SALLY and BRANTA

It’s not exactly a rare thing, but there is something about this spectacle that brings a smile to your face that just doesn’t leave. Sometimes the occasion is a formal race such as the classic Yesteryear Regatta or the no-holds-barred Opening Day Race of the San Diego Yacht Club (SDYC). But sometimes, as on the day I visited the boats in April this year, it just begins with a puff of wind and a twinkle in the eye. Then there is a sly smile from either the owner of SALLY or BRANTA to his rival, and a nod toward the crystal waters of San Diego Bay. But there is always the throwing down of a metaphorical gauntlet by one skipper and the picking up by the other that starts the rumble. These longtime owners and their thoroughbreds love to race.

SALLY and BRANTA will turn 100 in less than four years. They are the last two survivors of a 14-boat, one-design fleet of 10-Meter-class racing yachts designed by W. Starling Burgess and built in Germany by Abeking & Rasmussen for the New York Yacht Club in 1926–27. The new boats traveled from Germany as deck cargo to Halifax, Nova Scotia. They then sailed to New York on their own bottoms, with no auxiliary power, to avoid taxes and import duties. As the story goes, Olin Stephens was recruited as a boy to join the crew delivering BRANTA. It was his first offshore passage, and it informed the trajectory of his life and his yacht designs.

The yachting historian John Lammerts van Bueren says, “Olin was so deeply impressed with the oceangoing capabilities, the comfortable motion in a seaway, and excellent drive to windward” that the 10-Meters inspired the design of his breakthrough ocean racer DORADE in 1931. DORADE, he says, has similar I sections and prismatic coefficient but reduced overhangs to make the boat easier to steer in a following sea.”