Carter sailboats: production cruiser-racers from a Fastnet-winning original
A Carter production boat descends from one of the most improbable careers in offshore racing. Dick Carter was an unknown 37-year-old when Rabbit, his very first design, won the 1965 Fastnet Race - and within a decade his race winners were being translated into fiberglass production boats marketed under the Carter Offshore name, built by Olympic Yachts in Greece and, in the case of the Carter 30, in Britain and later Poland. Designer and company are one continuous story: these boats carry the thinking of the man who helped write the IOR rule itself.
Origins and ownership
Carter learned to sail on family holidays on Cape Cod and raced International 14s and Fireflies at Yale, a small-boat grounding that shaped his design instincts. His offshore education came aboard Medalist, a Bill Tripp design whose American features reflected the CCA handicap rules. Rabbit - built in steel by Frans Maas in Holland to the European RORC rule, with a separate rudder and a shallower keel with a trim tab - was a boat of unprecedented lines, carrying her maximum beam of 3.15 meters on a hull just 10.20 meters overall. Carter's biographer Sandy Weld reports that at the launch, Carter himself expressed surprised delight that she floated just like a boat. The Fastnet win established his reputation overnight.
Tina followed - his second design and his first for a paying customer, also built in steel by Maas - and won the 1966 One Ton Cup, then Europe's most prestigious regatta per Giornale della Vela. Yachting Monthly describes that win as the start of an eight-year duel with the pre-eminent Sparkman & Stephens. Optimist, a slightly larger Tina helmed by Hans Beilken, took the One Ton Cup in 1967 and 1968; Carter won again in 1972 with Wai-Aniwa and in 1973 with Ydra. Commissions poured in, among them Gitana V for Baron Rothschild in 1970 and the Orca 43 for Italian sailor Raul Gardini in 1971.
The production business grew out of this success, with Carter putting together a marketing team known as Carter Offshore. Giornale della Vela dates the downward curve of his design output only after 1975, and estimates some 1,800 hulls were built to his designs over his career. His memoir - co-written with John Rousmaniere and published by Seapoint Books in 2018 - makes one short reference to financial troubles in the 1970s that sank Carter Offshore, and he closed the design office in the mid-1980s without much further explanation: "It was time to pursue other interests and turn the page."
The designers
Needing more space, Carter moved his design office into an old WW2 watch tower on his property on the Nahant Peninsula, north of Boston, and "the Tower" became a finishing school for a generation of American yacht designers. Good Old Boat's Rob Mazza lists Bob Perry, Chuck Paine, Yves-Marie Tanton, and Mark Lindsey among the young designers who worked there - along with Doug Peterson, briefly and controversially in Carter's opinion. Tanton, who spent over three years at Carter Offshore, recalls that Peterson stayed just one week before leaving to design Ganbare.
Carter's influence ran beyond his own boards. By Tanton's account he started the IOR alongside Olin Stephens and van de Stadt to merge the American CCA rule with the British RORC rule; he sat on the IOR organizing committee and designed the rule book's cover, with its view of earth from space. He studied the ideas of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, which translated into clean lines and uncluttered decks. "I didn't want to design boats with an objective I didn't believe in," he said of his philosophy.
Construction through the eras
Carter's custom work spanned materials: steel for Rabbit and Tina at Frans Maas, steel again for the 65-foot Benbow - Carter Design No. 19, drawn in 1971 and built by Royal Huisman - and a laminated wood hull by Carlini for Naif, the racing-only design Gardini commissioned in 1973. At the extreme end sat the roughly 120-foot, three-masted Vendredi Treize of 1972, which Yachting Monthly called the largest fibreglass yacht ever built, though she finished second in that year's singlehanded transatlantic race.
The production boats were fiberglass. Olympic Yachts in Greece built the Carter 33, 37, and 39, and the 37 has the strongest race pedigree of the trio: Ydra, its aluminum-built prototype, won the 1973 One Ton Cup in Porto Cervo after a duel with Doug Peterson's Ganbare and entered fiberglass production as the Carter 37 that same year. The Carter 30 took a different route - introduced in 1972 with a first batch built as racers by Northshore Yachts in the UK, its production later moved to Poland. Sources differ on when: Good Old Boat's review of Carter's memoir puts Polish production at 1973, Yachting Monthly at 1979, with the boat continued there by Teliga until 1988 as the Teliga 30. Yachting Monthly counts more than 400 built in all, plus some home-built British boats.
Lines and generations
The Carter 30 anchored a small family. The Carter 33 was designed as a scaled-up Carter 30 and, per Yachting Monthly, was one of the first mass-produced yachts built in Europe; early boats used large amounts of plywood in the cockpit area while later ones were all glass. The Carter 35 arrived in the late 1970s as a large sister to the 30 - well built, with a transom-hung rudder - though a 1983 limited edition with a lifting keel and "Luna" rig was not successful. Above them sat the Olympic-built 37 and 39 and the Maryola-built fiberglass Carter 42 with its fin keel. Carter's ideas also surfaced under other names: the lift keel he pioneered on Red Rooster - winner of the 1969 Fastnet and part of the victorious US Admiral's Cup team - was later used in the Southerly cruisers built in England and the Tanzer 10.5 in Canada, and late in his career he designed the Southerly 33 as a pure family cruiser with its variable-draft keel.
Who Carter is for
A Carter suits the buyer who wants genuine racing history in a production hull: boats drawn by the designer who beat Sparkman & Stephens at the One Ton Cup, helped create the IOR, and trained Perry, Paine, and Tanton in a converted watch tower. The fleet is long out of production and varies by builder and era, so it rewards buyers who enjoy the research - the model directory pins an individual boat to its yard, year, and place in the story.
