Dorade Wins Transpac...Twice

77 years apart. How's that for a Boat Design!
I put it right up there with Secretariat's Triple Crown.
Interested to hear your thoughts on it's design - Moe

http://dorade.org/2013/07/24/dorade-wins-transpac/

 

Brilliant!

Dorade and Stormy Weather are simply invincible - sheer genius on the part of Olin Stephens.

Stormy Weather is also still winning races - I used to sail on Stormy in the 90's with her previous owner, and I had the pleasure and good fortune of sailing on her again almost 20 years later on the last day of Antigua Classics in 2011.
Dorade's owner Matt was also on board for Classics.

Here is a link to Stormy's website - http://www.stormy-weather.co.uk/

And her previous owner's site : http://www.stormy.ca/marine/index.html

 

Still beautiful boats. And Dorade is off to a good start to compete in all of her previous races.

 

Absolutely outrageous!
How does an old displacement-mode boat, even the best, win a sled race like the trans-pac?

 

Bit of trivia: dorade vents are called that because they were first installed on the Dorade.

add: here's a nice article on the subject. I was surprised to find that despite the modern sails, they still went with spruce masts. And I love the last paragraph: “I hope this win will make people sit up and take notice that these boats can still do what they were designed to do,” he said. “They shouldn’t be restricted to dockside museum pieces.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/s...in-transpacific-race.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

With a suite of modern sails Those old timers are fast. Not much has changed over the years.

 

I'm a bit confused - are there two Transpacs ?


"HONOLULU, July 23, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Lending Club (https://www.lendingclub.com) today announced that its 73-foot offshore trimaran, "Lending Club," has won the 47th Transpacific Yacht Race (Transpac) in the multihull division and had the fastest overall elapsed time, coming in at 5 days, 11 hours, 52 minutes and 33 seconds. This time was the Transpac's second-fastest ever, within two and a half hours of the race record established in 1997. "

http://www.wfsb.com/story/22913252/lending-club-wins-transpacific-yacht-race

 

I suspect it was a class win.

 

per the article I linked to in my earlier post:

And when they allow modern multi-hulls to join the race, I'd say that for all practical purposes there are at least two Transpac's going at the same time....

 

The "win" was on handicap, Dorade took longer to sail the course than almost all other boats in the race. Lending Club took 5 days xx hours and Dorade took 12 days 5 hours.......who won?

http://www.yachtscoring.com/event_results_detail.cfm?Race_Number=1&eID=728

 

Handicap is always a less than perfect way to determine the best sailor.

I suppose the true celebration should be the fact that the owner and crew of Dorade brought the boat up to offshore racing condition, then participated in one of the great regattas.

Very nice to see.

Hopefully all those old Kilaloas, Running Tides, Doras, Boomerangs....... also find owners who will bring legendary designs back into the fold.

 

I love that Dorade is back in ocean racing condition and being sailed hard.

But, in theory at least, handicap racing should make the boat design irelevent to the results.

So lets congratulate the crew on a doing a great job on sailing the boat as fast as possible. (though still very slow by modern standards)

 

I think it's fairly obvious a 50' boat normally isn't going to beat one 70' long on elapsed time. Without some sort of handicapping the longer boats will almost always win, and the race becomes one of seeing who can spend the most money and build the biggest boat. I think we have enough of those races already....

The Transpac has been handicapped since the very first race, and Dorade entered under the same handicapping rules as everyone else. So there's no asterick to her win overall on corrected time; any of the other 55 boats would gladly have taken the trophy instead.

Tad and BPW, Dorade beat 11 other boats on elapsed time. That doesn't put her up there with the big sleds. But given her size, it was hardly 'very slow by modern standards' - much less 'slower than almost all the other boats.'

 

Handicaps are a good thing in ocean racing, they make racing fun and viable for those without huge budgets. Despite many flaws they seem to work reasonably well.

I also think Dorade is a wonderful boat and it is great to see her racing again.

However, her win probably had far more to do with the big budget program and a crew of world class professional sailors than the boat. She may have beat 11 boats, but another 43 beat her, and I would guess many of those 43 where much lower budget programs.

Calling Dorade "fast" in the modern context is like saying a 1960's vintage Porsche is fast. A Beautiful car that was impressive for its era, but a mid-level Suburu would kill it on a race track these days.

Dorade took about 50% longer than the faster Transpac 52s to cover the course, as you would hope given the 70 years of development in technology and boat design the T/P 52 benefits from.

I would still rather own the Porsche (or Dorade) though...

 

Nonetheless: Dorade won fair and square, under handicap rules which weren't modified for her benefit. It seems a bit unfair for people to be lining up to add qualifiers to that win, as though she somehow didn't really earn it. Did they say the same thing about the last winner?

Are you really so sure a 'midlevel Suburu' would beat a vintage Porsche 911 that was properly set up for the racetrack? I wouldn't bet the farm on it...