Again, Dorade

The lighthouse keeper at Fastnet, Ire land, tells visitors that waves often go over the dome of his light, 150 ft. above the level of the frothy ocean. Whether this is true or not, ocean yachtsmen know that the 720-mi. race of the Royal Ocean Racing Club of England, from Cowes to Lonely Light at Fastnet and back again, is the most dangerous in the world. Fog, strong summer winds, the churning currents of the English Channel, make it far more risky than crossing the Atlantic, where at least yachts do not run the chance of going aground.

Unlike the race of 1931, in which a British yachtsman was swept overboard and drowned, last week's ended without a catastrophe. Lloyd's agents, looking out from the Lizard (headland at the tip of Cornwall) for the yachts on their return voyage first sighted the Flame, a British cutter owned and designed by Charles E. Nicholson, who built Sir Thomas Lipton's last two Shamrocks. Two days later, the Flame blew into Cowes at dawn under a trysail because her mainsail had been ripped the day before. In an ocean race--where time allowances based on sail area, beam, displacement are made to give the smaller yachts an even chance--crossing the finish line first is usually brief satisfaction. Winner of last week's race was not the Flame but the trim 21-ton, 37-ft. yawl that followed her into port six hours later--the famed Dorade, owned by Roderick Stephens Jr., 23, who was her captain last week and his brother Olin, 24, her designer. On corrected time, Flame dropped into third place and another U. S. boat, Henry and Sherman Morss's schooner Grenadier, was second. Sixth and last was the scratch boat Ilex. Said Robert Somerset, skipper of the Flame: "Flame went fast but so did Dorade and it was difficult to shake her off, although she is a much smaller boat."

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 the 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, then won the biannual Fastnet race for the first time. Last year Dorade was first in her class in the New London-to-Bermuda run. This spring, with a crew of five intruding famed Sherman Hoyt, who has navigated the Atlantic on everything except an inflated tire tube, the Dorade sailed for Norway in May. She arrived in 24 days after encountering two gales in one of which Roderick Stephens had to go aloft for three hours to repair a spreader on the mainmast.

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