Sport: Gem of the Ocean

She was superb: her losses mostly had to be marked off to crew mistakes, and her victories largely came from her built-in speed. Sleek and sturdy, white-hulled Columbia was clearly the fastest boat throughout the elimination trials to pick a defender for the America’s Cup. Last week she won two of three races from 19-year-old Vim, her final opponent, and the selection committee judged Columbia the gem of the ocean, fit to meet Britain’s Sceptre this weekend in the start of the four-out-of-seven series that will be raced alternately over triangular and windward-leeward courses ten miles off Newport, R.I. (see map).

Columbia won her deciding race without the help of canny Corny Shields, the 63-year-old grey fox of Long Island Sound, who quit his advisory role to whip her crew into shape and to take the helm himself for the final trials (TIME, Sept. 15). Shields stepped aside because of the strain on his ailing heart, but at week’s end was hopefully determined to race against Sceptre as a relief helmsman to famed Yacht and Auto Racer Briggs Cunningham, 51, Columbia’s regular skipper. And the cockpit crew will be completed by the retiring, reticent intellectual who is most responsible for Columbia’s basic speed: Designer Olin Stephens, 50, world’s best yacht architect.

Heavy Weather. As the designer of the 19-year-old Vim, until this summer the finest 12-meter yacht in the world, Stephens had a good head start when he settled down last winter to create the 12-meter Columbia. The new boat posed special problems. In the summer, when the trials would be run, the breezes off Newport can be as soft as a whisper, but in September, cup race time, freshening winds often turn the waters into a white-capped obstacle course.

The design Stephens finally picked, after long sessions with seven models in the testing tanks at Hoboken’s Stevens Institute of Technology, shows he had his weather eye cocked more on September than on summer. “Columbia differs from Vim only in a matter of inches,” says he. But inches are as vital to a racing hull as to a fashion model. Columbia’s bow sweeps gracefully into a full-bodied hull—a shape that helps her go swiftly to windward against a running sea. Stephens’ calculations show that Columbia should do her best in the heavy weather that often blows off Newport in late September.

To this basic design Stephens added the lightest equipment money could buy, e.g., an extruded aluminum mast, was thereby able to put the boat’s weight where it would do the most good: a 20-ton keel to keep Columbia from heeling excessively under a stiff wind. So carefully did Precisionist Stephens figure his boat’s total weight that he even weighed the paper drinking cups and the Tollhouse cookies that went aboard. He added sails for every kind of weather—four mainsails, twelve jibs, eight spinnakers. When he was done, the Columbia’s syndicate, headed by Financier Henry Sears, had a majestic 6g-h. yin. overall racing machine, and a bill of some $400,000.

Blue-Water Racer. Ever since he learned to sail as a boy on Cape Cod, Designer Stephens has shown the same loving and calculating care for boats. Son of a prosperous Bronx coal dealer, he completed one year at M.I.T., got jaundice, never went back to college. Instead, he studied ship design so thoroughly by himself that when he was only 19 Marine Architect Drake H. Sparkman asked him to form a partnership. Later, Architect W. Starling Burgess invited Stephens to collaborate on the J-Boat Ranger, the fastest yacht in history,* which defended the America’s Cup in 1937.

Stephens was 22 when he took a vacation from his drawing board and, with his father and brother Rod as crew members, astounded the blue-water racers by skippering his 52-ft. yawl Dorade to victory in a transatlantic race to England. The experience helped him go on to design deep-keeled, fast cruising yawls with flashy racing lines, such as Baruna and Bolero, and the shallow-keeled, sturdy Finisterre, that came to dominate blue-water racing against schooners and ketches.

Shy and modest, Stephens at 50 still looks much like a college sophomore with his horn-rimmed glasses and windswept shock of blond hair. In recent years he has left the family sailing much to gregarious Rod. instead spends his spare time painting or studying French and philosophy. Explains his wife: “He likes yachting people, understand. He just thinks there are other serious things in his life.”

-Ranger was 87 ft. long on the water line, 133 ft. overall, and faster than any 12-meter because of her size.