Made by Hand
FULL SAIL AHEAD International boat designer Mark Mills ’90 has crafted a successful career out of his love for sailing.
22
SPRING 2016
Growing up in Ireland and America, Mark Mills was fascinated with airplanes. As he drew them over and over again, he imagined soaring into the blue sky. Then, he took sailing lessons and succumbed to the lure and challenge of a different kind of blue expanse. As drawings of planes gave way to sketches of sailboats, Mills began to chart a different course for his life and career. Today, Mills is a highly successful yacht designer based in Ireland, where he took those auspicious sailing lessons. His company, Mills Design (mills-design.com), creates highperformance racing and cruising yachts for clients around the world. Mills has won a raft of honors, such as Seahorse magazine’s Sailor of the Month in December 2014, the 2009 Irish Sailor of the Year Award and the Asian Marine and Boating Best Designer Award in 2010 and 2015. His boats regularly win top races as well as Boat of the Year titles. Apart from the sheer beauty and thrill of sailing and racing, Mills appreciates the mental challenge of designing a boat. “The physics of sailing is quite complex — more so than aircraft flight — as it combines lift and drag equations in two fluids (air and water), as well as the interface effects between them,” he explains. “Designing racing yachts is balancing those effects to attempt to approach a theoretical optimum that will be tested in real-world conditions that don’t conform to the steady-state computer models — and that have to be sailed by people instead of computers.” During his time at Willamette, despite the university’s close proximity to the ocean, Mills yearned for easy and regular access to the water. “I missed the sea and competitive racing,” says Mills, who remembers sitting in a Russian class and filling his notebook with