Around the semicircular bar at Nassau's Pilot House Club, deepwater sailors were busy discussing the remarkable performance of one of the world's greatest sailors —Emil Mosbacher, last summer's skipper of America's Cup Candidate Vim. "Bus" Mosbacher had taken the run-of-the-drawing-board yawl, Callooh, designed by Phil Rhodes, and driven her to apparent victory in the annual 184-mile Miami-to-Nassau race. Then they discovered that Mosbacher had not won after all. Tardily, the race committee determined that the winner on corrected time was a 40-ft., fiber-glass-hulled yawl named Rhubarb. Not only that, but Rhubarb's sister ship, Southern Star II, was third. Both brand new, the two boats were the work of 39-year-old William H. Tripp Jr.—a new designer who is currently the talk of ocean sailors, and who may prove to be the first real challenger in decades to the long dominance of Philip Rhodes and Olin Stephens in yacht design.
Tripp has been in business for himself only since 1951. Son of a civil engineer, blond, shock-haired Bill Tripp is a lifelong Long Islander, has sailed everything from the family Star boat to ocean racers and frostbite dinghies, put in a twelve-year apprenticeship with Designers Rhodes and Stephens. As with all unknowns in the cliquish yacht business, Tripp at first found the going tough. In 1955 he finally got a chance to design an ocean racer, the yawl Katingo. The boat promptly won the American Yacht Club cruise two years in succession.
Bill Tripp set to work on the fiberglass design in 1956 for a Connecticut lawyer named Frederick Lorenzen, who was dissatisfied with wooden boats ("I don't like them. They leak"). Many small boats have been built of fiber glass, but few of ocean-racing size. At the Beetle Boat Co. in East Greenwich, R.I., a fiberglass mold was built around a wooden mockup of Tripp's design. From the mold came the racers themselves, including Rhubarb, Southern Star II and Lorenzen's boat Seal. Last year the three sister yawls performed beautifully in the Newport-to-Bermuda race, finished fifth, sixth and seventh in a huge field of 110 boats.
Rhubarb and her sisters have been named Block Island Forties. They are centerboarders, wider than most ocean racers, and with a unique rounded stem. In the closemouthed tradition of naval architects, Tripp will say only that his design "follows my ideas in relation to resistance and lateral plane, ideas which are somewhat different from some my competitors hold." Lawyer Lorenzen is a little more specific. "It's quite a trick to get a boat with tremendous stability and not too much underbody," he says. "Bill draws his lines very tight. His lines at the forward section are very fine. This helps particularly in going windward."
So far, ten ocean racers have been produced from the Tripp-designed mold. At least four, and probably more, will follow. After last week's triumph, many an ocean sailor was eying one of Designer Tripp's Block Island Forties for himself.