THE CONCORDIAN A NEWSLETTER FOR LOVERS OF CONCORDIA YacHTS SPRING 2015, NUMBER 58 C. RAYMOND HUNT The Sailor Who Could See the Wind NOTES What a winter. As I write this, there are still drifts over the Send photos as an attachment in the largest file size you can. spar rack by the side of my house so I have not been able to 300ppi or bigger. Bigger the better. I can handle it. pass the spars through the shop for their annual varnishing. Finally, start chatting among yourselves to find a new Hope they melt soon ‘cause I’m way behind. editor. Golondrina will be going on the market in a few It’s been four years since I took over this editorship so years and when she sells, I will no longer want to edit the perhaps it’s time for an update and reassessment. First, I’m Concordian. still having fun putting this together and I hope you are having as much fun reading it. I appreciate the kind notes that indicate that you do enjoy reading about the rest of the fleet. So let’s keep doing it. IN THIS ISSUE Second, I also appreciate the financial support you’ve made As you can tell from the cover, there’s a bit of looking back to the newsletter. When I took over, it was a money losing in this issue. And looking forward. At long last, a biography proposition with about one quarter of the owners supporting of Ray Hunt is nearing completion. Written by Stan Grayson, it and a rather large list of freebies being sent out. Now about A Genius at His Trade looks at all his creations from sail to three quarters of you support the newsletter with another fifty power and more. Hopefully Llewellyn Howland’s introduction or so friends of the fleet subscribers. and excerpts from Chapter 13 on the creation of Harrier will I’ve tried to make the Concordian something you want to entice you to seek out this forthcoming book. Backed by the read and keep and therefore are willing to support. I’ve also New Bedford Whaling Museum, the book will be available gotten rather grumpy when shaking some of you down. Sorry. this fall. Tied in with the publication of the Hunt book is a But it worked. So thanks. 2 campaign by the Museum to raise funds for the purchase of I got an MFA in grad school, not an MBA, so dealing with the 1/3 scale model of a Concordia for their collection. Keep money is at times foreign to me so if I misplace your check reading for all the details. or don’t cash if for a few months or forget to log your annual I first met Louie Howland at the relaunching ofKestrel and contribution, let me know and we’ll work it out. during our conversation, I asked about the original owners As I’ve said in the past, keeping the spreadsheet up-to-date of our boats. What he began relating was too much to take in is the hardest part of this job. But even that is getting better. during that event so we made plans to meet for a much longer The last issue had no copies returned as undeliverable and the discussion. For this Midwest to New England transplant, recent mass email message had only one bounced address. If I found this social and economic history to be especially I still do not have your email address, send it to me! jeide@ fascinating as these elements came together to create our meca.edu Right now! Messaging you by email is so much boats. easier for all of us. The cover photograph is of Harrier racing on Buzzard’s But following that plea, thirdly, you may remember in Bay, from, A Genius at his Trade. Yan is at the helm, Ray is my first issue I indicated that I’d like to move to an on-line trimming the ‘chute with Barbara to windward, Josh on the interactive publication after the 75th. We can’t do it. There are leeward cockpit winch, Sham on the house top and Kate either still a large number of loyal owners who do not use email, or forward of the mast or below. The photo is by Norman Fortier, even have computers. I have to respect these owners. I also courtesy the New Bedford Whaling Museum. His photographs have to respect the wishes of many more of you who want to also accompany my interview with Louie Howland and his read and keep the Concordian in a hard copy version. “My entire archive is housed at the Museum. You can see all his wife and I climb in bed and read the Concordian....” is one work at http://www.whalingmuseum.org/explore/collections/ note I got. OKaayy.... Whatever. database/search-photographs Next, send me your text submissions as an email. No Word The Sailor Who Could See the Wind was Stan Grayson’s doc. or pdf or attachment or anything other than an email. I working title for the Hunt book. can then format it in seconds and have it ready to paste up. JOHN EIdE •Thanks to the W. & L. Howland Insurance Agency, Inc. for underwriting a portion of the production cost of the Concordian. The W. & L. Howland Insurance Agency has been insuring yachts since 1936. They are located at 962 Kempton Street, New Bedford, MA 02740 and can be reached at: 508.992.7731 or 800.848.7731; or email [email protected] •Thanks also to an anonymous member of the fleet for underwriting a portion of our production costs. Hunt and his young family lived in Fairhaven while Hunt worked with the Wamsutta Mills on sail cloth development before World War II. He returned to South dartmouth to live a few years before his death in 1978. With his novel fin-keel 110 and 210 one- design sloops, Ray Hunt put competitive small-boat racing within reach for post-World War II sailors who could not readily afford conventionally designed and built daysailers. In the immediate postwar years, Hunt also began intensive development of advanced vee-bottom powerboat hulls that included the prodigious 42-foot, 46-knot flier Sea Blitz for Bradley Noyes in 1949 and the ever-popular Boston Whaler—and that led in time to the iconic 22- and 24-degree deep-vee hulls that remain a dominant worldwide force in powerboat design nearly sixty years later. Had Hunt been able to patent the deep-vee hull forms, his fortune would have been made. The patents were denied on a technicality. Meanwhile and all the while, sometimes 3 in boats to his own break-through design, sometimes in boats their previous owners believed were no longer competitive, Ray Hunt continued to compete successfully in sailing races locally, nationally, and internationally, both on- and off-soundings, against the world’s top sailors. When Hunt, sailing the Concordia 41 sloop Harrier with his family as crew, swept the fleet at Cowes Week in the summer of 1955, The following is excerpted from Louie Howland’s introduction to A Genius at His Trade, the soon to be published biography of Ray Hunt by he seemed, like the Concordia class he had done so much to Stan Grayson. create, altogether invincible. That Hunt was not invincible is a necessary and very FORWARD moving part of the story that Stan Grayson tells so powerfully in A Genius at His Trade: C. Raymond Hunt and His The world of sport can be a place of unrelenting partisanship Remarkable Boats. That recreational sailors and boaters and and unforgiving competition. Sometimes even winning is working watermen throughout the world continue to seek out not sufficient for victory. Sometimes there is triumph even in and use boats designed by him is a tribute not just to his own defeat. In this marvelously readable biography of legendary genius, but to the vital knowledge and experience he gained 20th century yacht designer and racing sailor C. Raymond during the years he sailed on Buzzards Bay. Hunt (1908 - 1978), historian Stan Grayson takes the full The trustees, staff, and membership of the New Bedford and fascinating measure of a largely self-taught American Whaling Museum/Old dartmouth Historical Society are genius whose lack of formal education was both a gateway to deeply grateful to Stan Grayson for writing A Genius at His invention and a continuing source of inner conflict and self- Trade: C. Raymond Hunt and His Remarkable Boats, and to doubt. C. Raymond Hunt Associates, to Ray Hunt’s own family, and Although Hunt was born and introduced to competitive to many generous friends of the designer and the museum for sailing in duxbury, Massachusetts, and earned his first yacht- their help in bringing this biography into being. The book is racing fame in competition off Marblehead, his career as a the third that the New Bedford Whaling Museum has published yacht designer developed in association with lifelong Buzzards in recent years that relates to the yachting history of the South Bay sailor Waldo Howland. It was for Waldo Howland’s father Coast of Massachusetts. But its concerns and appeal are truly in South dartmouth that Hunt drew the lines for the now international, and it does much to demonstrate how successive famous Concordia 39-foot cruising-racing yawl. In the same generations of sailors and designers contribute to the period Hunt also designed dartmouth summer resident Hendon advancement of one of the world’s most exciting and absorbing Chubb’s unbeatable big schooner Victoria, and the superlative pastimes.