Designed by Starling Burgess and launched in 1921, Jeanie was the first “modern” 6 Metre.
In 1959, Carleton Mitchell, the adventurous sailor and author that brought Caribbean cruising to the sailing public, released a very different book. It was called Summer of the Twelves and it was based on the Sports Illustrated articles that he wrote on the events of the summer of 1958, when America’s Cup racing resumed after the wartime hiatus. The boat in question was the 12 Metre, some 69 to 72 feet long overall, 30 feet shorter than the waterline lengths of either the 1930s J Class or early 20th century behemoths like Reliance.
In rereading an old copy of the book, which carries an image of what appears to be the Rhodes-designed 12 Metre Weatherly sailing by, I was inspired to take on a similar quest. I would sail and report. But my boat would be a half 12, the 6 Metre, the oldest keelboat class that competed in the 1908 Olympics through the 1952 Games. The event would be the 2025 6 Metre World Championships. I would keep a diary and write about it.
I did have some knowledge of 6 Metres. Since 1999 I had raced the 6 Metre’s little brother, the International One Design. They are long-ended, heavy, demanding keelboats. In the fall of 2024, I was an observer at the 6 Metre Pre Worlds in Oyster Bay, New York, hosted by the first capital of 6 Metre sailing in the early 20th century, Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club. I spent an afternoon afloat with the affable Rainer Muller, a bicontinental German healthcare entrepreneur in his mid-50s with an unusual taste for used 6 Metres. Rainer had his own mission: revive the glory of the Six Meter Fleet in its cradle, Long Island Sound.
We both had our work cut out for us, but we connected and the seed was planted. When Rainer offered me a boat to sail in the 2025 Worlds in September, I accepted. The Worlds will be held at Seawanhaka Corinthian YC, with its walls, dining room trophy case and bar loaded with Six Metre half models. I saw myself telling the story of the origins story of international keelboat competition between America and Europe. I said, “Yes, I’ll sail a Six. Like Carleton Mitchell, I would do my best to document the experience.
Six Metre racing started with the British American Cup in 1921, not in America, but in the Solent. The American-British rivalry in America’s Cup boats was 70 years old in 1921 when the Royal Yacht Squadron proposed that an American team of three boats, designed to the Six Meter Rule, come to Cowes. The British were successful in winning the series, but stirred up a hornet’s test of innovation and competitive fervor that lasted, alternating between Long Island Sound and the Solent, to the late 1930s. Today, the BAC continues but in smaller, more modest club boats like Sonars.
Launched more than a century afterJeanie, Fillipa was designed by Pelle Pettersen.
In its heyday, the Six was the “J Class for the Everyman.” Each year, challengers sought out the fastest designers and the best professional crews. In 1921, Six Metre #1 for the British American Cup was the product of the Burgess firm in Boston.
In the years following World War I, gentleman designer/sailors produced their earlier 6 Metre designs. Frederick Hoyt, a commodore of the Larchmont Yacht Club and survivor of the Titanic disaster, produced the bulk of the early ‘20s designs that gave way to formally trained designers like Clinton Crane, an 1894 Harvard grad who apprenticed on the Clyde in Scotland, and was the prolific Six designer of the late ‘20s. In 1929, a 19-year-old wunderkind named Olin Stephens took time from ocean racing designs to produce a string of Sixes from Cherokee to Jill to the penultimate Goose and Djinn, and finally the ultimate Six, Llanoria, Olympic gold champion.
As the international Six competition heated up, the designers of the day, Paine, Burgess, Luders, Hoyt, put out their designs. A few exceptional designer-sailors persisted in the 1930s. Even as late as 1935, skippers like Herman Whiton designed their own boats. (His Starwagon is entered in the 2025 Worlds)
As for builders, the place was Henry Nevins, on the southeast corner of City Island, a watery appendage of the Bronx. If the boat wasn’t designed in Boston, it was built in the Bronx by Nevins. From 1925 to 1953, when the Nevins yard closed, they built forty of the forty-six Sixes in those active days. One of the 1925 Hoyt designs built there, Madcap, races today under Hugh Jones.
One of the Nevins 1929-built boats, Lucie, was the ride of Briggs Cunningham, perhaps the best Six skipper before WWII. She too will be on the line at the Worlds under Matt Brooks, known worldwide for his campaigning of the classic Dorade.
From the British and Scandinavians came ultra-competitive designs from Nicholson, CL Watson Brothers, and Fife, from the Solent and the Clyde, England’s racing hotbeds. By the late 1920s the Scandinavian teams were in the game. Bjarne Aas, the prolific Norwegian designer-builder and the godfather of the one-design Six (the IOD), and many other local designer-builders drew their characteristic long and low designs for Scandinavian waters. It all ended as WWII loomed.
The Modern Six Metre
The August 2004 issue of Classic Boat profiled the action among Sixes in the building of new boats and restoration of old ones. It was titled, “And how the International Rule produces workable racing boats.” The comments are just as true now two decades later:
“It seems incongruous to have modern fin keel glassfiber boats racing against gorgeous old timber Sixes from the 1920s and ‘30s. it’s a simple statement about the International Rule which together with the other Metric cases, Eights and Twelves, for instance, was drawn in 1906 and came into force on January 1, 1907.”
That rule has allowed the class to develop over time, pushing the envelope of design while staying within its basic original parameters so that today, for instance, looking at the moderns and the classics racing together is like looking at a family group. There’s the elegance of profile with a narrow hull form and similar waterline length and sail area which creates the strong family resemblance… and of course the continuing close and competitive racing.
There is a formula that determines the boat’s vintage; technically we’re on the third rules for Sixes. The first rule dated to the Olympics of 1908. The second was for the boats beginning in the time before 1921. The third rule is for the modern boats being raced here and now
One talks in terms of modern and classic. To be a classic, the boat must be built in 1979 or earlier. Later than that is classified as modern. The boats are sorted into their classes. The racing is done in as many classes as the numbers permit. Once the classes are divided in to their sorting hats, once the moderns and classics leave enough boats in the middle, they sometimes have an “intermediate” class. But in most events, there are two flights.
Our Blade: Born 1987 with wings
The boat chosen for us for the 2025 Worlds was pulled from the extensive inventory of Rainer Muller. Blade is an older modern, a 1987 hull and rig from Ian Howlett, the cerebral British designer who followed Olin Stephens in Europe in the use of test tanks.
An array of Sixes in the Seawanhaka boatyard
Built in 1987, Blade is the author’s ride for the 2025 6 Metre World Championship in Oyster Bay.
Blade’s cockpit
Howlett designed Lionheart and Crusader as British 12 Metre challengers, but his 6 Metre expertise is all around underbodies, keels and rudders. He was working in the middle of the furor that led to Australia II lifting the Cup in 1983. Four years later, he put a similar configuration of a shallower keel with what looked like sting ray flaps on the back of a bulb. On the trailing edge is a trim tab. From that point the winged keel and appendages along with the long skinny deep rudder extended down to or below the keel. This has become de rigeur in the last thirty years.
The photos show a 37-foot, 9,000-pound powerhouse that has always loved the breeze We had put her into shape, compounded the hull and burnished the lovely VC Offshore bottom, spitting graphite from sanding with 400 grade and burnishing with a crumpled New York Times – our secret to create the hard, slippery finish.
Rainer Muller and the Six Metre Shop
Rainer Muller, our patron on Blade, owns about thirty 6 Metres; a dozen in North America in Vancouver and Seattle and most of the rest around Lake Constance in eastern Switzerland bordering Germany. His approach is a used boat strategy, acquiring a boat when an owner builds a new one. That and a deep inventory of sails allow him to lend his collection of boats to potential new Six sailors. With many of the best Sixes from major designers, his “consignment shop” has an S&S design from the 1990s (Tempest) and numerous Pettersons in the front window. The antiques division features the work of Sherman Hoyt and Hermann Whiton. We borrowed a relatively mid-life design in Howlett’s 1987 Blade. Rainer is a very generous man, and he’s having Howlett build him a new boat. Privilege is made of hull and deck cores of strip-plank Sitka Spruce, imported from Rainer’s backyard sailing in Vancouver, BC, with strips of epoxy glass supplying the necessary transverse strength. She’ll be sailed at the Worlds by the winning crew of the 2023 event, led by Jamie Hilton and looking to pull off a difficult two-peat.
And what about Team Blade?
Blade is a robust boat that likes wind. Will she work in the light air and washboard chop of mid Long Island Sound? The Pre Worlds featured 15-18 knots from the east. In wind and chop over a certain threshold, we believe in our speed. Our crew’s been training since mid-July, with youth and experience at the tiller. Our helmsman is the 22-year-old Sailing Director of The WaterFront Center in Oyster Bay. Match race ace Cormac Murphy is one of the youngest members of SCYC and these are his home waters.
The rest of the boat is a family affair, with the author on main and my much-decorated sister on the strings. Our jib trimmer is a partner in IODs. Our ace in the hole on the bow is Mad Martha Parker, the owner of Team One Newport and a fellow Huntington High School alum.
We know the water and the tides, and who knows the summer winds on the Sound, anyway? We will be loaded for fun. See you on the water when practice starts September 18 and racing on the 22nd. ■
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.
