Sport: Marblehead Marvel

When the tried and true blue-water racers of the New York Yacht Club set out fortnight ago for their annual series of races off the New England coast, a lean, shy sailor out of Marblehead, Mass, tagged along with his new sloop to see what she could do. Last week the fleet was marveling at the record of the 40-ft., plump-breasted Robin and young (32) Designer-Owner Frederick Emart Hood: four wins in seven races and an overall first-season record of eight wins in twelve races.

Ted Hood’s record was roughly equivalent to a rookie batting .425 in the majors. What made the feat even more outstanding was the fact that Robin was the first boat he had ever designed. Hood was known for canny helmsmanship, learned in a lifetime of small-boat racing (“I’ve always sailed. I guess”) that made him North American sailing champion in 1956. More important, he was famed for setting up a sailmaking business at the age of 22. He developed and wove his own brand of tough fabric from Dacron, which proved so successful that last year he supplied some sails for all four America’s Cup candidates, and was a member of Vim’s afterguard in the Cup trials.

Hood had no formal training as a naval architect, but he had plenty of ideas about boats picked up on salt water when he set out to design Robin in 1955. Patterning her after the successful, wide-beamed Finisterre (designed by Olin Stephens), Hood made Robin wide and shallow so that much of her displacement was up near the waterline. He willingly accepted a penalty under the intricate-formula racing rules for hoisting an outsize sail. Then Hood gave Robin an extralong, 6 ft. daggerlike centerboard “with some shape to it.”

As Hood expected, her wide beam and deep centerboard gives Robin solid stability while beating to windward, and her shallow underbody makes her fast off the wind. So effective is Hood’s centerboard that there was talk around the fleet last week that other racers may soon be copying his design as well as buying his sails. That would still leave Robin with one indispensable feature: Ted Hood himself at the tiller.