Dorade Wins 1931 Transatlantic Race in 17 Days

The Stephens brothers learned to sail off Barnstable, Cape Cod. They got their father, who owns a coal business in The Bronx, so interested in the sport that he became a vice-commodore of the Larchmont Yacht Club. Olin left M. I. T. after one year to help start, with a friend not much older than himself, the firm of Sparkman & Stephens, naval architects. Roderick got a job in a shipyard. Since Olin had the52-foot yawl Dorade built from his own specifications in 1930, both of them have spent almost as much time on the water as at work. Consequently the Dorade, smallest of the fleet of well-known ocean-going yachts, has functioned so efficiently that last week's statement by the skipper of the Flame amounts almost to a rule of ocean sailing. In 1931 the Stephens brothers won the Newport-to-Plymouth trans-atlantic race in 17 days.. When Dorade, named for the dolphin that is correctly spelled Dorado, was launched in 1931, it sparked a revolution. It was strikingly slender, its beam just 10-foot-3. It was also, by the standards of the day, extremely lightweight, in part because the frames that supported the hull were made from steam-bent sections of wood weighing far less than conventional and much bulkier sawn frames. Until then, it was believed that ocean-going stability could not be achieved without a much broader and heavier hull. Dorade's stability came from a different source-a lengthy lead keel that put the ballast far below the waterline, where it would be much more effective in counterbalancing the force of the wind. When Mr. Stephens announced that he was going to enter Dorade in a trans-Atlantic race, many yachtsmen thought he was foolhardy. Olin was the skipper and navigator during the race, which set out for England from Newport, R.I., on July 4, 1931. His seven-man crew, which included his younger brother Rod, who had overseen the yacht's construction and would become a partner in Sparkman & Stephens, was young: Even with the inclusion of the Mr. Stephens's 46-year-old father, the average age was just 22.