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FULL AND BY
By Bill Schanen

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The boat that Mitchell inspired and Olin Stephens designed was a racing phenomenon—winner of three consecutive Bermuda races, 1956, ‘58 and ‘60—but also a boat its owner would sail
thousands of miles in cruising that validated his belief that the sailing life was the best life.

November 2007

The ocean racer who chronicled ‘the finest of lives’

An innocent dock-stander observing the arrival of boats after a long-distance race could be excused for thinking the sailors onboard had just endured an awful experience. Why else would so many of them, with sea bags packed and BlackBerries reinstalled on their belts, jump ship the minute dock lines are secured in a rush for air or land transportation to get back to their non-sailing lives? The answer, of course, is that they’re in a hurry to get away because those lives are so busy and so full of really important things to do, but it does make you wonder whether they went sailboat racing because they like sailing or to cross another activity programmed for their busy lives off their to-do lists. I wish Carleton Mitchell were here to weigh in on this.

Well, he’s not here—Carleton Mitchell died on July 16, 2007, at the age of 96—but fortunately he weighed in long ago with words that expressed an appreciation of sailboat racing not just for the competition and the challenge but for blessing fortunate participants with one more opportunity to embrace the joys of sailing. His words carried weight, and still do, because Mitchell was the most successful offshore racer of his era and remains, nearly half a century after he last sailed in a Bermuda Race, a legend of that bluewater classic.

You can probably tell I’m an admirer. How could I not be? Mitchell was an exemplar of excellence in two noble callings—sailor and sailing journalist. (OK, you can debate the nobility of the second calling.) His name will forever be associated with a boat named Finisterre, but it would shortchange Mitchell’s legacy to remember him only in that context, for his real legacy is the books, articles and photographs in which he so gracefully distilled the essence of sailing.

This is not to say that Finisterre doesn’t merit a lot attention in any consideration of Mitchell’s life. The boat that Mitchell inspired and Olin Stephens designed was a racing phenomenon—winner of three consecutive Bermuda races, 1956, ‘58 and ‘60—but also a boat its owner would sail thousands of miles in cruising that validated his belief that the sailing life was the best life.

Mitchell liked to poke fun at his boat, deprecating her as a fat centerboarder, likening her to a watermelon. He wrote in Yachting magazine in 1954, “I might as well admit liking fat boats.” By today’s standards, Finisterre wasn’t all that portly, with a beam of 11 feet, 3 inches on a hull with an overall length of 38 feet, 7.5 inches. But in the 1950s narrow, deep keelboats in the Dorade mold were considered the shape of speed. So it was all the more astonishing when this little (by the day’s standards for offshore racing boats) yawl, with a draft of only 3 feet, 11 inches with its bronze centerboard raised) and a whopping displacement of 22,000 pounds proved to be almost unbeatable.

Finisterre, in fact, looked nothing like a watermelon. I saw her several times after Mitchell sold her and, though not in Bristol condition, she was a handsome yacht with a delicate counter stern, curvy sheerline and agreeably balanced proportions. She was pretty below too, I’ve read, with features you wouldn’t expect on a successful racing boat, including a soapstone fireplace and, besides an enclosed head, a second toilet and wash basin in the forward cabin, which Mitchell explained in Yachting was intended “to make less awkward the occasional presence of a professional or native pilot.”

That quaint amenity was meant for Finisterre’s cruising life, but the line between racing and cruising wasn’t all that well defined. Even while racing, the boat carried a full-time professional chef. Dinners were served with the off watch seated around a table in the cozy saloon and included wine described by one of the lucky quaffers as splendid. Imagine

the crew relaxed in the easy motion of this soft-lined, seakindly boat, chatting over their meal in the quiet cabin insulated by double planking of cedar and Mexican mahogany over Connecticut oak frames.

I love what’s new about sailboats in the 21st century as much as the next sailing tech geek, but I’m not sure the way we “dine” during races—sitting on a soaked sail (if you’re lucky enough not to be eating on the rail) while balancing a paper plate on your knees in a light composite hull being batted around like a shuttlecock by the seas in a cacophony that suggests an energetic but arrhythmic drummer—is progress. Maybe that’s why those busy guys jump ship at the first opportunity.

Unlike those who can’t wait to get off the boat after a race, Mitchell sometimes just kept sailing. After the 1956 Bermuda race, Finisterre, sailed farther east, crossed the Atlantic and cruised the Mediterranean and along the African coast.

Mitchell was famed for his fanatically careful preparation, precise (celestial) navigation and organizational skills, but at heart he was a sailing romantic and it shines through his writings. Here he is explaining how he named his most famous boat after Cape Finisterre on the coast of Spain: “I kept repeating the word, fascinated by the music and meaning of it; I thought back to the day when Roman legionnaires first stood on the bold promontory and looked out over the ocean, certain they had reached the boundary of the world. Finisterre, they named it. The End of the Land.”

Mitchell displayed his gift for capturing the sailing experience in words and photographs in articles in mainstream magazines such as Sports Illustrated and National Geographic as well as in sailing journals and in seven books. He wrote about his cruises; his books about the Caribbean lit up a love for the islands that has made me a frequent visitor under sail. He wrote about his races, including the transatlantic race to England that he won with his 53-foot Rhodes-designed yawl Caribee, about the America’s Cup, and, in a book titled Yachtsman’s Camera, about sailing photography. He wrote in the preface, “To me, pictures should be natural and easy, literally the unstudied record of a given instant in time; they should be direct and uncluttered, and have something to say; above all, they should convey a sense of participation.” I take that as good advice for editing a magazine that specializes in sailing photography.

Carleton Mitchell experienced much of the worst of sailing. He’d seen his share of stormy weather (he chose a yawl rig for Finisterre because the mizzen aided in heaving to). The Bermuda Race he won in Finisterre (then the smallest boat to ever win the race) in 1960 was one of the roughest on record. Yet you never sense in his writing an effort to dramatize the danger or difficulty of sailing offshore. Rather, there is one graceful evocation after another of the wonder of sailing. Only a man who truly loved sailing could write these words: “To desire nothing beyond what you have is surely happiness. Aboard a boat, it is frequently possible to achieve just that. That is why sailing is a way of life, one of the finest of lives.”

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