SALISH SEA
THOROUGHBREDS
by Nik Schulz
INTERNATIONAL ONE DESIGN INTEREST BUILDS IN THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS
A
cold day in the winter of 2003 found Michael Douglas in Mystic, Connecticut. He’d traveled across the country to inspect an old International One Design called Nutmeg (Hull No. 19) intent on bringing her back home to Orcas Island. The International One Design’s story began in 1935, not far from Mystic on the waters of Long Island Sound. Cornelius Shields—then the commodore of the New York Yacht Club and an uncannily talented class racer—was keen on finding a bigger, faster replacement for the 29-foot Sound Interclubs they had been campaigning. He envisioned a true one-design boat, one on which all of the major variables would be equalized so skippers would be measured on skill, not on how much they spent on improvements. Racing in Bermuda that summer, he found his inspiration in a newly delivered Six Meter-class boat named Saga, which had been designed and built by Bjarne Aas in Norway. Years later he recounted, “The minute I saw Saga, I fell in love with her. I thought she was the most beautiful boat I'd ever seen. I loved her shape, her sheer, her dainty transom, and her long, straight counter… It was terrible. All I could think of on the way back to the States were the lines of that darned boat.” Shields reached out to Aas to commission a design for a
48º NORTH
somewhat smaller boat with a cabin, based on the 37 ½-foot Saga’s lines (Six Meter was a formula-based class designation, not a measure of length). After some back- and-forth during the winter of that year, the design was fixed. She would measure 33feet 5-inches overall with a 6-foot 9-inch beam. Her waterline length would be 21-feet 5-inches. She’d carry 466 sq. ft. of sail and displace 7,120 lbs., 4,100 lbs. of which would be ballast. The English designer and sailor Uffa Fox described the boat’s lines “as clean as a smelt’s… each and every [one] perfect for its purpose.” One imagines that Shields had little trouble enlisting a few of his friends to form a syndicate to underwrite the cost of the first 25 boats. By December of 1936, the first four arrived on the East Coast. Shields christened his boat Aileen. She was in the water by Christmas. Excitement flashed across Long Island Sound when the initial boats exceeded all performance expectations. By the summer of 1937, the entire first run of 25 boats, Nutmeg among them, was racing on the Sound. The International One Design Class was born. Returning to more recent history, Nutmeg did pass inspection that day in 2003 and Mike spent the winter back home on Orcas figuring out how to get her to the West Coast. Set on transporting
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SEPTEMBER 2020
