New York Yacht Club
172nd Annual Regatta is a Sweet Homecoming for 113-Year-Old SPARTAN
The 172nd edition of North America’s oldest recurring sailing competition, the New York Yacht Club’s Annual Regatta, served as a homecoming for one of the grand dames of classic yachting, the NY50 SPARTAN. Birthed at the legendary Herreshoff Manufacturing Company in Bristol, R.I., in 1913, the 70-foot SPARTAN is the sole survivor of nine sisterships built by Captain Nathanael Herreshoff for New York Yacht Club members. She’s spent most of the last decade battling on the Mediterranean classics circuit, but owner Charlie Ryan brought her back to the United States for this celebratory summer. This past weekend, she looked as if she’d been sailing here all her life.
“Because of the America 250th celebration, a couple of the European boats wanted to come over here,” said Ryan. “So we’ve got a Fife called VIOLA, and TUIGA, which is a 15-Metre. I thought, ‘Well, they’re going to come, I should come home too.’ I joined the Club. So that was kind of like a thought of, ‘Well, we should get the boat sailing in some of the Club’s regattas.’ And then on the personal front, I moved from London back to Philadelphia.”
With neither VIOLA nor TUIGA entered in the Annual Regatta, Ryan and the SPARTAN crew battled a couple of Annual Regatta stalwarts for the top prize in the Classics B division: the Sparkman & Stephens 52-footer DORADE, built in 1930, and the 12-Metre ONAWA, built in 1928.
Success in the regatta, with three firsts in four races, was the product of some favorable conditions and a lot of hard work over the past 15 years both restoring the yacht and learning how to make her sing.
“Captain Nat designed her for Long Island Sound, so she’s a weapon on flat water,” said Ryan, noting how the conditions in Narragansett Bay this weekend couldn’t have been more perfect. “The first regatta we sailed in, we could not get the boat to point. We were tacking through like 120 degrees. That was in 2010. SPARTAN had a Marconi rig in the late ’70s. So, no one had seen a 50 with the original gaff rig. We went and looked at the photographs, tried to discern what they were doing. We also worked hard on the sails. We worked with the guys at North to come up with a little bit more belly in the sail to give it a bit more power. It was probably about three or four years ago that we really figured it out. And then we started winning a bunch of regattas in the Med. And that was basically the culmination of all that effort.”