develop an angle of attack that would be detrimental to its optimum performance. Peterson, like John Illingworth a decade
earlier, believed that upwind performance was the key to winning offshore champi- onships like the One Ton Cup, due to the mixture of inshore and offshore courses which were predominantly set by the race organisers to include a lot of windward sailing. Relatively symmetrical waterlines had been the key to the Illingworth & Primrose success of the early 1960s. Throughout history successful racing
yacht design had been dominated by developments that concentrated on improved windward performance. Doug, who had started drawing boats from the age of 10 – already convinced that it was the only thing in life that he wanted to do – could not have failed to note that yacht- ing journalists, when describing the latest racing yachts, predominantly talked of little else than design trends that helped to improve upwind speed. Young impres- sionable minds, like Doug, dreaming of creating his own ‘superior’ hull shapes, would be further influenced by race reporting, whether it be America’s Cup or Admiral’s Cup, that almost always graphi- cally emphasised the ‘edge’ provided by windward superiority. Of course yacht designers all had their own unique view on how to attain this holy grail. At the launch of Ganbare Peterson said,
‘Part of my reason for keeping the weight low was to keep the cost down, but after my calculations I decided she would also be better. I felt other designers were trying to get the most size allowed under the rule, so I went back to the basics of what I thought it took to make a boat go fast.’ Like Olin Stephens back in the 1930s,
48 SEAHORSE
when he started his design career, Doug benefited from a supportive father who took his son sailing from an early age. But perhaps even more important in the for- mative years for Doug was the fact that his father was an aeronautical engineer. The potential aerodynamic correlation between marine and aviation design was not lost on the young Peterson. In drawing Ganbare to be a balanced
shape, Doug produced the perfect ‘plat- form’ for a keel shape inspired by aircraft design. The Peterson keel, with absolutely no fairing between itself and the unusually flat-bottomed hull, delivered the maxi- mum lifting surface, with the highest aspect ratio within a given overall draft. Like most measurement rules, the IOR
controlled draft within tight limits, but this combination of keel and hull shape gave Ganbare a very real edge upwind against all of her One Ton competitors, partly because the span of the keel was optimised within the draft. Doug Peterson credits his father, Carlton,
with helping him develop a passion for sailing. ‘But my father also taught me a lot from the beginning about design.’ Signifi- cantly Doug had no formal training in naval architecture or yacht design… but clearly an appreciation of aerodynamics fostered by his father’s knowledge of flying. The other big influence, and something
of a mentor to the young Doug Peterson, was the Californian yacht designer Wendell Calkins who had recently penned a Transpac-winning design. His trademarks were light displacement combined with a double-ended or canoe-shaped hull which helped create a similarly balanced hull form. Peterson would adapt this Calkins influence, in his own way, after spending
many hours in the Calkins design office and sailing with him out of San Diego, when he was a young man. These ingredi- ents all came together for Doug to produce that world-changing One Tonner Ganbare, but there was even more to set this first design of Doug’s apart from the rest. His interpretation of the bustle, pio-
neered by Olin Stephens in 1966, played into Doug’s fundamental belief that water- line length was way more important than overhangs. Hence fairing the bustle into the aft overhang was a low priority. But Ganbare’s U-shaped bustle perfectly carried volume aft to take maximum advantage of the waterline length. What remained, that short aft overhang, sharply veed in section, was largely there to help reduce the measured length – extremely powerful in IOR measurement. Finally, Peterson changed the shape of
the underwater bow area. The vast major- ity of racing boats of the time were veed in section forward, but again Peterson went for U’d sections which distributed the volume more evenly and helped immea- surably with that all-important balance that Peterson felt was key. Needless to say, after Ganbare’s success in 1973, many designers started producing their own adaptation of the new ‘Peterson shape’. The combination of confidence with an
intuitive feel for what made for a fast hull shape proved to be a heady mixture for Doug Peterson. But there was also early disappointment, missing that maiden One Ton Cup win on a technicality – Ganbare well ahead in the short offshore race when they rounded the penultimate mark the wrong way. Nothing gained in terms of distance, but a five per cent penalty cost the young Californian sailors the trophy.
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