Als ik Harry ws zou ik eens goed te rade gaan bij de toekomst. Niet -misschien met nostalgie wel- terugkijken naar wat je allemaal hebt gedaan en hebt willen doen, maar wel naar wat je nog wilt gaan doen.
Harry is een dermate goede en ervaren zeiler dat hij elk bootje aan het varen krijgt, solo of met bemanning.
Als Harry op dit moment geen boot zou hebben zou hij z'n handen vol hebben aan meevaren met anderen of deliveries uitvoeren voor anderen. Van extreme trimaran, via class40, langs Pogo's, Firsts, evt zelfs Bavaria's naar platbodems naar zware stalen gebouwen.
Dus: wat wil je nog in de jaren die je voor je hebt?
Ik zou zeggen: jaartje geen boot en oriënteren op het mooiste ontwerp van vdStadt: de Gallant53.
In het juni nummer van Seahorse magazine staat over vdStadt een interessant artikel door collega ontwerper Julian Everitt waar natuurlijk de Gallant niet ontbreekt:
Ericus (Ricus) Gerhardus van de Stadt - usually known, more simply, as E G van de Stadt - an internationally renowned ocean racing yacht designer who succeeded in getting innovation to work for him - rather than letting it frighten his clients away, in the conservative world of offshore race boat design.
Van de Stadt pioneered trends that right from the outset of his offshore design career, beginning in 1949, took until the mid sixties to become the norm and which still form the cornerstone of fast yacht design today.
I speak, of course of aeroplane section high aspect ratio fin keels and spade rudders on light displacement, flattish bottomed hulls. In ocean racing boat design terms the appearance of the 39ft Zeevalk - van de Stadt’s second design, since setting up a design and build business with his wife in 1933 - was truly revolutionary. The keel was short fore and aft with a vertical trailing edge and only a small slope on the leading edge. A trim tab enabled the aero foil keel sections to be made asymmetric for additional lift upwind. The rudder - another aeroplane wing profile simply hung off the stock, with no skeg and nothing to support it other than the bearing surface at the interface with the hull. This, combined with what was, in effect, an ultra light displacement, while not uncommon in the keel boat world, was regarded by the conservative offshore racing world as verging on dangerous. The plywood, hard chine construction did little to reduce the incredulity of a design establishment that considered the very laws of offshore seamanship were being challenged.
Zeevaalk undoubtedly represented a watershed moment in conceptual terms, but despite being highly successful on the race course, few other designers followed the concept. She did, however, represent a significant part of a designer/ owner relationship that would, only 11 years later, produce one of the most significant ocean racers in the history of the sport.
The owner, in question, was Cornelius Bruynzeel - a pioneer of a new construction ‘wonder-material’ - plywood. Boat building seemed like a perfect environment to test the material as long as designs could be produced that would particularly suit the qualities of the material. The young van de Stadt had the perfect flat panel shapes to suit and so began, in 1939, a new chapter in sailboat design and construction. Valk, launched just before the start of WW2, was a 21ft hard chine day boat and proved so successful that it is still built today and is the most popular open boat in the Netherlands.
But it is in offshore racing boat design that van de Stadt really broke down the barriers of convention. Many of his innovations have been credited to other designers over the years but in reality Ricus van de Stadt really is THE Mr light displacement, fin keel and spade rudder offshore race boat designer. And Zeevalk is all the evidence you need from her shallow hull body, to the angular connection between hull and keel and the high aspect ratio foils.
But if ever a boat deserved an accolade for pushing the boundaries of design and technology to the limits available, it would be the maxi Stormvogel. Once again a commission from Cornelius Bruynzeel, to push the barriers of cold moulded plywood construction to promote his building material, Stormvogel at 73ft long - the length limit back in 1960 for the maxi class - represented the equivalent of a ‘ moon-shot’ in terms of available technology. Her design was typical of smaller van de Stadt boats with an unsupported spade rudder, shortish fin keel and, set against typical big boat design for the period, an ultra light displacement. She was, quite simply, an extraordinary yacht compared to the main stream. What made this moment in history even more remarkable was that the van de Stadt design office was so busy in 1959 that Ricus initially refused the commission for this maxi from Bruynzeel! Imagine that - refusing to take a commission for a 73ft racing boat! But Bruynzeel knew what he wanted and was not prepared to wait. He looked at other designers for the project, but figured van de Stadt’s concepts were what he needed. A compromise was reached, to share the design time burden and, long before America’s Cup style design teams were created, the first super-group of naval architects was assembled to create Stormvogel.
Van de Stadt’s radical signature hull and foils was topped off by a rig from Illingworth & Primrose, while Laurent Giles took care of the structure, interior and deck layout. It proved to be a perfect marriage of talents.
In the early days Van de Stadt’s design business ran very much in parallel to that of Olin Stephens throughout the fifties and sixties. Both design houses produced race winning boats as well as myriad cruising designs built out of steel, aluminium and timber. Any similarity, however, in boat shape was minimal. While most of the van de Stadt race boats featured separate spade rudders and a tendency towards light displacement, S&S, along with the majority of offshore boat designers, stuck to longer keel hung rudder concepts. Convention simply dictated that a keel hung rudder was safer, more seaworthy and more efficient from a hydrodynamic stand point.
But in 1958 van de Stadt started another offshore yacht design revolution that would impact around the world and help create an unparalleled growth in offshore racing.
Just as Zeevalk had shown the potential of plywood as a viable construction material for an ocean racer, the Pioneer - a 30ft minimum waterline length RORC rule racer - would showcase another ‘wonder’ boat building material -GRP. The Pioneer was no ‘glass’ version of an existing wooden design. Every detail of the design was drawn to take full benefit from moulded plastic construction - a concept used again successfully 21 years later on the DB1 Three Quarter Tonner designed by van de Stadt.
Over 650 Pioneers were built in the early sixties. They won innumerable offshore races around Europe including the RORC Class III Championship paving the way towards the ubiquitous production cruiser racer of today. It’s probably fair to say that the Pioneer design in all of its aspects of construction, hull form and appendages provided the inspiration to Bill Lapworth to produce the Cal 40 design in 1963 which helped turn the American offshore racing scene on its head.
The builders of the Pioneer, Southern Ocean Shipyard, commissioned a follow up and in 1963 the 36ft Excalibur hit the offshore scene. Like the Pioneer, the Excalibur was an engineered grp design showcasing the van de Stadt design offices skills at creating a complete package of drawings and information. She was also fast - winning the RORC Class Championships in 1963, ‘64 and ‘65.
While designs like Zeevalk had pushed the boundaries of advanced foils and lightness in offshore capable racers and Stormvogel had showcased what was possible in the rarified atmosphere of maxi boat racing, the Excalibur brought the van de Stadt design message through to the guts of the offshore establishment. For sure the success of this boat inspired Dick Carter, with his first design - the 34ft Rabbit, to utilise a van de Stadt style hull and appendages package. Rabbit’s win of the 1965 Fastnet opened a flood gate to designers across the globe to universally adopt variations of the van de Stadt rudder and keel layout for offshore boats.
In an ironic twist a few years later after Ricus had helped Olin Stephens and Dick Carter to develop the world-purposed International Offshore Rule (IOR) in 1970, he resigned from the IOR Technical Committee in protest to the American domination of the rule and his belief that IOR was fostering an unseaworthy type of yacht! Ironic indeed - as it was Olin himself, back in the fifties and early sixties, that considered separate rudders - inspired by the van de Stadt spade - to be unseaworthy for offshore racing!
In fact the van de Stadt design office relationship with IOR was perhaps not quite as successful as the one they had enjoyed in the RORC rule period. For sure they had some good successes in the various Ton Cup classes, but in bigger boats the continuation of their light, fair hull shapes did not fit the more tortured lines that were favoured by IOR. But this all changed in 1980 with the advent of the Three Quarter Ton DB1. Brilliantly engineered by Cees van Tongeran, chief designer and son in law to Ricus, the DB1 proved that simple, distortion free shapes, aligned with lightish displacement and the trademark van de Stadt foils, could dominate during the highly competitive mid term of the IOR. The production design detailing of this boat is a masterclass of grp design engineering which elevates it into a class of its own. It is a fitting continuation of the design skills first seen in the 1958 Pioneer.
But the success of this design, on the race course, is truly staggering with the following results tally at the Three Quarter Ton World Championships. 1980: 2,3,5,6. 1981: 2,3,4,5,6. 1982: 2,5. 1983: 3. 1984: 1,2,3,5. 1985: 3. The championship win of 1984 came with the slightly modified DB2. With other wins all over the world, the van de Stadt DB’s have probably won more yacht races than any other single design and could arguably claim to be the greatest racing yacht design ever - certainly their pedigree as a series production racer is unequalled. While Ricus retired from the design office a couple of years earlier, the DB1 and DB2 assuredly carry the DNA of the van de Stadt design ethic.
There are many notable designs from the van de Stadt cannon. But perhaps the Royal Cape One Design best epitomises the daring approach that created a design criteria that is still relentlessly pursued today - that of speed. At just under 30ft long, with a waterline length of 28ft the displacement was a mere 4,000lbs giving a displacement length ratio of 82.7! This compares pretty favourably with any go-fast offshore designs of today. In all design element respects, the RCOD, drawn in 1961, is decades ahead of its time with its deep, but short bulb keel, spade rudder and rig amidships.
The most renowned development of this class, named Black Soo, belongs firmly in yacht design folklore and is regarded by many yacht designs as inspirational.
While plywood construction enabled the van de Stadt office to fully exploit their beliefs in light displacement, grp gave the firm an opportunity to scale other unchartered territory in yacht design. When she was launched in 1960, the 48ft Glass Slipper was the largest production grp offshore racing yacht in the world. This accolade was then taken by the Gallant 53 in 1966 and then by the Ocean 71 in 1970. Van de Stadt designs both.
Ricus van de Stadt completed his training as a naval architect in 1932 and in 1936 he went to the Olympics as a reserve for the Netherlands sailing team. He started his design and build business in 1933, but it really took off when Cornelius Bruynzeel commissioned the 39ft plywood Zeevalk in 1952. Business boomed throughout the 50’s and 60’s until the boat building part was sold to Dehler. And what a success that was! They continued the production of the 21ft Varianta, which had begun in 1962 and produced a staggering 4,400 of these pocket cruisers. There are many other Dehler/van de Stadt successes, but none come close to the iconic, IOR DB’s.
And so, in summary, this great man of the offshore racing yacht design world brought us lightness, fin keels and spade rudders in 1949, the astounding Maxi, Stormvogel in 1960, and then to cap it off, arguably one of the most successful IOR racers of all time, the DB1 design of 1980. Along the way his designs did as much as anyone to help popularise ocean racing - either through self build ply boats or mass produced grp racers that we’re the equal, in their time, to any one-offs. To date the E G van de Stadt office has produced over 400 designs with in excess of 25,000 boats built.
Veel plezier Harry!