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Thread: IOR & MORC event in SF?

  1. #1
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    Default IOR & MORC event in SF?

    It may not be completely SSS but maybe it would be something you might be interested in participating in.

    I know i rarely post here and have been rather busy running other sailing programs and events for the Master Mariners. It has been with some sadness that i have not sailed many SSS races the past years as work life, family with a teenager and other things pressing things have kept me away from competing and general sailing with many of you. But those things are changing for me and my boat this next year. In addition to getting out among you all, I am interested in starting a group of like minded individuals and hosting an old school IOR/MORC sailing event in San Francisco for the spring or summer next year. I have some good experience running the Master Mariners Regatta serving as race and sponsor chairs. I think it is time to restore one of the premiere venues with all the old CCA & IOR boats here in the bay. I plan on writing an article for Latitude 38, getting support from local yacht clubs and marine business. It is my hope is to form a managing committee to begin to iron out the dates, get the race committee squared away and hosts on board. My inclination would be to keep the cost of entry low, participation based on mixed IOR/IRC ratings, try to group within logical classes. I would like to hold the first meeting in the next few weeks here in Alameda. PM if you would like to meet up to begin to further this conversation.

    What would you think would draw the owners, crew and sponsors to this fun event?

    Thanks!

    Ted Hoppe
    Alameda, CA
    Last edited by BobJ; 09-23-2016 at 08:22 AM. Reason: Shorten thread title for index header

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    Quote Originally Posted by Black Jack View Post
    Thanks! Ted Hoppe Alameda, CA
    Acronyms acronyms. Whatever do they mean? Do they refer to my boat? Should I bother googling them? Does this post have anything to do with me? IOR/MORC, CCA & IOR. Dunno

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    Quote Originally Posted by Philpott View Post
    Acronyms acronyms. Whatever do they mean? Do they refer to my boat? Should I bother googling them? Does this post have anything to do with me? IOR/MORC, CCA & IOR. Dunno
    Good question. In my opinion... This are several labels tied to the evolution of modern sailboat design focusing on roughly on the mid 60s to late 80s/90s —the IOR decades and beyond. It was the decades of the advancement and explosive growth of racer/cruisers, cruiser/racers, dedicated cruisers, the rise of trailersailers, and the first of the fun, fast day racers like the J/24, Ranger 26 and the Santa Cruz 27 as well as the great fabled warhorses that decorated sail magazines and lifestyles. The adoption in the late 1960s of the International Offshore Rule (IOR) basically ended of the Cruising Club of America (CCA) rating rule and with it the true dual-purpose offshore boat. Your fine boat, the Cal 2 27, like many of (coastal cruisers/(club) racers, but most were recommended by general acceptance for crossing oceans. Production sailboat designs diverged into several different branches of the same tree: IOR racers, cruiser/racers and a new genus of hard-core offshore-cruising boats.
    Here in the bay area, we were lucky enough to have many great designers in conjunction with some really terrific builders and they had a profound influence on what could be considered the golden age of modern sailing.

    Gary Mull, our local hero and designer legend ushered in the IOR designs from the CCA. It would be only fitting to honor Mull and friends in calling for The Mull Cup to be held with boats from the era that have a heritage that profoundly changed and inspired builders, owners, crew and larger community here.
    Last edited by Black Jack; 09-17-2016 at 11:35 AM.

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    pogen is offline Sailing canoe "Kūʻaupaʻa"
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    Pinched sterns, tumblehome, bloopers, and broaching. Over 30', mainly a nostalgia trip. NTTAWWT.

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    MORC boats were good boats. I'm not so much a fan of IOR.

    Have you talked with Scott Owens (SUMMERTIME DREAM)?

    I saw another Mull 30 out today (in the Estuary) - the one with Betti Boop (?) painted on the quarters.

    Nice looking boats.

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    Quote Originally Posted by BobJ View Post
    MORC boats were good boats. I'm not so much a fan of IOR.

    Have you talked with Scott Owens (SUMMERTIME DREAM)?

    I saw another Mull 30 out today (in the Estuary) - the one with Betti Boop (?) painted on the quarters.

    Nice looking boats.
    Thanks! Thats was me and my boat Lively Lady, coming back from a nice raft up with great friends, some good wine, and great food. ) Anyway - it was quite hot in the estuary and i sucked the motivation out of me to do much more than get her home. The cutie on the quarters is my wife so i can make the claim she always sails with me.

    To make a long story short about this boat and me, i told my father back in 1969 when i was 7 at the Cristobal Yacht Club (Canal Zone - Panama) that one day i would get Lively Lady which was on the cover of one of those long forgotten sailing magazine. Many around me laughed when I said it. For years i looked for the boat and it came up just under two years ago. I could not resist getting her and changing the course of my own sailing direction. The boat is nearly 90 percent together now. I am enjoying putting her together abet a little slowly. She now sports a nice trick folding gimbaled spartan mahogany galley, fresh keel bolts, freshened wooden hull and a few other things to make her more complete to sail. Every time i sail her out, more of the genius of the design and superb combination of master crafted plank and cold molded construction is revealed. To make it easier for single/double handed racing, i am going to start taking a look at successful boats in the SSS so i can manage a better and safer boat.





    I will look up Scott. Hopefully he and other like minded folks will join me making this thing happen.
    Last edited by Black Jack; 09-18-2016 at 05:38 PM.
    Without friends, none of this would be possible.

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    A beautiful looking boat.

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    I've owned two Mull hulls: Santana 22 & Newport 30. Neither was an IOR design, thank God! I think you've got your feature order backward. Put "BROACHING!" first, then bloopers. But then the blooper didn't solve the broaching, did it? I think Kame might be the only sail maker left who could build one - and he'd probably leave the "Pineapple" off the sail so no one could identify it when they recovered the shredded pieces. Oh, and I'd add "Damned uncomfortable to sail on!" to the list. I do have to admit some of those pinched sterns and that tumblehomes did look sweet, however. Most of the other bumps and dips were underwater so couldn't be seen - unless of course you watched one of the dinosaurs broaching.

  9. #9
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    Well, the earlier IOR boats were not so constrained/distorted by "The Rule".

    Jackie... alphabet soup, here.

    CCA = Cruising Club of America... This group was founded in the winter of 1921 by some avid yachtie-types and sort of modelled on the Royal Cruising Club of England. The notion was to incorporate racing as part of the overall "yachting" activity, and to create a prestigious association of yachts and owners. One of the things they did, starting in the late 1930's was develop a "rule"... a series of hull measurements which were taken and then analyzed to create a handicap rating for the boat in question. Whenever there's a "rule" there will be designers who will try to maximize a boat to perform under that rule. Since the CCA "rules" were somewhat "loose" and based on concepts of what made a good cruising boat back at that time, many, many boats from the 1940's and 50's and early 60's were designed to that rule. Most of Carl Albergs boats...the Pearson Triton, Ariel and Electra for example, were rated by the CCA rule.

    As a very VERY general rule, boats that were designed with an eye to the CCA rule have what we would call today, "full keels", though maybe "full keel with cutaway forefoot" would be more accurate. They tend to have largish overhangs, fore and aft and they heel relatively quickly, to a point where stability really increases. They also heel to a point where the ends get in the water more and the functional waterline length goes up. Part of the idea was to limit wetted surface when not heeled.....in light air.... and then stretch the boat out in heavier air.

    Here's an Alberg 29, a redesign of the classic Alberg 30, showing a typical CCA-type underbody.



    Nowadays, folks tend to think of CCA-rule-type boats as slower but they definitely make good cruising boats....though maybe on the wet side. A few well-known CCA deisgners were C. Raymond Hunt, Carl Alberg, the early Sparkman and Stevens office, and Halsey Herreschoff. Charley Morgan did more than a few CCA-type boats.

    IOR - International Offshore Rule...The IOR evolved from the Cruising Club of America (CCA) rule for racer/cruisers and the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) rule. It was based on a series of hull and rig measurements, and a stability test. Those numbers were plugged into a super-secret formula...which by about 1975 every designer worth a nickel had figured out, and that formula generated a handicap. That handicap was expressed as a theoretical boat length. So it was that a typical IOR "One-tonner" (which didn't weigh a ton, the "ton" language actually refers to an old trophy that was given out, early in the history of the class) had a rating around 30 and was probably something like about 36-40 feet LOA. Well, not everybody wants to race a 40-footer and so as time went on, what was called "level-rating-classes" were developed. Two-tonners were 50-footers, more or less. One-tonners were 40 footers, plus or minus. Half-tonners were 28-30 footers. Quarter-tonners were 24-27 footers. Mini tonners were 20-21 footers. To very much oversimplify, the LOA of the level rating classes increased over the years. So for example, the Wylie Hawkfarm was a mid-early half-tonner, with a LOA of about 28 feet. it would compete straight-ahead with the Ron Holland designed Silver Shamrock of 1972, which is 29.9 feet LOA....and so on.

    The super-secret formula wasn't perfect, as these things never are. So as designers started figuring out what the formula was, they started designing boats which maximized performance under the handicap which the rule created. This tended to develop boats which were very small in the hindquarters, often had a lot of tumblehome, had minimal ballast and very complicated rigs. Rigs tended to have very small mainsails and large foretriangles. This mean that you had to have a huge array of headsails for varying conditions and you had to develop a foredeck crew that was absolutely expert at doing headsail changes. As a very general guideline, "early"...meaning late 1960's and early 1970's IOR boats tended to be less extreme in terms of the hull distortion imposed by the rule. By the time we got into the early-mid 1980's (when I started sailing), an awful lot of IOR boats were just wicked machines to handle in a breeze. They were fast upwind, required huge crews overall, and were terribly unstable off the wind in a breeze. In the smaller classes, it became fairly obvious in time that having ballast really high in the boat was a rating advantage, and so for a couple of years there were actually IOR quarter tonners built with NO outside ballast...just a daggerboard with enough weight in it to make it sink. All the lead was INSIDE the boat. In fact, one of those boats, with most of the internal ballast taken out and a new modern keel bolted on, is still racing quite happily out of the Alameda Marina. It's been revived and painted sparkle-bronze and if I could remember the boat/owners name, I'd write it here.

    a WHOLE lot of 1970's production boats in the 22-28 foot range were rated as quarter tonners or half-tonners without *really* being designed as such. Jackie, you sail a Cal 2-27. Perhaps you're aware of the original Cal 27, which exists in a version called the Cal T-2 27. The T-2 is just a Cal 27 with rigging and deck modifications which enable it to "measure in" as a half-tonner. The hard-chine Thunderbird is, technically, a quarter-tonner. So is the Ranger 23, the Sprinta Sport (which really looks like one), the Santana 25 (not the 525), Carl Schumachers "Summertime Dream". There was a company on the SF Peninsula, "Sudden Yachts" that cranked out about a dozen Gary Mull quarter-tonners.

    Here's a Ron-Holland IOR boat.



    This is one of the Gary Mull quarter tonners (still in the Bay Area) made by Sudden Yachts



    Some well known IOR designers were Ron Holland, Doug Peterson, Laurie Davidson and Bruce Farr, with locals Gary Mull, Tom Wylie, the Nelson-Marek team and Carl Schumacher making their marks, too. If you would like to see a very typical IOR-type hull, find a Cal 9.2 from the late 1970's/early 1980's. That design originally won the IOR Half-ton worlds and then Cal built a mold from the hull to sell as a racer-cruiser. Find a Nelson-Marek 36 from the very early 80's...that's the same thing.

    Upshot was, by the early 1980's an awful lot of IOR-designed boats really were not that good-sailing boats. They "rated well" but were miserable to sail. I would like to point out that not ALL IOR-influenced boats were pigs, eh? The Hawkfarm is eminently NOT a pig, it's a very good ocean boat. Rob MacFarlane is out cruising shorthanded on a Nelson-Marek 45, which is an IOR design. The array of production boats which theoretically rate as a quarter-tonner is quite long...
    Last edited by AlanH; 09-20-2016 at 05:32 PM.
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
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  10. #10
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    At some point people wized up to the problems with the IOR rule. The joke back in the late 1980's was that IOR stood for "Invest Or Retire". The boats became incredibly complicated, wickedly unstable off the wind and every other year a new boat hit the market that had a rating edge over the boat that was 2 years old.

    There are exceptions to this of course. John Clauser raced his IOR Bodacious for years- there's a good exception.

    However, a couple of things were happening in the late 1970's that would become the death knell for the IOR. 1.) Rod Johnstone designed the J-24... 2.) a bunch of guys in Santa Cruz started building Santa Cruz 27's and Moore 24's.

    These were boats designed to just sail well and sail fast, with no regard to the IOR. Honestly, they were just plain "funner". The J-24 was such a monstrous hit, and sold SO many hulls that at least 3-4 boats which are still around were specifically designed to be "J-24" beaters. The Merit 25 IS a J-24. Literally, the guy who founded Merit Marine took a J-24 into a garage, went after the deck layout with a chainsaw, lengthened the hull out to the transom, replaced the outboard rudder with an inboard rudder...and VOILA! New boat. The Capri 25, Kirby 25 and my own boat, S-2 7.9 were all designed to "beat the J-24".

    In Santa Cruz...well....we all know that story and there are guys on this forum (AHEM, Skip) who can tell you the Santa Cruz story better than I can.

    MORC- Midget Ocean Racing Club (or Class). This was founded in 1954 in New York by a bunch of guys who were impressed by the exploits of the little British boat, "Sopranino". Here's Sopranino... she crossed the Atlantic with two guys aboard, and the book...appropriately named "Sopranino" by Colin Mudie and Patrick Ellam is a great read.

    https://farm7.staticflickr.com/6132/...e3b63efa_z.jpg

    MORC and JOG (Junior Ocean Group, in England) were both dedicated to the idea of smaller boats being able to race on the open ocean. Famous yacht designer Bill Shaw, who was with the Sparkman and Stevens office at the time, consulted with the lads and together they developed a rating/handicap rule specifically for boats 24 feet and under. In 1958 that was expanded to 30 feet LOA.

    While some custom boats were certainly built "to the MORC rule" the nature of the rule didn't encourage such drastic distortion as the IOR did. One big difference between the IOR and the MORC rules was that the MORC specified scantlings...construction strength. As technology improved, IOR boats got lighter and lighter, sometimes without sufficient regard to strength/seaworthiness. This didn't happen so much with MORC - type boats. Over time, some of the larger 30-footers, the "Maxi-Morc" boats developed a somewhat boxy hull shape, but at least in my opinion, nothing terrible. Jackie, some common boats that you know of that qualify as "Maxi-MORC" boats would be the Capo 30 / Olson 911S...the Santana 3030, the Andrews 30. Over the years there have been plenty of specialized MORC boats like for example the Capo 26, but oodles of production boats work well under MORC.... Ranger 26, Thunderbird, C&C 27 and 29, Soveral 26, and my boat the S-2 7.9 are all good example. At one time there was an MORC fleet in San Francisco and there are guys in the SSS who will remember racing in it. A lot of the Santa Cruz Ultralights used to race MORC in the ocean. That all faded out in the late 1980's early 1990's.


    IMS ... to simplify, IMS (International Measurement System ??) replaced the IOR in the "Big Boat" scene for a while. Again, it was a hull measurement rule, and a super-secret mathematical formula, which smart designers figured out in a few years. Early 1990's IMS boats were, to my mind pretty sweet racers. All of the gross distortions of the IOR were gone and the boats were fast. I never really understood why IMS kind of ran out of steam, but probably a lot of it was that the "Invest or Retire" philosophy got going again. Every two years a new boat would come out that would whuppp the older boats on handicap and so you had to constantly upgrade in order to stay competitive. I think it was that plus there were never significant "small" classes of IMS boats. Not a lot in the <30 foot range ever developed.

    Others here know more about IMS than I do and probably can comment on it.

    Also, right at this time, windsurfing took off. I know that sounds silly but I remember going to the Vallejo race in about 1986 and the last big IOR warhorse syndicates were still going to Vallejo and bringing along wads of young guys and...well.... paid pretty girls. In 2008 I did another Vallejo race and it was still mostly all the same people, but...where were the young guys? Where were the pretty girls who showed up because the young guys were there? Answer: I think they were windsurfing.

    Also, in the "big boat" end of things on the West Coast at least, the whole TransPac 52 phenomenon got started right about then. That soaked up some of the Big Boat market. By this time there were scads of reasonably quick fiberglass sailboats from the 80's still around for pretty cheap and the bang-to-buck equation starting not working out so well for the mid-sized boats. At the same time we saw the rise of J-Boats to a huge force. When was the J-105 introduced? "Moderately big-boat" sailors opted to buy into a more-or-less big boat one-design class rather than blow wads of money on a boat which would be out-designed in two years. I think it all came together to more or less shut down IMS, at least here on the West Coast.

    Where we are now....

    Old boats, because fiberglass never dies and for some of us creaky-types the "cruiser-racer" concept still works.
    J-Boats, who don't care about handicap rules, they build what sells and they're good at it.
    Sportboats, because going fast is fun, and besides, who sleeps on their boat any more?

    Hope that helps!!
    Last edited by AlanH; 09-22-2016 at 01:02 PM.
    1968 Selmer Series 9 B-flat and A clarinets
    1962 Buesher "Aristocrat" tenor saxophone
    Piper One Design 24, Hull #35; "Alpha"

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