Dinghies USA

Vanguard Sailboats Chairman Steve Clark gives a wide reaching perspective on the dinghy world Stateside

Steve Clark is Chairman of Vanguard Sailboats, the US’ leading builder of dinghies. From their plant in Portsmouth, Rhode Island Vanguard hold the US and Caribbean licenses to build the Laser and produce a wide range of boats from Optimists and 420s to Laser 2s and Radials to their own homegrown Zuma, Vanguard 15 and the double trapeze Vanguard Vector skiff.

Personally Clark is a massive dinghy enthusiast and has sailed in a wide variety of classes, but his passion is for high speed development classes. Such experience, along with his team’s victory in the Little America’s Cup with the current holder Cogito, has left him with many insightful views. Our interview with Clark is lengthy but covers many interesting issues.

So why isn’t dinghy racing as popular in the US as it is in the UK and Europe?
“Originally it was down to the definition of a Corinthian. An equivalent situation happened in England when tradesmen couldn’t row in Royal Henley regatta and you couldn’t enter punting competitions if you drew a salary. In the States around western Long Island Sound there were boats called sandbaggers that were wager boats - similar to what was going on in Australia at the same time. They were raced by professional watermen, fishermen, and longshoremen: the guys who were on the water all the time.

“Essentially Seawanhaka Corinthian and a bunch of the west Long Island Sound yacht clubs banned professionals from the sport, and chose only to race “wholesome” boats which were more seaworthy and conservative. The result is there are whole professions in American society who aren’t really represented in sailing - plumbers and pipe fitters for example. By contrast many Australians that sail are plumbers because it is a job that pays well and they can take off whenever they want to! But in America those guys fish and go out on the water, but they don’t sailboat race. It has put us in this upper class, conservative frame. What were the sandbaggers of New York 100 years later probably would have become like the Sydney 18s had they been allowed to prosper.

Because of the pre-dominance of Portsmouth Yardstick-style racing in England,” says Clark. “The possibilities for new boats are very different from what they are in the States. In the small cruising boat world we have very active PHRF racing, which is what you see on Narraggansett Bay in the summer time. But you don’t see it in dinghies. It is not something that happens particularly here.”



The Vanguard 15

Because dinghy sailing happens less it also makes it hard to introduce new designs. “In England, they structure the economics of new boats to be paid off in 100 units and you can sell 100 boats at the Boat Show just because it is new and different and one guy in 100 clubs is going to buy one and still think he achieved the full value.. Whereas in the States, you have the feeling that if you don’t have 100 boats on the start line it isn’t a real class. The guy who owns the only XXX in the club feels pretty lonely. So the sport consolidates around the largest classes.”

There is a trend he says of not playing at things you’re not good at. This has made it hard to promote more demanding skiff-style boats. In the US almost no impact has been made by the production skiffs such as those built by Laser and RS. Clark says they tried to get the 49er going, but he is not a fan of the Olympic skiff. “The 49er is basically a nasty boat. It is a hard boat to produce to the quality that it has got to be. There are a couple of things from a manufacturer’s standpoint that are just hideous and on the water it is very impolite. Julian [Bethwaite] made some trade offs there which I’m not sure were ideal.”

“A boat like that was going to tip over all the time and you shouldn't have to buy a new mast every time you stuck it in the ditch. Agreed for the elite it’s alright, in the early days of the 49ers there were broken masts all over the place. The US market in general has no tolerance for this kind of thing, and it really hurt getting the boat accepted [for the Olympics]."

Clark says the 49er's handling also leaves much to be desired. “He could have put 3in on the bottom of the rudder and made it is so that the boat would have sailed out of irons without the rudder stalling all the time and maybe lost a fraction of a knot in the performance overall and it would make the down speed handling of the boat much much easier…”

The 49er is a boat that when it was introduced seemed daunting to sail. Today those who have mastered the Bethwaite beast are now looking for something with more performance. Clark says this is usual when high performance boats are introduced. Another example is the International Canoe, a class he is active in.

“I’ve spent 20 years sailing International Canoes, which when I started sailing them were regarded as almost impossible to sail. Now there’s a group of people sticking 20sqm asymmetric spinnakers on them because they just aren’t exciting enough - which officially I think it is a bad idea.

“Individually we all have a problem that collectively we may not have. Individually I have a problem every time I sail out to a race: that my canoe isn’t fast enough. I get off the starting line and I want more speed than the other guys. But collectively I’m not sure that anyone comes off the water having sailed an International Canoe saying “nice boat, but the performance isn’t up to standard.” Then the question is how much faster do you want to be? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

“My major problem is that Rob Michael and the boys have hijacked a perfectly nice boat that had a perfectly nice group of people sailing it and having a wonderful time and set a quite different agenda unilaterally. Then having driven a truck over the class rules, they want to lock it down again. ‘ don’t think for yourselves, this the best thing.’ That stinks…”

The same happened in the International 14 class: “I was sailing 14s in 1983 when they started changing things so fast that with working full time and having kids, I couldn’t modify my boat fast enough to keep up with the rule changes. Literally before I got the boat in the water I was ripping things out that I had built to change them again. This was things like masts and where the sprit came out of the bow and how far. Because it was an oddball boat that I had with a different arrangement inside it, it wasn’t easy to figure out how to launch a 12ft pole– it was like a cue shot through the bulkheads! It was an impossible scene.”

At present Clark is fulfilling his catamaran lust in the A-class development singlehander. “There’s 10 or 12 of them in Bristol and we get a bunch of them out every Tuesday night during daylight time. It is a very good group of sailors. Usually in the States to get good competition you have to sail some lowest common denominator boat but in this case we are fortunate that the boat we are sailing is a very high common denominator boat.

“I continue to sail Canoes. Canoes are more of a movable feast. One of the standard forms that dinghy sailing takes in the States is that it follows the iceboat model. You can't go any one place and see 20 in a parking lot, but there are 20 of them within an hour’s drive of each other. So there’s a New England fleet of International Canoes that goes home every night and will show up every second or third weekend some place. We’ll go to some place and there’ll be seven or eight boats and we'll play for the weekend then pack them up and put them back in the garage.”

The dinghy park phenomenon is one you rarely find in the US, purely due to a fundamental cultural difference. “The boat park is probably is a function of our real estate being sufficiently unconfined. We’ve all got big enough backyards where you can stick a Laser on a trailer whereas in the semi-detached world of England where do you put your stuff? You’ve got to put your car somewhere and the back garden isn’t big enough. So you have to join a sailing club to have somewhere to park the toy.”

Sailing conditions, he maintains, are also better in the States compared to the UK. “There is a willingness to play boat on wet sponges and sewer plant outfalls and things like that which in America don’t get regarded as adequate. No one in America would consider sailing in Thorpe Bay, somewhere if the tide goes out and it is a six mile hike back to the beach to get your dolly…”

The Clark family are also known for their participation in the Tempest, the 1970s Olympic keelboat, in which Clark’s father Van Alan won the 1973 US and North American Championships.

“I was a great admirer of the Tempest for years. Ian [Proctor] did a wonderful job on that boat. I never really understood why it exploded the way it did. The Star boat people managed to kill it because you had to be too big to sail it and then they all proceeded to weigh 600lbs! It was okay for a Star boat sailor to weigh 325lbs, but to have 6ft 7in crewman who could bench press 300lb was regarded as unnatural somehow - excuse me, but isn't this athletics?

“It had a couple of quirks about it but basically the concept of a lightly ballasted boat which planes was good. The Tempest out on the water would still shock people relative to Melges 24s. It was a good boat and if reinterpreted in the modern world with a second trapeze on it and a masthead A sail out the front - the mast is definitely stiff enough to handle the abuse - you would horrify people. It would be just too much fun. And you could do it for $1,500!”

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In part two of our interview with Steve Clark tomorrow, he gives his views on the darker side of the Optimist, 420 sailing in the US, the interscholastic and colleageate sailing scene, their answer to the 29er, why match racing is best carried out in the slow boats...and much much more...