Ray Hunt’s 12-meter Easterner, beautiful but not quite competitive enough for the America’s Cup.
hands on the materials and, ultimately, had to work with a prototype of what he had sketched on paper—sometimes the back of an envelope or a paper bag. “Ray Hunt was one helluva designer, but in a non-scientific sort of way. He
usually got things right, but maybe not the first time,” said Dick Fisher, his collaborator on the Boston Whaler. Dick Fisher and his partner, Bob Pierce were commissioned by Hunt to build the prototypes of what would
Right: courtesy 12-Meter Charters Bottom left: courtesy Bertram Yachts. Right: Alison Langley
business that began with brokerage and moved into design, boatbuilding, and eventually the renowned Concordia yard. The new thing in racing in the early 1930s was the frostbite dinghy, and the two Concordia Company partners hatched a B-class dinghy project. They took the first boat down to Mason’s Island, near Mystic, Connecticut, won a winter regatta with it, and sold it that day. They took a second, beamier boat to Essex, Connecticut, and won two days of racing against the likes of Cornelius Shields and Briggs Cunningham. Although they only built and sold three frostbiters that winter of 1933-34, it was an auspicious beginning for Ray Hunt, a designer whose principal credentials were his instincts, and for Waldo Howland, who began putting certain things together. “I was the salesman, and Ray was the designer,” Howland said. “It was a matter of me selling Ray Hunt.” They soon sold a fleet of 12' hardchine boats to a group of sailing friends on a lake in Dublin, New Hampshire, and followed in the mid-1930s with Ray Hunt designs for larger boats built by Casey, Pierce and Kilburn, and Lawley’s. And in the winter of 1938-39, Hunt designed the first of the Concordia yawls for Waldo Howland’s father Llewellyn. Ray Hunt was interested then in design, production boatbuilding, winning races—he won the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club’s Challenge Cup in 1938 in a chartered 6 Meter—and in new materials. One of the new materials in the late 1930s was plywood. He was not much of a boatbuilder, but it was part of his instinctive method that he had to get his
Four Concordia yawls in a row. www.maineboats.com
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