The queen of the Nantucket Classic Yacht Exhibition, the J Boat Ranger
August, midsummer. It is THE season. Art shows, antiques shows, car shows and of course, boat shows. We are not visiting boat shows to kick the tires or buy a boat; we are touring collections of vintage, usually all wooden, boats brought by their owners for viewing by the boating public. We’re talking about an Antiques Roadshow of floating vintage wood.
There are many such shows but we have picked two, one about as far east as one can go in the U.S., one far west. One is all sail all the time, with entries typically no younger than sixty years old. The other is located on the biggest serious boating lake west of the Rockies and has a dazzling collection of original, restored and newly built traditional speedboats and runabouts.
The first is the Nantucket Race Week Classic Yacht Exhibition (CYE) at Straight Wharf in Nantucket Harbor, followed the next day by the Parade of Sail (nantucketraceweek.org). The second is the Lake Tahoe Concours d’Elegance, at Homewood, California (laketahoeconcours.com).
The Classic Yacht Exhibition
On Saturday night, August 17, the night before the 2024 Opera House Cup, Nantucket’s iconic offshore race, the CYE attracts both the boating casual and the boating passionate among the 60,000 visitors and locals who are present for Race Week. The yachts are classified by size, age, and yacht designer.
The CYE is an important benefit event to support Nantucket Community Sailing, itself founded in 1994 as a program to teach island children. Today with 150 boats, kayaks and paddleboards, NCS has served over 20,000 children and provided over $1 million in sailing scholarships to island youth.
Lake Tahoe Concours d’Elegance
Meanwhile, 2,900 miles west, the annual Lake Tahoe Concours d’Elegance took place on August 8 & 9. This is speedboat and runabout collectors’ heaven. The brand names at Tahoe hearken back to the early 20th century’s golden age of wooden speedboats. Tahoe Concours visitors are fans of names like Hacker, Riva, and the pride of Algonac, Michigan, Chris-Craft. It was these elegantly styled semi-custom speedboats that expanded the market for powerboat owners. Those 20th century fans wanted an alternative to the 19th century package of steam power and pencil-thin hull so favored by Gilded Age moguls seeking a faster ride to Wall Street from their country homes
Nantucket: Classic Yacht Exhibition to the Parade of Sail
The Nantucket event, now in its ninth year, is a Saturday night warmup for Sunday’s Opera House Cup. The OHC is itself in its 52nd year, attracting fifty or more vintage raceboats to one of the most popular legs of the Classic Yacht Owners Association racing circuit. Boats like the NY 32, designed by Olin Stephens in 1935, mix with the smallest, the local Herreshoff knockabout, the Alerion. In 2023, the scratch boat was uniquely huge; she was Ranger, a rebuilt version of Starling Burgess’ 1936 J Boat.
The Parade of Sail on the morning of the Opera House Cup
The perennial stars of the show are the 12 Metres – Columbia, Weatherly, American Eagle. These boats were the penultimate designs in wood for their designers, Stephens, Rhodes and Luders, respectively.
The Classic Yacht Exhibition is a public event open to all. Viewers with their families, from participating sailors straight off their Race Week completion to local residents, head east from Nantucket town’s unforgiving cobblestone streets to walk out the Straight Wharf to climb aboard, shoes left ashore, and inspect the boats tied up on the finger piers of what is on its eastern extremity, a 100-yard stretch of mega-sized motoryachts. With owners aboard, guests can see these beauties up close, something that happens nowhere else in the summer sailing circuit. Visitors get to ask their questions on the provenance and rigorous upkeep of the CYE classics.
A sampling of the Nantucket classics includes:
Dorade
Berthed on Nantucket’s Straight Wharf, a modern pier where what would have been a whale oil depot in the 1830s, was one of the most iconic classics, the yawl Dorade. She hit the water in 1930, drawn by a college kid named Olin Stephens, financed by his father and crewed by friends and family.
Dorade sailed to England, won everything in sight, and became the prototype for a series of Sparkman & Stephens offshore boats from Stormy Weather to Black Watch. That lineage peaked with the great 70-footers: Bolero, Cotton Blossom, and Baruna. Owner Matt Brooks has taken on the mission of meticulously keeping Dorade race-ready, and done so magnificently.
Compared to the 12 Metres and more modern woodies around her, Dorade seems impossibly narrow and fragile, but her skippers, including Sail Newport’s Brad Read, will vouch for her speed in all conditions and toughness in conditions that challenge the best.
Ticonderoga
A perennial CYE favorite, this L. Francis Herreshoff design of 1936 is a boat that has been sailed and raced continuously throughout the world. She had a complete refit in 2021, making her once again fit to journey to her winter playground in St. Barts and then tour the classic yacht race circuit before returning to her summer home in Greenwich, CT. With her unmistakable raked ketch rig and clipper bow, “Big Ti” cannot be missed, and she is said to have logged more ocean miles with her 72 feet than any vessel sailing today. Her owner is very generous in bringing her from her Long Island Sound berth to appear as a signature boat of the CYE.
Other boats displayed in past shows are dear to me including:
Dolphin is a limited edition, one of the four Newport 29s built before World War I.
Dolphin
The pictures at the docks in the 2015 CYE display the most modern hull and rig that Nathanael Herreshoff delivered in 1914. We sailed her to podium finishes and still marvel at her good manners and durability. We hope to have her at the 60th anniversary of the first Block Island Race Week, in 2025.
Gamecock
Another extraordinary craft resurrected from the past belongs to Newport sailor Peter McClennan. Gamecock is an R Boat, a design of 48 feet done to the Universal Rule by L. Francis Herreshoff. This was the rating rule the Herreshoffs stubbornly stayed with while the leading-edge racers had moved on to design under the International Rule. With low freeboard, a bow shape that was modern for 1926, and an enormous rig, Gamecock is really a smaller refinement of the heritage of the America’s Cup yachts crafted by his father, Nathanael Herreshoff, at the turn of the 20th century.
Go West, man, to Tahoe
In early August, a different group of dedicated kindred spirits take over a marina in Homewood, California for a celebration of vintage wood propelled by power. This year marked the 50th anniversary of what the event website touted as “North America’s Premier Wooden Boat Show.”
The Tahoe Concours d’Elegance website describes their event as follows: “The most acclaimed and prestigious wooden boat show in all of North America. Each year, the show features more than 70 of the world’s finest boats set against the backdrop of the deep, clear blue waters of Lake Tahoe.”
This water-borne hot rod is one of many exquisite wooden boats on display at the Lake Tahoe Concours d’Elegance. Courtesy of Lake Tahoe Concours
If you owned a Ferrari in the 1950s or ‘60s and were a boating enthusiast, you might’ve had a Riva waiting at the dock…though likely without this beauty’s matching teal docklines. Courtesy of Lake Tahoe Concours
The gestalt is very different from Nantucket. The vibe is about powerboats for two days of events that include the Concours, an Awards BBQ, Mountain Quest’s Captains, Cars & Coffee, Terry’s Tour, and the mysteriously named “Olson Bridge at Roar Off.” We are told this is a rally where as many participants as possible turn over their (often quite loud) vintage engines.
The field, showcasing “50 Years of Past Overall Best of Show Winners,” was eclectic. The website describes the fleet thusly:
“Boats of the ‘60s, fins, hardtops, American V-8 engines, modern Atomic Age styling, will be on prominent display in the Obexer’s marina this year. 1960s Italian Riva boats, and maybe a few wood-deck flat-bottomed go-fast boats as well…”
It all happens at Obexer’s Boat Company (Est. 1911), a full-service marina on Lake Tahoe with extensive grounds for winetasting, eating and more. It sounds exhausting in comparison to Nantucket’s genteel stroll among vintage wood sailboats.
At Homewood, you should picture stock car racing mixed with old, complex powerboats, a combination requiring the maximum amount of maintenance in order to even start an engine, let alone cruise at speed in one of the many shiny wood speedboats. Photos do not do justice to the shine of the mahogany planks and the inlaid decks of many of the boats. One starts to appreciate the advantages of wind-powered craft: simpler to fix, but perhaps equally expensive to maintain.
Hacker, Chris-Craft, and Riva
The iconic brands that vintage powerboat enthusiasts revere are two American names, Hacker and Chris-Craft, along with the ultimate speedboat, the Riva. This is the boat of James Bond and other celebrities, made in a yard in Italy that has turned out boats for centuries.
Hacker, located today in St. Queensbury, NY, near Lake George, built steam launches for late 19th century wealthies as transportation to their Adirondack estates. Masters of Wall Street travelled in private railcars to a gleaming Hacker speedboat which whisked them to their island retreats. My own father, who summered in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, knew of Hacker. It was the Mercedes-Benz, maybe the Rolls Royce, of fresh water transportation
How many sailors who were out on the water in the 1950s and ‘60s either admired or cursed a passing Chris-Craft on a light wind day? As iconic to a Baby Boomer as a Boston Whaler, the local Chris-Craft always seemed to throw a wake at me on a light air leg. I don’t care if there is a lavish coffee table book praising the brand. Not a Hacker, but a Chris-Craft is still a display of polished wood from the dark side.
Riva is a story all its own. Featured in films and glamorous books from photographers like Slim Arons, the Riva Aquarama with its teal leather interior and auto-style instrumentation is the ultimate international speedboat. Lamborghini attempted to put two V-12 engines into one for more speed. Giorgio Armani has his own signature Riva model. No other speedboat has the combination of performance and panache. Riva is Cary Grant stepping out with Grace Kelly in an exquisite speedboat.
On the website of the Lake Tahoe event, an artistic rendition of a speeding Chris-Craft has its older gentleman driver in a mooring cap with goggles. This is vintage wooden boat as stock car. For vintage sailing enthusiasts, Nantucket’s Classic Yacht Exhibition is a warm invitation into the living rooms of classic wooden boat owners. But Lake Tahoe, with its rallies, BBQ and Roar Off, sure seems fun. ■
Not a formally trained historian nevertheless a boat storyteller, collecting and reciting stories for the boating curious, Tom Darling hosts Conversations with Classic Boats, “the podcast that talks to boats.” Tune in via Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or Spotify, or online at conversationswithclassicboats.com.
