What's happening to offshore racing? A three part history
From Jolie Brise to Ultims - a three part history of the people, the designer's and the boats
The idea for this series began, as many useful offshore conversations do, in the dark.
This year I was skippering a Sun Fast 3600 in the RORC Myth of Malham with a crew of mixed experience. Some were good sailors, some were still finding their way, and most were new to the particular rhythm of offshore racing: the watches, the damp kit, the strange meals, the long quiet spells, the sudden urgency, and the way a boat becomes its own small moving world once the land has disappeared astern.
By the first night, once the boat had settled, the sails were trimmed, the watch system was working and the first nervousness had gone, the conversation moved beyond the race itself.
How did this sport begin?
Why did anyone think it was a good idea to race yachts offshore, through tide, darkness, poor weather and all the uncertainty of the sea?
And, perhaps most honestly, was offshore racing always just a rich person’s ego sport, and is it still one now?
It is a fair question.
Offshore racing did not begin as a mass-participation sport. Yachting has always carried money, privilege and status. Before the Fastnet Race, before RORC became the centre of British and international offshore racing, and long before IRC, Class40, IMOCA or double-handed Fastnet campaigns, yacht racing already had its aristocratic and millionaire world.
The great cutters, schooners and later the J Class yachts belonged to owners with deep pockets, paid hands, powerful social connections and a taste for display.
But that is only part of the truth.
A serious offshore yacht has never been only an owner and a cheque book. It needs a navigator, helmsmen, trimmers, bowmen, sail handlers, watch leaders, cooks, engineers and people willing to get cold, wet, tired and frightened without stopping the boat. Many of those sailors would never own an offshore yacht themselves, but they became part of the sport through ability, appetite, toughness and trust.
That is one of offshore racing’s enduring contradictions.
It has often required wealthy owners, but it has also made room for sailors who owned little more than their kit bag and their willingness to turn up. The best boats were never just expressions of money. They were communities under pressure.
Some were run well. Some were not. Some owners were fine sailors. Some were passengers with better tailoring. But the sea has always had a useful habit of stripping away pretence. Offshore, the boat still needs to be sailed. Someone still has to reef, steer, navigate, change headsails, find the tide, keep the watch awake and make the next good decision when everyone would rather be asleep.
That is why the history of offshore yacht design is not just about hull shapes.
It is about owners, crews, designers, rules, ambition, seamanship, fashion, money, fairness and judgement. It is about the continuing argument between speed and safety, comfort and performance, rating advantage and real offshore ability.
This three-part series follows the runners, the boats themselves, from Jolie Brise and Dorade to Myth of Malham, Rabbit, Imp, Ceramco New Zealand, the Admiral’s Cup boats, the great IOR machines, the Whitbread and Volvo racers, the French offshore designs, the modern IMOCA foilers, the Ultims, and the practical IRC and production racers that still fill offshore start lines today.
But the boats are only half the story.
The other half is the rules.
From the beginning, offshore racing had to answer a difficult question: how do you make unlike boats race fairly against one another?
A big boat should usually beat a small boat. A light boat may fly in a breeze and stop in a chop. A heavy boat may look slow until the weather turns foul. A professional crew can make an ordinary design look good, while a poor crew can make a brilliant boat look ordinary.
If offshore racing was going to become more than a procession of the richest and largest yachts, it needed handicap systems. Those systems did more than score the boats. They shaped them.
The RORC rule, CCA rule, IOR, IMS, CHS, IRC, ORC and other systems all tried, in different ways, to balance performance, size, seaworthiness, speed and fairness. In doing so, they changed the boats themselves. Designers learned to design for the sea, for the owner, for the crew and for the rule.
Sometimes that produced wonderful yachts.
Sometimes it produced strange ones.
That is why the history of offshore yacht design is never a simple march from heavy boats to light boats, or long keels to fin keels, or wood to aluminium, glass and carbon. It is a more interesting story than that. Offshore design advanced by argument. Sometimes the argument was with the sea. Sometimes it was with the rating rule. Sometimes it was between an owner and a designer. Often it was between an old idea of seaworthiness and a new idea of speed.
So in three parts this is my view of 100 years of the boats, the people and the designers
Part 1, From Jolie Brise to Myth of Malham: The Age of Seaworthy Speed, looks at the first great era, from 1925 to the early 1960s. This is the story of pilot cutters, early Fastnet boats, Olin Stephens, Sparkman & Stephens, Charles Nicholson, Laurent Giles, John Illingworth, Dorade, Bloodhound, Carina, Stormvogel and Clarion of Wight. It is the period when offshore racing moved from working-boat inheritance towards purposeful racing design, but the sea was still the main examiner.
Part 2, From Rabbit to Victory of Burnham: The Age of the Rule-Beaters, follows the sport into the IOR years. This is the era of Dick Carter, Éric Tabarly, Doug Peterson, Ron Holland, Bruce Farr, German Frers, Ed Dubois, Stephen Jones, Julian Everitt, Rob Humphreys and the Admiral’s Cup at its height. The boats became faster, cleverer, stranger and more rule-aware. Offshore design became an arms race, and the rating certificate became almost as important as the hull itself.
Part 3, After IOR: When Offshore Design Split into Tribes, looks at the modern world. After IOR, the sport did not move in one direction. It split. IRC and ORC tried to make handicap racing more usable. TP52s and other box-rule boats offered cleaner real-time racing. Whitbread and Volvo boats became professional ocean-racing machines. The French built a complete offshore pathway through Mini, Figaro, Class40, IMOCA and Ultim. Double-handed sailing exploded. Production racers such as JPKs, Sun Fasts and Pogos gave serious amateurs a practical route back into offshore success.
Today, offshore racing is no longer one sport in any simple sense.
A fully crewed IRC yacht, a double-handed JPK, a Figaro, a Class40, a foiling IMOCA, a TP52 and an Ultim trimaran all use the same playing field, the sea, but they are not really playing the same game.
They share weather, tide, darkness, fatigue and consequence. But the design brief, the crew model, the cost, the risk and the purpose can be completely different.
That is what makes the story worth telling.
Offshore racing has always been partly about money, but never only about money. It has always contained ego, but also courage, competence, discipline and trust. It has always attracted owners, but it has also made sailors. It has always needed rules, yet the sea remains the one rule that cannot be negotiated with.
The boats have changed beyond recognition.
The question has not.
How do you build a yacht that is fast enough to matter, strong enough to trust, fair enough to race, and manageable enough for human beings to keep driving when the easy part is over?
That is the thread running from Jolie Brise to the modern offshore world.
So let’s begin where offshore racing itself began: with a working pilot cutter, a handful of determined sailors, and a race around the Fastnet Rock.
PART 1: From Jolie Brise to Myth of Malham
The age of seaworthy speed
FirstBeat’s history of offshore racing yacht design, 1925 to 1963
Luckily I’ve owned or raced a yacht from each era I’ve written about:
In 2022, sailing Morning After past St Catherine’s Point at the start of the RORC Round Britain and Ireland Race, I found myself thinking about the boats that had gone before.
Morning After is a Sparkman & Stephens 34. She was designed in 1966, only three years after Clarion of Wight, another S&S design, built by Lallows of Cowes, won the 1963 Fastnet Race outright from a fleet of 127 boats and helped Britain win back the Admiral’s Cup.
Same designer. Same tradition. Same stretch of water. Different decade.
Offshore, when the sea gets serious and the crew stops talking, you understand something about those boats that no archive photograph can quite communicate. They were built to keep going when it stopped being comfortable, and that quality does not come from a rule. It comes from a philosophy.
With 1,600 nautical miles still to go, I was hoping Morning After, the first S&S 34 built and later rebuilt by me, would rise to the challenge and look after us for the next fifteen days. But let’s start at the beginning of the modern era of ameteur offshore racing in 1925:
The man who organised the race, won it, and founded the ‘Ocean racing club’
Before we meet the boats, we need to meet the man who built the stage.
Weston Martyr was an English former seaman and yachting journalist, then living in New York, who sailed in the 1924 Bermuda Race and was captivated by the experience. He came back to Britain and began pushing the yachting press hard: Britain needed its own ocean race. Martyr’s campaign found its partner in Evelyn George Martin, cruising editor of Yachting World, who joined Martyr and Malden Heckstall-Smith, editor of Yachting Monthly, to form what became the Ocean Race Committee. They agreed on the course. They organised the entry. They held the start.
Then Martin entered his own boat.
Martin had bought Jolie Brise in 1923, a gaff-rigged pilot cutter, built at the Albert Paumelle Yard in Le Havre in 1913 to a design by Alexandre Pâris, built to take pilots to ships in real weather, not to look handsome at anchor. In August 1925, from the line at Ryde, Jolie Brise won.
At the end of the race, the Royal Ocean Racing Club was founded. Evelyn George Martin, winner of the race he helped create, became its first Commodore.
That is not a footnote. That is the founding legend of the sport. One man, one boat, one summer. The prize, the club and the history, all from the same voyage.
The boat that came from work, not sport
Jolie Brise herself is the right starting point, because she was not really a racing yacht at all. She came from work.
Built at Le Havre in 1913, her job before Martin bought her was to carry pilots to ships in real weather, in tidal water, when delay was not convenient and failure could be fatal. She was a tool. Pilot cutters had to leave harbour when other boats stayed put, carry canvas in hard weather, heave-to, beat, reach, survive and get their men home. When Jolie Brise won the first Fastnet, she did not win because somebody had found a clever weakness in a rule. She won because she was already the sort of boat that understood offshore work.
She went on to win the Fastnet again in 1929 and 1930, making her, still, the only yacht to have won the race three times.
That matters, because it tells us something important about the birth of the sport. The first offshore racing yachts were not pure racing machines. They were seaworthy yachts being raced offshore. The distinction matters. Weight was not yet the enemy; weight was security. Depth was not yet inefficiency; depth was grip. A stout hull, a forgiving motion and a rig that could be handled by wet, cold men were not old-fashioned ideas. They were survival tools.
The sea, not the rating office, was still the principal examiner.
Modern sailors sometimes forget this. We look at old boats and see drag, displacement and romance. The people who raced them saw something else. They saw a boat that would keep going when the race had stopped being a pleasant idea and had become a cold, wet business of endurance.
Jolie Brise did not give offshore racing its future. That would come later. She gave it its soul.
The young American who made the old world uncomfortable
Then came Dorade.
If Jolie Brise represents the working-boat inheritance, Dorade represents the moment offshore yacht design became intellectually dangerous. She was designed by Olin Stephens, who was 21 years old when he drew her in late 1929, in the same weeks that Sparkman & Stephens Inc. was formally incorporated. Dorade was not youthful in the careless sense. She was disciplined, narrow, efficient and serious. The boat was Design Number 7 of the new firm.
She had a tall Bermudian rig, narrow beam, lead ballast carried deep in the keel, and lightweight steam-bent frames rather than the heavier sawn frames that were then conventional. Each of those decisions tells you something. Narrow beam reduces wetted surface and improves upwind performance in a seaway. Deep ballast increases righting moment without the penalty of a heavy hull. Steam-bent frames save weight without sacrificing structure. None of this was accidental; it was calculated by a 21-year-old who had thought the problem through.
Dorade was launched in May 1930. In 1931, she won the Transatlantic Race — finishing two days ahead of much larger boats on elapsed time. In the same year she won the Fastnet Race. In 1933 she won the Fastnet again. In 1932 she took the Newport Bermuda Race, and in 1936 the Transpac. When the winning 1931 Transatlantic crew returned to New York — average age 22, including Rod Stephens and their 46-year-old father — they were given a ticker-tape parade up Broadway.
The important point is not simply that Dorade won. Many boats win and then disappear into the footnotes. Dorade changed the level of the conversation.
She was not a brute, nor merely a heavy hull carrying more canvas. She was a refined answer to the offshore problem. Stephens seemed to understand that a serious ocean-racing yacht had to be efficient enough to be fast in ordinary conditions, strong enough to survive bad ones and controllable enough for tired sailors to keep driving. A boat that is quick for thirty minutes in flat water is one thing. A boat that remains fast after two days of wet bunks, cold food, poor visibility, changing breeze and a crew losing its edge is another. Dorade belonged to the second category.
She also changed the status of the naval architect. After Dorade, the designer was no longer simply the person who drew a handsome boat. He could be the person who altered the competitive order.
Stephens understood this himself. Years later, asked what he would design if all the rating rules were swept aside, he said he would simply design Dorade again. For a mix of offshore speed and seaworthiness, he never found a better answer than the one he had at 21.
The British answer
It is easy now to look back at some of the British pre-war offshore yachts and call them conservative, but in offshore racing conservatism has saved lives. A strong boat, properly built, with a good motion and sensible gear, is not a bad idea when the Channel is ugly and the crew is tired.
Designers such as Charles E. Nicholson, Robert Clark and Laurent Giles came from a world where a yacht was not simply a racing platform. It was an object of craft, purpose, social standing and seamanship. Those things could be restrictive, but they could also be valuable. The problem for any conservative design tradition is that it starts losing once someone else finds a safe way to go faster.
Bloodhound gives us a good pre-war example of the British answer at its peak. Designed by Charles E. Nicholson and built by Camper & Nicholsons in 1936 for owner Isaac Bell, she won the Fastnet Race in 1939 — with Charles Nicholson himself at the helm. That detail matters: the man who designed the boat sailed her to victory in the race that was supposed to prove whether the design worked. He won.
After the war, Bloodhound had a long second life. In 1962, she was bought by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, who kept her until 1969. She became the boat on which young members of the royal family learned to sail, sailing with Britannia in the Western Isles. For a boat that represents the British establishment answer to American offshore design, there is a certain logic to that ending.
The comparison between the British and American traditions is useful. The British boat had authority. The American boat had sharpened intent. The British tradition carried seamanship, craft and reassurance. The emerging American tradition carried efficiency, calculation and a willingness to make older habits uncomfortable. Neither side had the whole answer. The best offshore boats would eventually need both.
War, interruption and the need for a sharper brief
The Second World War broke the rhythm of offshore racing. Boats aged. Owners disappeared into service. Yards changed purpose. When racing returned, the sport still looked familiar, but the question had shifted.
John Illingworth understood that first.
Illingworth was not merely an owner commissioning something pretty. He was a serious offshore sailor with a very clear idea of what he wanted a boat to do, and a track record to prove he meant it. In 1945, still a Royal Navy officer, he had proposed what became the inaugural Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race — when invited to join a planned cruise to Hobart, his response was immediate: “I will, if you make a race of it.” He entered, and won, in the 35-foot double-ended Rani. He won the race he created at first attempt.
Two years later, back in Britain, he turned to Laurent Giles for what became Myth of Malham.
Illingworth was not thinking about what offshore racing yachts had traditionally looked like. He was thinking about a specific problem: the Solent start, the Channel, the headlands, the tides, the western approaches, Fastnet Rock and the long road home. He wanted a boat designed around that problem.
The design brief he telephoned to the Giles office became one of the most quoted documents in British offshore racing history. As Laurent “Jack” Giles recalled it: “John is back and wants a ‘flat-out’ for the Fastnet; minimum size, rather light displacement, no sheer or doghouse and very short overhangs.”
That is a race brief, not a yacht brief. Every word in it is a decision about the Fastnet course, not about what looks handsome at Cowes.
Myth of Malham, designed for the race
The result was a 37ft 6in mahogany sloop with a masthead rig, built by Hugh McLean & Sons at Gourock, Scotland, and launched in 1947.
It is difficult now to feel how sharp Myth of Malham must have looked to some eyes. Today we are used to short ends, plumb bows, wide sterns, hard chines and hulls drawn around computer prediction. But in the immediate post-war British offshore world, a boat with short overhangs and little regard for old visual comfort was making a point.
The masthead rig was not merely a style choice. The RORC rule of the time attached less significance to the area of headsails than to the mainsail — so a masthead forestay carrying a large genoa was, under the rating, effectively free sail area. Illingworth and Giles understood the rule well enough to exploit it without designing a freak. Myth of Malham was fast because she was efficient, not because she was unusual.
And she was fast. She won the Fastnet in 1947 and again in 1949. She was part of Britain’s winning team in the inaugural Admiral’s Cup in 1957.
What matters is not only the trophy list. It is what the boat says. Myth of Malham tells us that a serious offshore yacht is not simply a general-purpose yacht made a little faster. It is a set of decisions aimed at a particular job. Illingworth knew the Fastnet was not a beauty contest. He knew the boat had to get out of the Solent, work through the Channel, live through the western approaches, round the rock, come home through the tide and still have enough life left in boat and crew to finish properly.
The Americans had their own answer — and it was formidable
While Britain was wrestling with the Fastnet and the RORC rule, American offshore racing was developing its own habits. The CCA world was different. The races were different. The Gulf Stream, Bermuda, longer ocean legs and American owner culture all shaped the boats. The CCA rule encouraged its own answers, often combining offshore capability with a real cruising interior and a different attitude to beam, centreboard and comfort.
Philip Rhodes’s Carina belongs in this part of the story. Dick Nye’s Philip Rhodes-designed Carina won the Fastnet in 1955 and again in 1957, built in aluminium and setting trends on both sides of the Atlantic. That is not a small achievement. It shows that the American answer was not merely comfortable or moderate, at its best, it was devastatingly effective.
But the highest expression of the American tradition in this era was a boat the article must not pass over in one sentence.
Finisterre was an S&S centreboard yawl of 38ft 8in, designed for Carleton Mitchell and launched in 1954. She won the Newport Bermuda Race in 1956, 1958 and 1960 — three consecutive victories, a feat that has never been equalled in the race’s history. She was at her best in a blow, yet quick enough in light air when sailed with the concentration Mitchell and his crew brought to the job. Three Bermuda wins is not a run of luck. It is mastery.
Finisterre proves that the American offshore tradition at its peak was as technically serious as anything in Britain. Different rule, different racecourse, different solution but the same level of thought.
The Admiral’s Cup
By the late 1950s, offshore racing was becoming more international, more serious and more political. The Admiral’s Cup sharpened everything.
The first edition in 1957 introduced team racing between the UK and USA, Channel Race, two Cowes Week inshore races and the Fastnet, with teams of three yachts. What had been a personal race became a national one. A yacht was no longer trying to win for an owner. She could be part of a country’s argument about whose design tradition was better.
That is a very different pressure. It rewards consistency, not just brilliance. It rewards boats that can perform across different race types. It rewards designers who understand rating, sea state, crew work, reliability and the particular demands of a multi-race series.
Myth of Malham still belonged in that world — she contributed to Britain’s 1957 victory. But by then the sport had begun to move beyond her. The Admiral’s Cup was becoming the great offshore design examination, and the paper was about to get much harder.
Stormvogel: the future with a bigger wake
Then came Stormvogel.
She does not sit neatly in the old story, which is exactly why she matters. Stormvogel was not simply another offshore yacht. She was a warning from the future.
At 74ft 6in LOA — with a waterline of 59ft 4in and a beam of 16ft 4in — she was a different order of object from the racing yachts around her. Her hull lines were by Ricus van de Stadt, construction by Laurent Giles, rig and sail plan by John Illingworth. She was built in 1961 at the Lamtico yard in Stellenbosch, South Africa, for Dutch owner C. Bruynzeel — a multi-continent project long before that was fashionable. Her 1961 Fastnet performance in heavy weather made the point: big, light and powerful, she was not merely faster than the boats around her. She was operating at a different speed entirely.
Until Stormvogel, much of the offshore design conversation had been about balance, rating, seaworthiness and efficiency in moderate-sized yachts. Stormvogel changed the scale. She suggested that offshore speed could become something larger, more spectacular and more openly aggressive.
Classic Boat called her “the first of the Maxis.” You can see the later world in her wake: Whitbread boats, Volvo boats, record-breaking programmes, offshore campaigns where line honours and speed become part of the commercial brief. She was not the final answer. She was the first loud hint.
Clarion of Wight and the international future
By the early 1960s, Sparkman & Stephens were still central to the offshore story. The S&S influence was not a single burst of brilliance with Dorade. It endured and deepened.
The Fastnet winner list makes the point: Anitra in 1959, Zwerver in 1961 and Clarion of Wight in 1963 were all S&S designs. The firm had been dominant offshore for more than three decades.
Clarion of Wight is the ideal closing boat for this first part of the story. Designed by Sparkman & Stephens, built by Lallows of Cowes in 1963 for Derek Boyer and Dennis Miller’s Admiral’s Cup campaign, she was declared the overall winner of the 127-boat 1963 Fastnet fleet — not just a class result, but outright victory on corrected time from the largest fleet the race had then seen. She was the top scorer in the British Admiral’s Cup team, alongside Ron Amey’s Noryema III and Max Aitken’s Outlaw. Britain won back the Cup.
There is a pointed irony worth sitting with. A boat built in Cowes, for the British Admiral’s Cup team, designed by an American firm, crewed to overall Fastnet victory.
That tells you precisely how international offshore design had become by 1963. British offshore racing had not lost its identity, but it was no longer a closed domestic conversation. Owners were shopping for ideas across borders. Designers were competing internationally. The Admiral’s Cup had made winning a national statement.
And the next generation was already waiting.
After Clarion of Wight comes Dick Carter’s Rabbit. Then Éric Tabarly’s Pen Duick III. Then Red Rooster. Then IOR. Then the Admiral’s Cup arms race that consumed the 1970s and 1980s. Then Doug Peterson, Ron Holland, Bruce Farr, German Frers, Ed Dubois and a period in which designers learned not only how to make boats fast, but how to make rating rules nervous.
That is Part 2.
But before the rule beaters arrive, it is worth pausing to ask what the first era actually taught.
What the first era teaches
From 1925 to 1963, offshore yacht design moved from working-boat inheritance to purposeful racing intelligence.
Jolie Brise gave the Fastnet its founding myth. She proved that a practical, powerful, seaworthy working boat could win before the sport had fully decided what an offshore racing yacht should be — and that the man who organised the race, won it, and founded the club was the same man, on the same boat, in the same summer. Dorade changed the level of thought, showing that efficiency, balance and refined design could beat brute tradition without abandoning seamanship. Olin Stephens was 21. The crew averaged 22. They came home to a Broadway parade. Bloodhound represented the best of the British establishment answer, strong, elegant and credible and later became a royal boat in the Western Isles.
Then Myth of Malham broke the post-war British mould. She was designed for the Fastnet, not for inherited visual comfort. Short overhangs, light displacement, a masthead rig that exploited the rating rule, and a ruthless brief made her the hinge boat of this period. Finisterre showed that the American offshore tradition had its own peak: three consecutive Newport Bermuda Race wins, never equalled. Stormvogel pointed towards the Maxi future. Clarion of Wight showed that by the early 1960s, offshore racing design had become international, strategic and increasingly professional.
This was the age of seaworthy speed. Not slow boats. Not safe boats versus unsafe boats. Not old-fashioned caution against modern bravery. Something more useful than that.
It was an era in which designers, owners and sailors were still trying to understand how much speed could be added without losing the qualities that make a boat worth taking offshore in the first place. That remains the question. The materials have changed, the rules have changed, the boats have changed and the speeds have changed, but the serious offshore problem is still the same.
A racing yacht must be fast enough to matter and strong enough to trust.
The first era understood the second part instinctively. The next era would become obsessed with the first.
And Olin Stephens, the man who understood both better than almost anyone, would eventually write, after watching the 1979 Fastnet storm take lives from boats built on a different philosophy, that
“Some modern ocean racers, and the cruising boats derived from them, are dangerous to their crews.”
He knew where the line was. He had drawn it himself, at 21, in 1929.
PART 1 Conclusion
FirstBeat: Who Beats Who?
1925 to 1963
FirstBeat Design Podium
1925 to 1963
First Beat Boat podium
1925 to 1963
Final FirstBeat verdict
The first era of offshore yacht design was not a simple march from heavy to light. It was a fight between inherited seamanship and emerging intelligence. The old boats were solid and dependable, the new boats were not automatically better, but by 1963 the direction was obvious. Offshore racing was becoming more international, more technical and more competitive. The rating rule was no longer just a method of scoring the race. It was becoming part of the design brief.
That is where the trouble starts.
Part 2 - subscribe for free to get it automatically
The gloves come off:
Carter, Tabarly, Peterson, Holland, Farr, Dubois, Stephen Jones, IOR, the Admiral’s Cup and the strange genius of boats designed not only to beat the sea, but to beat the rule.
Offshore racing is never just about the boat, the forecast, or the routing software.
It is about decisions made under pressure, in changing conditions, by tired people trying to keep the boat moving fast and safely in the right direction.
That is where races are won and lost.
At FirstBeat, my aim is simple: to help owners, skippers and crews race offshore with more clarity, more confidence, and better preparation — whether that is a RORC Channel race, a Fastnet campaign, or your first serious step into offshore racing.
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Thanks for reading.
Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat — Offshore Racing Intelligence
From first beat to first place
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