OLIN STEPHENS

Olin Stephens designed yachts from the late 1920s into his retirement, and boats from his board are still raced. He was born in New York in 1908, learned to sail with his brother Rod on the New England coast in the summers, and spent a single term at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1929, at twenty-one, he went into partnership with a yacht broker, Drake Sparkman, and Sparkman & Stephens was formally created on 28 October that year, with Olin and Rod among its five partners. Olin designed; Rod, his partner, supervised and tested the yachts the firm drew.

The firm’s name was made by Dorade, a yawl of fifty-two feet, drawn by Olin in 1929 and built at the Minneford Yacht Yard on City Island. With Olin as skipper she came second in the Bermuda Race of 1930, and in 1931 she won the Transatlantic Race in seventeen days, a passage that takes three or four weeks; her crew were given a parade on their return, and the mayor of New York gave Olin a reception. That summer she won the Fastnet as well. Under Rod she won the Bermuda Race in 1932 and the Fastnet again, in unusually severe weather. She left behind the Dorade box, a ventilator that became a standard fitting on small sailing boats, and in 2013 she won the Transpacific race on handicap, as she had in 1936. Stormy Weather, of 1934, was the design he liked best, and both yawls won the Bermuda Race and the Fastnet more than once.

Then the America’s Cup. With W. Starling Burgess he designed the J-class Ranger, which defended the Cup in 1937 against Endeavour II of the Royal Yacht Squadron, in four races, with both brothers in the crew: Olin as tactician and navigator, Rod trimming the rig and sails. When the Cup was sailed in 12 Metres after the war, every defence from 1958 to 1980 but one was won by a yacht he had first drawn; the exception was Weatherly, in 1962. Intrepid, of 1967, had her rudder set apart from her keel, to reduce wetted surface and improve steering, an idea he had tried first on ocean racers; she won the Cup again, altered by another hand, in 1970.

He drew for production as well as for owners. For Nautor of Finland he designed the Swan 65, finished on 1 June 1973, and a Swan 65, Sayula II, won the first Whitbread race round the world. He worked with the yard of Argentario at Porto Santo Stefano. In retirement, in Hanover, New Hampshire, he wrote computer programs for designing yachts. He published his autobiography, All This and Sailing Too, in 1999, and was named in 2007 among the first six members of the ISAF Sailing Hall of Fame. He died in 2008, five months after his hundredth birthday, the senior member of the New York Yacht Club.

His work is in the season wherever the old boats are. At Nantucket Race Week, Intrepid has sailed for the Opera House Cup among the wooden yachts, and the 12 Metres have a regatta of their own. At the Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta, the fleet’s reputation was made by Endeavour, the J-class that challenged in 1934, three years before Ranger met her successor. At Porto Cervo the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda has held a world championship for Swans since 1980, and Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez began in 1981 with a 12-metre against a Swan. The Sailors Ball pays for two 12-metres on New York Harbor. And the Rolex Sydney Hobart is counted, in its own entry, with the Fastnet and the Newport to Bermuda, the two races Dorade won.

He was a designer who raced what he drew, and whose boats went on being raced long after the rules they were drawn to had changed. A yacht still raced, and still winning, at more than eighty years old, is the clearest account of the man who drew her.