Top: steady as she goes… as Dorade rolls her way down the Solent on her return to UK waters for the Rolex Fastnet Race of 2015. Above: the 1996 refit – something of an understatement – at Porto Santo Stefano on the Italian island of Argentario was a celebration of traditional skills using original materials throughout. The shipyard of Federico Nardi was one of the leading lights in the modern classic yacht movement starting with his rescue and restoration of Patrizio Bertelli’s magnificent 12 Metre Nyala some 25 years ago. Right: leaving a marker… one of many. The eponymous deck ventilator was created specifically for Dorade by Olin Stephens in 1928


clearly caused him to reflect: ‘… when Dorade was designed I had


been tested by exactly three boats as hard- ware – a 21ft one-design class, a Six Metre with some promise but no racing record, and a very simple 30-footer… What made that possible? It was luck, pure luck – but not conventional luck. It was luck to have intuition that worked.’ With the intuition having worked for


Dorade – the family boat – Olin and Rod Stephens proceeded to race her single- mindedly, without much intuition at all,


58 SEAHORSE


because they were used to driving boats hard and fast. But doing that continuously, thousands of miles from land and out of sight of competitors, was relatively new. In the 1931 Newport to Plymouth


Transatlantic Race they sailed a more northerly course and closer to the ice than all but one other competitor. Yacht designer and racing yachtsman Sherman Hoyt, aboard his own schooner design in the race, George Roosevelt’s Mistress, wrote: ‘This course was considerably shorter in distance and she found heavier and


stronger fair winds than the rest of us way to the south, so Dorade, almost the small- est in the fleet, led Landfall into Plymouth by nearly two days and on corrected time defeated all others disgracefully.’ But any thought that Dorade had been


lucky in her transatlantic was soon set to rights by her victory by almost 19 hours on corrected time in the fiercely windy 1931 Fastnet Race. The die was cast, a legendary story in


yacht design had truly begun, and the legend of Doradewas established for ever.


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