Page 8 - Kwasind Nov-Dec 2019

AU REVIOR RED JACKET
A new chapter has opened for Red Jacket, an RCYC yacht with few peers in the world. After spending most of her life at the Club, with a string of owners starting with Perry Connolly, then Norm Walsh, Peter Bowman, Paul Phelan and Paul D Phelan, she came to Peter Milligan, who, like the Phelans, kept her in the state she deserved. With Milligan’s death, she will move to the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes in Kingston, ON, as a reminder of her creators’ technological leap.
Designed by RCYC’s George Cuthbertson and partner George Cassian to Perry Connolly’s famous instruction, “Build me the meanest, hungriest 40-footer afloat”, Red Jacket emerged from the Bruckmann shop in Oakville with a row of aces up her sleeve. First, she had fundamentally good, fast lines. As the Club’s chief measurer since high school, her designer said, “By then, I’d looked closely at a lot of fast yachts – I knew what worked.” Second, she had an aggressive owner with skilled friends ready to sail hard. Finally, she had a secret – in fact, not so much a secret as a quality that few then understood. Red Jacket’s fibreglass hull was cored with balsa-wood.
She was not the world’s first cored vessel. A few small craft had been built this way, as had the plywood- over-balsa Mosquito fighter bomber, but Red Jacket was the first large yacht that relied so extensively
on what we now call composite construction, with fibreglass outer skins bonding the hull’s balsa core in a mutually strengthening sandwich. This made her stiff and above all, light, a fraction of the weight of her competition, all built in solid wood or solid fibreglass.
These advantages meant fast. She cleaned up in her first season on Lake Ontario, so Connolly took her to Florida’s prestigious Southern Ocean Racing Conference (SORC). The first time out in 1967, she won her division. The next year, she won the SORC overall, the first non-American boat to do so. Similar results in the SORC, the Canada’s Cup and hundreds of Club races validated the cored-hull concept and catapulted a small design firm into integrated C&C Yachts, at one time one of the world’s leading yacht- builders.
Looking beyond yachts, the success of composite construction on the water spurred experimentation in other areas. Ten years after Red Jacket touched the water, aircraft and spacecraft builders were experimenting with a myriad of cores and skins; virtually every application in which weight and strength are crucial – aircraft, spacecraft, boats and windmill blades employs composites. Red Jacket was more than a winning race-boat; she was a glimpse of the future.
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NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2019 • KWASIND
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HERITAGE