996 I still may never have noticed… As it turned out, Dorade only arrived in
early 1997, shipped to Livorno as deck cargo aboard a very traditional Croatian freighter, then sailed to Porto Santo Ste- fano by Nardi and her future skipper Giles McLoughlin. There was very little time to have her structurally and aesthetically restored and refitted ready for the 1997 season. In any case this wonderful yard’s main undercover hall was already full of winter work and carefully laid-up yachts. So on my return in the spring of 1997,
on learning there was yachting royalty in the yard, I had to see her. First impressions
Though per se beauty is not a factor of speed, the easiest boats to look at seem the easiest to drive
Olin J Stephens II (aged 19), Six-Metre design review, Yachting magazine, January 1928
were something of a shock. Lying under a tent by the slipway was a yacht that, had I been none the wiser, I might have taken for a design by Frederick Shepherd, or Claud Worth, or any number of fine British designers of sensible, capable, certainly not slow, but rather narrow-gutted early 20th- century sea-going yachts of character. As I was to learn later, Dorade, and
what surrounded her, amounted to a lot more than that. The yard work progressed nicely on
Dorade through the spring of 1997. Until more recently the Mediterranean regatta season had always commenced with August’s Trofeo Almirante Conde de Barcelona event in the Balearics. But in
1996 Les Voiles d’Antibes had inaugu- rated early-season racing for classics and we were heading for that. Dorade would never have been finished
in time to attend Antibes, and there was no pressure to do so. However, as events unfolded, just before we sailed for France suddenly a deadline presented itself… Out of courtesy the Argentario yard had
invited Dorade’s designer to the relaunch, never imagining the then 90-year-old would come. But the reply was affirmative, and suddenly the pressure was on. Now it was all hands to the pumps. Thank goodness we’d got our yard jobs done before then. Olin J Stephens describes this episode in
delightful detail in his extraordinary auto- biography All this and Sailing Too (Mystic Seaport Museum, 1999), which would be remarkable alone as the non-ghostwritten – indeed beautifully written – autobio - graphy of a nonagenarian. But this was no ordinary nonagenarian. Stephens’ sense of connecting deeply,
not just in the passing, with his past career for the first time via the work of the Argen- tario yard comes out strongly. And it had
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