When ace American yacht designer Olin Stephens raced the new-built 52ft yawl Dorade to Europe in 1931 to win the Transatlantic Race and then go on to win that year’s Fastnet Race, he was 23 years old. His co-skippering younger brother Rod was just 21, but had reached the ripe old age of 22 by the time the Fastnet title was in the bag.
Their father, Dorade’s owner Roderick Senr, was also in the crew. But even though the father – a Bronx-based New York coal-merchant on a big scale – was very much on board and still signing the cheques, it was his two precocious sons who were totally in charge for an international season’s campaigning that changed the face of offshore racing, and put several corner-stones into the Stephens brothers’ ultimately almost mythical reputation.
Dorade’s crew after winning the 1931 Transatlantic Race to Plymouth. Front row, second left, is Olin Stephens (aged 23), next is his brother Rod (21) and their father Roderick Stephens Snr.
CONTEMPORARY COMPARISONS
So how does the contemporary sailing scene compare in terms of youthful endeavour and event innovation? Well, today should see the start of the weather-delayed 2026 season for the Irish Sea Offshore Racing Association, with the novelty attraction of special awards for participants aged 25 or under. Either way, ISORA can have considerable satisfaction from the international success of their young skipper Sam Hall. Then in May, the annual Lambay Race from Howth is being included for the first time in the 2025-introduced Royal Alfred YC Superleague Mark 2.
The First 50 Checkmate XX speeding along the Fingal coast in the Lambay Race. Nigel Biggs and Dave Cullen of Checkmate have made a speciality of introducing young dinghy sailors to keelboat racing and helming. Photo: Annraoi Blaney
The underlying aim is to inject an atmosphere of novelty into each year’s sailing, and thereby support the many efforts being made to encourage a younger cohort into the sport. A very specific example is the Royal Ocean Racing Club’s English Channel-based Griffin Pathway Project, which began by providing guided offshore racing experience in Sun Fast 30 ODs for sailing hopefuls aged between 18 and 30, and has now moved up to racing Sun Fast 36s.
The RORC’s Pathway Project’s Sun Fast 36 Griffin. Photo: RORC
WAR VETERANS AT 17
Time was when people aged between 16 and 25 were simply regarded as young adults, and not as some sort of separate species to be mollycoddled, protected and supervised on life’s path by health and safety regulators. Certainly some of us can remember meeting impressive men of few words, men who - as others would soon tell you - had been piloting Lancaster bombers on active service at the age of 17 during the Hitler Unpleasantness.
But in Australia, ever since six lives were lost after five boats sank in the storm-tossed 1998 Sydney-Hobart Race, any crew must now be at least 18 years old before they can compete in the race to Hobart. Set against 17-year-olds piloting Spitfires or captaining Lancasters in the Battle of Britain, that is at the very least a cause of pause for thought about the health’n’safety-dominated world we now appear to inhabit.
When sailing was still fun….the Stephens brothers take some partying friends for a sail in the new Dorade in an era when guard rails were only optional. As it happens, sailing without guard-rails has now become a feature of the restored classic yacht scene.
SELF TAUGHT
As for learning to become designers and creators of race-winning yachts, Olin and Rod Stephens did make the best use they could of technical courses available in New England, but much of it was of necessity self taught. Olin had done his first Bermuda Race in 1928 as crew for the great designer John Alden, but while his shipmates and the crew from other boats were ashore making good use of the ready availability of the Bermudan speciality of Dark’n’stormies, created with Gosling’s Bermuda rum and doubly-appreciated after racing across from the Prohibition-blighted USA, Olin Stephens spent his time swimming in the warm waters of Bermuda in order to closely examine the hull shapes of the more successful boats, most of which reflected John Alden’s deep-heeled schooner hulls.
Dorade’s profile showed a hull outline owing much to John Alden’s schooners, and while the rig had a traditional three-headsail arrangement forward, Rd Stephens optimised its efficiency and moved towards making it a masthead cutter configuration.
FIFE INSPIRATION
Before that, he had been much taken with the hull sections of the elegant Fife-designed Int. 6 Metres that had been shipped across the Atlantic to race the British-America Cup, and consequently when – aged 21 – he persuaded his father to let him design Dorade to be ready for the 1930 season, the hull design – superficially at least – has the profile of an Alden schooner with the deep heel right aft, and the slimly elegant midship sections of a Fife 6 Metre.
The narrow beam of Dorade was at variance with the later view of American boats tending to be much wider than the accepted European norm, but narrow she was – just 10ft 3ins beam on a 52ft hull. However, what these basic dimensions don’t reveal was that Olin Stephens had a particular talent for designing sweet-lined high-performing stern sections. Other designers – particularly Fife – had a tendency to make the waterlines aft a bit too full, but Olin Stephens got it right from the very start.
While current owners have introduced some odd experiments with the shape of Dorade’s mizzen, her classic hull continues to find the easiest way possible though the sea for a boat of quite heavy displacement.
GENIUS FOR ENGINEERING A RIG
Allied to that was the fact that younger brother Rod had an aptitude of genius for engineering, rigging and sail solutions. Together they made up a creative team that in time was unbeatable, yet it was all done by a conservative approach. Roderick Stephens Senr continued to fund Dorade until 1935, by which time she’d won the Fastnet again in 1933, and then on being sold to San Francisco in 1936, promptly won that year’s Transpac to Honolulu.
Meanwhile the most direct descendant of Dorade, the 1934-built 54ft Stormy Weather designed by Olin Stephens when he was 25, retained the yawl rig on a schooner-profile hull, but had the significant change of a 20% increase in beam, from 10ft 3ins to 12ft 6ins. Dorade’s narrowness made her notorious for extreme downwind rolling, but Stormy Weather seemed to get it just right for all-round performance, and by the time Olin Stephens died aged 100 in 2008, he’d hinted that Stormy Weather – still happily very much in action – was probably his favourite boat.
Stormy Weather, Dorade’s beamier younger sister, was believed to be Olin Stephens’ favourite of all his designs. Photo: JRT
CHRONOLOGICAL AGE “A CRUDE INSTRUMENT’
You can draw many conclusions from all this, including the notion that chronological age is an extremely crude instrument for measuring any individual’s potential and limitations. And sailing being so much a vehicle sport, once we get into keelboats all bets are off. For instance, America’s Cup superstar Dennis Conner has reckoned he was at his prime when aged around 45, yet recently we have seen the upper limits highlighted by Australia’s Gordon Ingate celebrating his hundredth birthday in a sailing career in which his most recent victory in the Australian Dragon Nationals was achieved at the age of 94.
NO TEENAGERS IN THE 1930s
Against that, in the 1930s the concept of a significant section of the population being separately identified as “Teenagers” had not been developed, and young people were allowed to spread their wings as soon as they showed they were able, an opportunity taken by the Stephens brothers with the enthusiastic support of their father.
This was to continue to the end, as we discovered in 1970 when Rod Stephens came to Ireland for a day-log seminar afloat and ashore in Howth to provide guidance for the owners of the new S&S 34s. We duly reported it with photos in what was then Irish Yachting & Motorboating, and within weeks Roderick Stephens Senr had taken out an annual subscription.
Rod Stephens at an S&S34 Seminar Afloat in Howth in 1970 – when reported in Irish Yachting magazine, it emerged that his father continued to take a lively interest in the activities of his talented sons. Photo: W M Nixon
REINVENTING THE SUPERLEAGUE
As for Superleagues, when the multi-talented Tim Goodbody Senior was Commodore of Dublin Bay’s Corinthian-racing Royal Alfred YC in the 1980s, he found a kindred spirit in Gerry van Zoest, who’d been sent from the Netherlands to put new life and fresh image into the old Murphy’s brewery in Cork under the Heineken banner.
Tim Goodbody’s sailing career is extraordinary, as he has been a champion in Dragons, J/24s, Sigma 33s and J/109s along other boats, he has helmed the top Fastnet Race-winning boat in an Irish Admiral’s Cup Team (1987) and he has made a long and exceptional contribution to the practical organisation of sailing in Ireland and internationally.
Man of many talents. Tim Goodbody wins the 2009 Sigma 33 Championship on Belfast Lough.
So for some glorious years, the RAYC Heineken Superleague was the peak of the season-long Dublin Bay sailing, emulated at other sailing centres. But it began to consume too much interest and energy to the detriment of more traditional fixtures, and in 2001 a new market-leader took centre stage, the four day Volvo Dun Laoghaire Regatta, which could be done and dusted within a manageable time-frame, while acknowledging the reality that a remarkably large proportion of the Irish sailing population is in the Greater Dublin area, and could adjust their plans for participation (or not) by being prepared to pay top dollar for late entry if the increasingly efficient medium-range weather forecasts were favourable.
THE ROSY GLOW OF NOSTALGIA?
But now some sort of nostalgia seems to have emerged, and the historical image of the original Heineken Superleague appears to acquire a rosier glow with every passing season. Of course, it could no longer be called the Heineken Superleague - the banning of alcohol sponsorship was one of the reasons for its demise. Yet with DBSC/RAYC’s AIB sponsorship, the title Superleague stays very much alive, and the addition of the Lambay Race on May 30th to its 2026 fixtures gives it a bit more historical heft.
AIR-PUNCHING TO THUMPING MUSIC
And the AIB Superleague also optimises the opportunities for glitzy post-race prize-giving ceremonies in yacht club forecourts.
Time was when sailing prize-givings were an exercise in modesty, quiet events tagged on at the end of the Annual Dinner in the depths of winter. But now no event of significance is complete without a glitzy and hopefully sunny distribution of much silverware to the accompaniment of thumping music and choreographed air-punching by winning crews.
It wasn’t like that at all when John Cox Stephens of the New York Yacht Club was quietly presented with an off-the-shelf £100 silver ewer after his schooner America had won the race round the Isle of Wight tagged on to the end of Cowes Week 1851.
