Signature sailboat designs seem to have gone by the board
Issue 117: Nov/Dec 2017
Doug Peterson drew a 35-foot sailboat, borrowed money from his grandmother to have it built in his hometown, raced it himself in the North American One Ton Cup, and won. He then shipped the boat to Italy and made a name for himself on the world stage. It was the early 1970s and Doug was only 28 years old.
Doug’s contemporary, Robert “Bob” Perry, was in his 20s when he drew the beloved Valiant 40 and became a household name (at least in the households of admiring boat designers and appreciative sailors).
Surely events could not unfold for today’s young sailboat designers the way they did for these men, despite an extraor- dinary pool of design talent. The technologies and complexi- ties now required to be competitive on the world racing stage make it nearly impossible for any lone designer to break out and then go on to design successful production boats. Builders today have relationships with design houses or employ an in-house design team and it would be unrealistic for a young designer to innovate his way through the door and get his own design built. Now, builders simply have too much at stake to go out on a limb with a standout design.
Is that why I don’t associate designers’ names with the new sailboats, because the world has changed? I think so.
I went looking online for the names of celebrated young sailboat designers (and hoped to uncover at least a few women). I turned up a few (not a single woman), but I think their celebrity is largely confined to the rarefied niche worlds of high-end one-offs. Who are the young designers of production sailboats built today? Gerry Douglas’ name has been attached to Catalinas for 30 years, Glenn Henderson has drawn recent Hunters, and Marc Lombard and Philippe Briand put their stamps on new Jeanneaus, but all four men are much closer to retirement than they are to starting out.
I can rattle off the names of many more designers of production sailboats, but all are either dead, retired, or near-retired: Carl Alberg, John Alden, Ted Brewer, Bill Crealock, Bruce Farr, Bill Garden, Robert Johnson, Bill Lapworth, Al Mason, Rob Mazza, Chuck Paine, Robert Perry, Doug Peterson, Philip Rhodes, W.D. Schock, Olin Stephens, Bill Tripp . . .
These are the names that come to mind when I survey the familiar lines of good old boats in a crowded anchorage. In any 30-year-old Pacific Seacraft I first see the unmistakable hand of Bill Crealock. Every Island Packet might as well have “Bob Johnson” painted on its side. And when I catch sight of a Pearson Vanguard, I pause to linger on the combination of sweeping sheer and blunt spoon bow that are hallmarks of Philip Rhodes.
There are a lot of differences between boats of then and boats of now. The production sailboat market was once crowded with dozens of builders and there was plenty of room for talented young designers to literally make names for themselves. Boats were hand-drawn and designer person- alities emerged. The Hiscocks, the Pardeys, and Moitessier wrote books, Murray Davis started Cruising World in the attic of his home, and from their works a new market was born, a fertile space for young Perry, Crealock, and others to design sailboats capable of passagemaking. Racing’s shift from the CCA rule to the IOR created a new playing field overnight and presented an opportunity for Peterson, Ron Holland, Yves-Marie Tanton, and others to outmaneuver legacy designers burdened with their preconceived ways of drawing boats.
The dust has settled and today we live in a world where nearly every industry resembles Detroit’s Big Three. Sailboat manufacturing is no exception. And just as nobody would ever have confused a Ford with a Chevy, nobody would ever have confused a Columbia with a Catalina or a Cal with an Irwin or an Ericson with a Beneteau. But today’s Beneteau looks like today’s Jeanneau which looks like today’s Dufour, Hanse, Elan, and Bavaria. And not a single designer’s name pops into my head when I see their computer-rendered lines on a boat entering my anchorage. That’s not inherently bad — not by any means — it’s just different, and a bit less romantic.
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