BEST OF 2015 – “Me who invented modern boats.”

In 1965 a small boat stunned the yachting world, winning the legendary Fastnet race outright. The boat is called Rabbit, is a little over ten meters long, and was designed by a thirty-seven-year-old U.S. “amateur designer” almost unknown-Dick Carter. No one had ever designed a boat like this: a hull shape with tapered appendages and a very pronounced maximum beam placed amidships: 3.15 meters in just over 10 in length.

His biographer, Sandy Weld, reports that, as soon as the boat was launched, Carter expressed his surprised delight that it floated “just like a boat,” which astonished Frans Maas, who Rabbit had built it, in no small part. An epic date in the world of sailboat design, because Dick Carter would change its history forever.

DICK CARTER’S OLYMPUS: IN EUROPE HE BEATS ALL
As he proved a year later, in 1966, when one of his designs, Tina, won the second One Ton Cup in Copenhagen, at that time the most prestigious regatta in Europe. Tina had the lines of the boats of the future (as well as having “launched the fashion” of the keel separated from the rudder), lines that prematurely retired so many yacht designers of the time. Tina was followed by Optimist helmed by the excellent Hans Beilken, a slightly larger Tina that won the One Ton Cup twice in a row in 1967 and 1968 (also coming second in 1969, the year Dick Carter won the Fastnet again with the Red Rooster, a boat with a movable drift and internal ballast, which Carter designed for himself and which made him famous even at home in the United States, where he was still a complete unknown).

In 1972 he won again with Wai-Aniwa. In 1973 a design built for Marina Spaccarelli Bulgari with Italy’s greatest sailor, Agostino Straulino, at the helm won the One Ton Cup in Porto Cervo after an exciting challenge with Doug Peterson’s Gambare. The boat is called Ydra and has harmonious shapes combined with speed in all sea and wind conditions that make it the “prodigy” boat of the day. That same year Ydra became a production model, built in fiberglass by the Greek shipyard Olympic Yachts under the name Carter 37. The boat is also very successful throughout Europe for cruising use. is one of the earliest examples of the large-scale cruise-regatta.

MEETING WITH RAUL GARDINI
During these glorious years, another big name in Italian sailing, Raul Gardini, fell in love with Carter’s designs: in 1971 he had the Orca 43 built. In 1973 the time was ripe, Gardini abandoned the mass-produced boats and ordered the design of a yacht expressly conceived for racing only: the Naif was finally launched, a laminated-wood hull built by Carlini that amazed the entire Mediterranean with its three independent cockpits and split wheelhouse. Dick Carter probably reaches the highest moment of his career (let us not forget that the design of the wonderful 65-foot Benbow built of steel by Royal Huisman also dates from 1973).

After 1975 his design flair embarked on a downward curve, without overshadowing what he had done in the previous ten years: the Red Rooster’s moving drift became his signature achievement, but the new Rules of Tonnage, the IOR, changed the game and put him offside. Over the entire course of his career, some 1,800 hulls have touched the water with his signature imprinted on them.

CARTER DIED. IT’S NOT TRUE, IT’S ALIVE AND WELL
Someone in 2007 had spread the news online that Dick Carter had died, but he pleasantly denied it. “I’m alive and well,” he joked on stage at the VELAFestival, where he received a special tribute. What “resurrected” him by bringing him to Santa Margherita was Francesco Gandolfi, who sought him out along with Lionello Gasparini, the man who sold his hulls in Italy with Carter Offshore Italia (where 130 were sold).

“I went in search of authoritative denials of Carter’s death,” Gandolfi tells me, “which came first from Gilles Carter, son of one of Dick’s brothers, and then from Catherine Carter, his first daughter; Dick then phoned me, to thank me for resurrecting him!” It was a great thrill to see him walking up to the stage moved, unaware of what had been arranged for him. All the evening’s guests lined up to pay tribute, from Luca Bassani to Mauro Pelaschier, from Federico Michetti (owner of the Samoa, a 1972 Carter) to Commodore Bonadeo.

AT THE HELM EVEN TODAY
But even more exhilarating was seeing him at the helm of Tomira (Francesco Gandolfi’s Carter 37) during the VELA Cup, engaged with the other two Carters that participated in the regatta: the Carter 37 Mustang that arrived especially from Corsica to pay tribute to its designer and the 65-foot Carter Benbow owned by the Recchi family. Dick Carter caught everyone’s attention in Santa Margherita: this eighty-seven-year-old gentleman perhaps thought he had been forgotten by the sailing world.

And his viscous gaze, rejuvenating a body a little weathered by years, could not believe what he was looking at: a surprise tribute, a standing ovation when he took the stage to accept his award and four owners who still “pamper” his boats with great love, as if they had just been launched. Let us leave the closing words to him: “Cruising is a great way to get somewhere. A boat is just a wonderful means to visit places where everything is beautiful, once you arrive“.
Taken from the June 2015 GdV