Pint size revival

We spoke to some of the key players at this week's Quarter Ton Cup

Glossy yachting magazines have as their regular fare coverage of the beautful classic 'metre' boats from classes like the 12m, 6m, 5.5m, usually involving boats that were expensive to start with and have become even more so now they are classics requiring profound up-keep due to their vintage. It is perhaps for this reason that Peter Morton's initiative to revive the IOR Quarter Ton class is so refreshing - the boats were dirt cheap to start and have become even cheaper in the interening years - and yet competition, as was seen at this week's Quarter Ton Cup in Cowes, is fierce.

Run by the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Cowes, this year's Quarter Ton Cup saw among its competitors legendary yacht designers Ed Dubois and Ron Holland (Bruce Farr was scheduled to come but was kept away by America's Cup business), both of whom cut their teeth in the class back in the 1970s and 1980s. Today both are known for their yachts at the opposite end of the scale. Ron Holland was the creative hand behind the enormous Mirabella, while Ed Dubois' Lymington-based design company has become so prolific in the arena of large sailing yachts - thirty 100+ft sailing yachts of his design now exist - that they will be holding their own 'Dubois regatta' in Palma next year between the Louis Vuitton Cup and the America's Cup itself.



Dubois recounts the tale of how he came to be sailing his Quarter Tonner. "Morty rang me up and said ‘oh Ed, you know that s***tter (any boat that isn’t a Farr boat is a s***tter!) you designed in 1977 called Enigma, and I said ‘yes’ and he said ‘well - you own it!’ And I went ‘WHAT?’ and he said “yeah, yeah, I found it in a boat yard in Plymouth looking rather sorry for itself and I bought it. So send me a cheque for three grand.” Against this on-slaught Dubois could do little but acquiesce, Morton subsequently putting him in contact with Anthony Haynes who carried out the refit on the boat at the GBR Challenge yard in Cowes. Enigma, winner of the 2006 Quarter Ton Cup, when we saw her in Cowes yesterday is in what yacht brokers would describe as 'as new'.

So at a time when many keelboat sailors who remember IOR are still breathing a sigh of relief that it has bitten the dust and with it, its lumpy awkward hull shapes and 's***tter' performance, why this resurgence of the Quarter Tonner? For Peter Morton it is for the good racing, but also the nostalgia.

"I started sailing big boats in Quarter Tonners after I sold a 505 in the mid-1970s," he recalls. "When I saw the Quarter Ton Cup in Cherbourg in 1974 when 45 Deg South came up, I thought it looked like a nice little boat, so I bought a hull and deck and finished it in a garage in Jersey." After that he built an Dubois boat, Star Flash and then Odd Job, the boat in which he won the Gold Roman Bowl in 1984. "So my first three boats were Quarter Tonners," continues Morton. "Then a couple of years ago, Louise my wife wanted a little boat to sail around with with her girlfriends and I tracked down the Quarter Tonner I built in 1976, Super Q, and got it back here, did her up here and gave it to her." Meanwhile over in Hamble the owners of Purple Haze were getting frustrated with having no one to race against, to the point of wanting to sell their boat. A conversation with Morty later and it was decided to make an attempt to rejuvenate the Quarter Ton Cup.

Since making this decision Morton has gone into full Philip Marlow mode and seems to have enjoyed the process of tracking down old Quarter Tonners scattered around obscure backwaters of the British Isles. To date he has 'saved' five boats including the Phil Morrison-designed Four Mates, recovered from a river bank in Plymouth while the boat he sailed to second place in this year's Quarter Ton Cup, Espada a 1980 Farr design, by a strange twist as a boat originally constructed for his wife's uncle. "I tracked that down and found it in a guy’s garden in Poole," he recounts. "He hadn’t sailed it since 1999. I refurbished that over the winter. I did a lot of the work myself. I really enjoyed it!" Other famous Quarter Tonners have also been recovered such as the original Tom Bombadil, the Gold Roman Bowl winner in 1983.

Looking back at the class, the Quarter Tonners first came into being in the late 1960s and numbers-wise were at their peak around 1984-5. Of all the level rating IOR classes, they were also the final one to die holding their last Quarter Ton Cup as recently as 1996. In its later years Quarter Ton racing was concentrated on the Med where it was embraced particularly in Italy by designers like Giovanni Ceccarelli.

Being a low budget box rule the Quarter Tonner was particularly attractive to designers looking to make a mark for themselves. Aside from Ed Dubois the Quarter Tonner was at least partly responsible for putting on the map some of the world's top yacht designers such as Ron Holland, Bruce Farr, Doug Petersen, to name just a few.

Ron Holland describes his first exposure to the class in 1971: "I was over here doing the Admiral’s Cup on a New Zealand boat called Improbable. And then after the Fastnet we raced from Plymouth to La Rochelle where the Quarter Ton Cup was and I could not believe my eyes when I saw all these Quarter Tonners out of the water among the Towers of La Rochelle. It was just an amazing sight: The French were doing radical stuff. There were boxes, hard chine boats, round boats, square boats - it was an incredible sight to see and it inspired me to design and build my first Quarter Tonner."



Holland (left), Dubois (right) prop up veteran journalist Bob Fisher



Former Quarter Ton Cup winner 45deg South

This came to pass when Holland was a draughtsman at the Morgan Yacht Corporation in St Petersburg, Florida. "The local yacht club in St Petersburg decided to do the first American Quarter Ton Cup, so I designed and built a boat for that particular regatta called Eygthene which won and the prize was free shipping to England for the Quarter Ton Cup. So I shipped the boat across to Europe. Charlie Morgan wouldn’t give me time off, so I quit my job! That was back in 1973. The boat arrived in Dunkerque and we had to sail her to Weymouth which was a bit of an eye opener crossing the Channel with all the currents and the traffic."

Following the delivery to Weymouth, Eygthene - so named because of Holland's Kiwi accent, at the time the designers at Morgan Yacht Corporation were all targeting the Quarter Ton 18ft rating limit - won the Quarter Ton Cup. For her day she was radical for carrying a 10ft beam on 24ft LOA - the widest Quarter Tonner ever built at that time. A Holland design subsequently won it again in Helsinki with Manzanita sailed by Rodney Pattisson. Both Eygthene and Manzanita were turned into production boats built all over the globe. Looking back at the Quarter Ton class Holland compares it to building tank test models and taking them racing. Holland drifted out of the Quarter Tonners as more commissions came through for bigger boats and he quips it was the beginning of a long road culminating in Mirabella.

Aside from rounding up old Quarter Tonners, a problem for Morton has been working out how to race them in the 21st century. Many of the boats although built to the IOR since the demise of the class have had their bumps and creases faired out and more lead added to their bulbs. Hence to qualify to race in the Quarter Ton Cup now boats must have had an IOR Quarter Ton rating in the past, but the regatta is now sailed under IRC. "If we stuck to IOR the new boats would completely dominate the old ones," states Morton. "Whereas IRC does a really good job of giving some benefit to the older boats and allowing those boats that had done modifications to race. So it is not perfect because IOR allows bigger spinnakers and boats with the original rigs can’t have them. But it is getting there and it is the best solution. When you look at the results - a Farr 727 has been up there and Ed Dubois’ boat which was from 1977 has been pretty dominant. My boat has done pretty well which is a 1980 boat and there is a 1990 boat which was fourth or fifth. So IRC is handling the age differences pretty well."

Morton compares the boat Dubois raced this week - a small light boat, designed for light conditions with Odd Job, his heavy 29 footer with lots of sail area, both of which seem to go a similar speed. "The rule kind of works it out. There is no boat that is shockingly slow with a high rating. It is not perfect but you could’t get a perfect system or try and do IOR again."

The round the cans format is also rather different from the Quarter Ton Cup format of old which included a two and a half day long offshore race. Ed Dubois recalls the most hair raising race during the Quarter Ton Cup in Japan in 1978. "It blew like hell, there were really long courses, six knots of current in some places. One Petersen boat turned upside down and didn’t come up. They had to dive to get the liferaft out. So they got into the liferaft, the boat sank and they were washed 800 miles downwind before they got picked up. That was a very dangerous event, so I don’t remember that with much passion..."



The Ron Holland-designed Manzanita - note the typically IOR heavily tapered shape



Some boats are more attractive than others...

With 22 boats competing at this year's Quarter Ton Cup and with some big names among the entries, it seems inevitable that the class can go anywhere but up. While the Royal Corinthian YC will hold the event again next year, Morton says that they will also probably hold another in France. "Most of these boats have got trailers and there is a class growing pretty quickly in France. The French guy who has 45 deg South has tracked down about 25 boats in Frce and they are starting to race again now there, so I think we will have a regatta in La Trinite or Benodet." This year the Quarter Tonners will get another chance to race one another at the RCYC's Vice Admiral's Cup on 30 September-1 October.

As we have mentioned the Quarter Ton class was responsible for putting several name designers of today on the map. As Dubois puts it - while Enigma, the fourth boat he designed, was campaigned several people noticed it who ended up commissioning him to design larger boats. Today there is no equivalent and Dubois admits it is hard to get started in yacht design. In this size range most boats are production boats for reasons of cost. Its nearest today perhaps is the Mini class, although this hasn't gained wholescale popularity outside France and is too orientated towards short-handed racing. Perhaps the ORC's new 26ft box rule boat could develop into the 21st century version of the Quarter Tonner?