Some of the west coast good ol’ boys at work and play: Dee Smith (opposite) drives Monroe Wingate’s Serendipity 43 Scarlett O’Hara during the 1984 Pan Am Clipper Cup in Hawaii. This Peterson design was the most successful mid-sized series-built IOR racer of its time. Always competitive, several Serendipity 43s also starred in some blockbuster measurement scandals… Scarlett O’Hara was built by maverick New Orleans boatbuilder Tom Dreyfus… a man who regularly appeared with a pair of silver-plated Colt 45s on his waist (big boat racing really was more fun back then, ed). Another west coast boy, one who’d make an unprecedented impact upon sailing technology, Lowell North (above) drives the Peterson/Reichel/Pugh-designed Secret Love at the 1984 SORC. And chilled-out in Hawaii (right) at the ’82 Clipper Cup on Clay Bernard’s well-named Davidson 52 Great Fun, skippered by spar pioneer Tim Stearns
Long, narrow, light offshore boats dubbed Ultra Light Displace-
ment Boats (ULDBs) or Sleds were not invented in Santa Cruz, with a few pioneers like Ragtime having sailed the Transpac back in the 1970s: this unusual-looking low-freeboard, reverse-sheared, hard- chined Spencer design from New Zealand (issue 496) earned line honours in 1973 and 1975, the two editions prior to Merlin’s 1977 record run that cut 11 hours off Ragtime’s best effort. Yet it was in Santa Cruz that the ULDB genre was developed for wider accep- tance on (and eventually beyond) the US west coast. This was seen in production form first in smaller designs: for example, the light and fast Moore 24 introduced in 1972 preceded the Melges 24s by 20 years, the fast and pretty Santa Cruz 27s were ubiquitous in the mid-1970s and the Olsen 30s built in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Then the light fast designs went to 40ft in size in 1982 with the
advent of the Santa Cruz 40 and Olsen 40. While a few crazy people sailed the smaller boats to Hawaii now and then, these 40-footers were Transpac-compliant: I know because I prepared and raced on an Olsen 40 in the 1983 Transpac while an undergrad student at UCLA. That race we had a class of 11 Olsens and SC 40s, a pretty solid turnout and 10 days of fun over the 2,225-mile course. Meanwhile, the IOR lead mine scene was also alive and well: the
Kerry Geraghty-built Nelson-Marek 41 Brooke Ann (commissioned by Larry Harvey, who was tired of getting crushed by the IOR rating of the otherwise lovely Timberwolf, was tearing through the SoCal course-racing scene, while on the east coast her sistership Thunder - bird was dominating her class in the SORC in Florida. These were IOR designs with slightly softer bumps and rig plans
with larger mains and smaller headsails than the typeformed designs of a few years earlier. This success helped put the Nelson-Marek design team on the grand prix map alongside Frers, Holland and eventually Farr, with new orders for larger boats – as well as smaller ones in the increasingly active MORC class for racers below 30ft. IOR One Tonner interest was also growing in the US after the IOR
rule change in 1983 which prompted a new generation of fractional rig boats around the 40ft mark. More SoCal designers would join in, like Alan Andrews in Long Beach, who at this time was building his own local following and helping to fill orders for Dennis Choate’s nearby yard at the start of what would become a long and productive relationship spanning several decades. The Andrews design Allegiance did well in the SORC, the US One
Ton championship in Annapolis, and was on the 1984 US Sardinia Cup team later that summer, with Dave Ullman and recent 470 Olympic silver medallist Steve Benjamin (sadly a damaged spar compromised their chances in Porto Cervo that year). The two other boats on the team were 45-footers: Jack King’s Frers-designed Merrythought, representing the east coast establishment; and for another west coast team led by Lowell North, the deep-red Secret
Love, one of the last designs Reichel and Pugh would work on for Peterson before they struck out on their own. The following year, 1985, was a milestone in ULDB racing, with
the launch of Kathmandu, Bill Lee’s first series-produced Santa Cruz 70. Out of Lee’s famous down-scale production facility in a barn in the hills of Soquel over the next few years 19 boats were launched to this design, with slight modifications made over time to the original construction materials, deck and interior design, and even rig and appendage dimensions, but keeping the hull the same so as to preserve the age date and thus age allowance in the IOR rating. Over the next few years this strategy would give the SC 70s a
small but steady rating advantage over the new designs from Andrews, Nelson-Marek and Reichel/Pugh, which was realised even more in the following years as the same boats migrated from the west coast to other racing venues like the Great Lakes. In the latter end of the 1980s the popularity of Sleds among
several SoCal owners prompted the formation of a class association where a clever idea emerged: rather than keep to the 70.0ft rating limit target for everyone in the class, they devised a reverse age allowance solution, where the rating targets were lowered for new designs, putting the optimisation burden on them rather than on the older boats. It was a clever recognition that newer boats would probably have an unrated advantage anyway, benefiting from new technologies, and thus the class could keep the group competitive without too much of a cheque-book war. Managing the politics and personalities of the Sled class for
many years was Scuttlebutt founder Tom Leweck, who by dint of splendid diplomatic skills somehow kept everyone agreeing on technical points like this, along with important scheduling topics among a group who enjoyed both inshore and offshore racing. As IOR evolved towards IMS and the 70.0ft rating limit became irrelevant, speed limits were opened up in the Transpac and Sleds became turbo-Sleds… but this was in the next decade and is a whole new chapter of this story. And by then, of course, Seahorse and its experienced and highly influential readership was also firmly established as a big player on both sides of the pond. Happy 500th one and all.
Dobbs Davis
FRANCE Paying the piper On 23 July OC Sport Pen Duick officially announced the opening of registration for the 12th edition of the Route du Rhum, which will leave St-Malo on 6 November 2022 for Pointe à Pitre in Guadeloupe. A date that corresponds to the weekend of the All Saints holiday and thus to the arrival of a lot of people at the port... In response to an ever-increasing demand the organisers have
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