Marbleheads
For
a long time, this was my father’s favorite class. It’s a development class and
it tested his skills as a designer and as a skipper. The basic rule for the class is that the boat
must be 50 inches long and is limited to 800 square inches of sail area. It’s sometimes called the 50/800 class for
this reason. It’s called the Marblehead
class because the class was invented in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
My
father joined the ranks of Marblehead skippers in 1975. His first Marblehead was a Soling and was
built from a kit. I have only one
picture of this boat which was taken by a newspaper photographer. It was light blue and everything in the kit
was fiberglass. He made the mast out of
wood. The sails were provided in the
kit. The only thing remarkable that I
remember about this boat was that he took a number of deviations and shortcuts
when building the kit. His attitude was
that if you follow the instructions exactly, your boat will only be as good as
a boat built by somebody who followed the instructions. This came back to haunt him. On a blustery day while sailing at Fahnstock Park, the port side of the deck peeled off of the
hull and the boat almost sank. He only
raced the boat a few times and he didn’t do well with it. The design was a great design at one time
when most of the class consisted of heavy wooden boats that were converted from
the vane days. My father was about five
years too late in his purchase. He
experimented with modifying the keel to improve the boat’s performance to no
avail. Today there is a one design class
based on the original kit known as the Soling 50. My father sold his long before that happened.
The
Soling at Wampus Pond
His
next Marblehead was a wooden boat of his own design. He named the boat “Wind”
and that became the name of the design. It was a pretty good boat for a first
shot and it came in fifth in the 1975 national championship. It had a sharp
front end, was rather wide in the middle and it had a flat bottom. In my opinion, the best feature of this boat
was that the overall problem was obvious and easy to correct. Simply put, the boat moved too much water. If you look at the pictures, the bow wave is
huge for a model racing yacht and the turbulence behind the boat looks like the
boat has a motor. The ensuing winter
gave him plenty of time to think of this and come up with his next design: The Wind II.
In
the spring of 1976 my father introduced to the world the Wind II. It was a modification of the original Wind,
or Wind I as we started to call it. He
widened the front (bow) from a sharp edge to a full inch to give it more
buoyancy. He narrowed the rest of the
sections by an inch except for the very back end. This was his first boat that didn’t have a
shoe-box type hatch. The hatch was flush
with the deck. Furthermore, he decided
to make this boat out of fiberglass. He
had worked with fiberglass before but this was his first attempt at making a
mold and a shell. The first shell ripped
in half coming out of the mold. He
salvaged it and built a white boat. He
made a second shell and this one came out almost perfect. This one he painted black. Of all of the racing yachts he sailed, this
one was my favorite. It had a mahogany
deck that was made from paper-thin planks backed with fiberglass. The waterline was originally white but later
that summer, he replaced it with prismatic striping
tape. It looked rather impressive if not
intimidating when the sun hit it. The
boat was an instant success. Finishing
in first place became routine. He had no
problem selling the white boat even when it was divulged that the boat was
damaged and was a little heavier due to the repair.
The
fact that the boat came from a mold and could be reproduced led to people
asking for one. My father decided to
sell Wind II half-kits. This included a
hull, fin, lead weight and rudder. Essentially
it was an unpainted boat that was complete from below the deck. All that was needed was a deck, sail, and
radio control. In 1976 my father sold 12
Wind II half-kits for $80 each. In 1977
he came out with the Wind II Second Edition.
This was a Wind II with the keel and sail moved back about an inch, and
the rudder moved back about two inches.
He felt it would make the boat hold a steady course better. This wasn’t a problem with the boat but he
was always looking to make improvements.
He sold five Second Edition Wind II’s plus he
built three complete boats. He sold his
black boat and built himself another one for himself which he painted
white. He built one for a man named
Frank Hoza who didn’t want to race but wanted
something nice to sail at the park. The
last one he built for me.
Wind
II’s didn’t do as well in 1977 as they did the year before. Another design called the Epic was faster in
light to moderate winds and was becoming more popular. If the wind was harder than 15 mph, the Wind
II’s had an advantage if sailed right.
Otherwise, racing against Epics was an uphill battle. He still continued to win races but not as
often as he had in 1976.
In
1979 he sold that Wind II and built himself another. This one didn’t have any design changes. His focus on this one was to make it
light. It had less bracing inside of it
and the deck was made of 1/32nd-inch plywood. It didn’t do any better than last-year’s
boat. It still needed strong wind to
hold any advantage over the Epics. This
would be the last Wind II he would race.
In 1980 he came out with the Wind III. From the front to about 40 inches back, it
was exactly like a Wind II. The last 10
inches are hard to describe. The boat
almost came to a point. In this he was
trying to mimic the Epic but at the same time, he maintained the flat-bottom
that was the signature of the Wind design. The Wind III was the last boat he
ever painted black. It won the first
time he raced it. The race was in
southern New Jersey. The wind was about
20 mph with 30 mph gusts. The sharp back
end had the effect of pulling the front out of the water and making the boat
easy to control. It also made a rather
tall rooster tail which is rare for a sailboat. The Epics would turn abruptly
or burry their noses when hit with a strong gust. Unfortunately, that kind of weather rarely
happens in the places we raced the most.
Under less extreme sailing conditions, the design was an abysmal
failure. The sharply swept back end had
the effect of creating a vacuum. It was
like dragging a parachute through the water.
He tried to alleviate that by filling in the back end but to no
avail. The boat was in the garbage
before the end of May.
He
immediately came out with a new design that he called the Wind IV. It’s also somewhat pointy in the back but
much more gracefully. Throughout the
next five years he must have gone through about three dozen designs that
weren’t based on the Wind design or its progenies. I wasn’t sailing with him much in those days
so I wasn’t able to keep track of all of the changes he made. I do know that towards the end of his sailing
days in New York, he was able to go from the drawing board, to making a mold,
to making a finished boat in a week. He
would use the keel, rudder and sail from the previous
boat but the hull would be new. For most
people, this would take a few months.
Wind IV at the World Championship Regatta
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