I have a rule that I’ve tried to keep sacrosanct throughout the many decades of my boating life: I only want to own pretty boats.
Admittedly, it hasn’t always worked, since my early boating years were devoted to racing. There are some god-awful ugly boats that were incredibly fast. Winning a trophy overpowered my pretty-boat rule.
Having switched to power, however, I can pick and choose my boats. Some may be chosen for speed, others for range, others for entertaining qualities, but they all must be pretty.
I even have a rating system for boat looks. My scale goes only from one to five. Let me introduce the Caswell RAF, or Row Away Factor.
This name, of course, dates me, because no one rows to or from their boat in an anchorage anymore. I loved rowing for several reasons: It was quiet, it was fume-free, and it allowed me to pause and lean on my oars to admire boats while I was fetching the
morning paper.
When it came to the RAF for rating boats, if I leaned on the oars twice during a trip to admire a boat, it received a Caswell RAF rating of two. Pause four times, and it was a four. Five times usually required me to row closer to that particular yacht to call out to the owner sitting in the cockpit, “Man, that is a beautiful yacht.” Some great friendships have been built with those six words.
Today, I find fewer yachts that even budge my RAF scale. In the old days, a designer would start with a dimension. Say, a 50-footer. He would sketch the lines (sadly, pencils and drafting tables have gone the way of oars), making sure the deck had a sweet sheerline. It was higher in the bow and stern, lower amidships. Water ran off through scuppers in the rail, not off the bow or stern. The bow swept aft, and the stern curved up.
When I saw my first axe bow, or reversed bow, design, I was gobsmacked. The RAF-o-Meter registered negative for the first time in my life. How the French or the Italians, or even the Dutch, could create something so graceless remains a befuddlement.
Which brings me to today’s designers. First, I am good friends with several designers, whom I do not wish to insult. I understand that they have to design what the market wants, in order to put food on the table.
But, I think many of today’s designers started thinking from the inside out, not starting with a pretty hull as you were taught in design classes. First, you want three bedrooms (I’m using a landlubber term for good reason). You add two baths, a kitchen and a back porch. Then, you shrink-wrap a hull around this pile. Voila: a new boat for the unknowing masses of boat buyers who care only about the view from the boat, not the view of the boat.
The results of this design process result in a plug-ugly floating condominium. We’ve all seen these monstrosities bobbing in an anchorage. These things have all the sail area and windage of an ocean-racing yacht, but it matters not, because they have twin engines and a bow thruster to yank them into a slip regardless of wind.
OK, you say, put up. Name some modern good-looking boats.
Oh, no, I’ve already insulted my designer friends. My self-preservation instinct is stronger than my need to rant.
But, there are some classics that I’m happy to mention. At the smaller end, Lyman runabouts are simply gorgeous, and several are in my dream marina. I’ve owned a few Bertrams (more than I want my wife or banker to know about) and the smaller ones (20s and 25s) were always good-looking. At the other end of the scale, it’s hard to fault J.P. Morgan’s 343-foot Corsair IV with its black hull and graceful clipper bow, which set the standard for superyachts.
Oh, you want more real-life examples? Pick a Trumpy, any Trumpy, and you’ll immediately understand what “sweet sheer” means. Jack Hargrave is a designer who knew what a yacht should look like, and his Hatteras 74 remains a classic. I knew Arthur DeFever, who started by designing long-range tuna clippers that stayed offshore for weeks at a time, and he knew that a high bow and sweeping lines were seaworthy in nasty conditions. I also knew Robert Beebe, a true curmudgeon whose seaworthy and “see-worthy” Passagemaker yielded the title for this magazine.
The list is long and distinguished, but if you look around any anchorage, you’ll understand Caswell’s Row Away Factor.
This article was originally published in the September 2023 issue.
