Handsome is as handsome does

The name Ray Hunt has been a presence since my earliest days on Duxbury (Mass.) Bay. I first heard it when my father showed me, nestled in Duxbury Beach dunes, the remains of the Hunt family’s waterfowling camp, near which my great-uncle had a similar structure.

Then there were the odd-looking sailboats I saw in the bay, the narrow, plumb-stemmed, double-ended, slab-sided, hard-chined 110s designed by Duxbury native C. Raymond Hunt in 1939: Original “contract cost” was $480.50.

The name of one of these caught my eye back then — Hogan’s Goat — and it’s stayed with me to the present day. One plausible derivation of the name Hogan’s Goat is this WWII “New York Times” reference: “An old Navy descriptive phrase for total confusion is fouled up like Hogan’s goat.” I imagine some Navy vet returned from the war, bought a crazy looking 110, and hung the Navy moniker on her sides.

But as eccentric as the 24-foot 110s appeared, there was no confusion or foul-ups in their design and performance. Hunt designed them to be simply and inexpensively built, easy to sail, and seaworthy. The 110 satisfied all criteria because Ray Hunt couldn’t help but think outside the box.

More than 750 110s have been built of both plywood and fiberglass. Hunt would later expand his “Ten” Series to include the 210, 310, 410 and 510. Ray won the 1948 New London to Marblehead Race by such a large margin in his 36-foot 410 Et Toi, the race committee phoned the Cape Cod Canal to see if he’d cut through it instead of sailing outside.

Various shops pulled 110s off the stocks – W.D. Schock, Cape Cod Shipbuilding, George Lawley & Son, and Graves Yacht Yard – but the current builder is Westease Yacht Service, in Saugatuck, Mich. As proof of the enduring viability of the class, fleets are in Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, California and Hawaii. And the 2017 110 National Regatta will be held July 6-9, in Newport, R.I.

What prompted these reminiscences was an exhibit at the New Bedford Whaling Museum entitled “Power, Performance and Speed in 20th Century Yacht Design: C. Raymond Hunt and W. Starling Burgess,” which ran from last December through this May. Under the right whales suspended from the ceiling were several boats built from designs off Hunt’s board, including the 110, the Boston Whaler, and a one-third scale model of a 39-foot, 10-inch Concordia Yawl, designed by Hunt for the Concordia Company in South Dartmouth, Mass.

The exquisite Concordia model – built by local artist/sculptor/ship’s carpenter Tom Borges – is 15 feet, two inches long with a 44-inch beam, and has a 22-foot stepped mainmast, handmade bronze fittings, and a 200-pound lead keel. Sails were made by Sperry Sails in Marion, Mass. It can be sailed from a “pilot seat” below the companionway, “allowing it to be skippered by a set of controls from belowdecks,” the museum said, “with a head-and-shoulders view of the exterior.”

The iconic 13-foot Boston Whaler was born in the mid-’50s when Ray Hunt took a design based on the twin-hulled sea sled and converted it to a cathedral hull form that proved stable, relatively dry, and seaworthy. In design and construction, this little bucket transformed the boatbuilding industry. Today, Boston Whaler builds 26 recreational models (between 11 and 42 feet) and 15 commercial models (between 15 and 37 feet).

A display explained Hunt’s pivotal role in the development of the prototype of the stable, deep-vee planing hull that’s seen today in Hunt Yachts, Grady-White, Bertram Yachts, and Grand Banks Eastbay Series vessels.

Ray Hunt was a consummate waterman, sailor and yacht designer who quietly changed the sport, recreation and industry of boating. If you’d like to learn more about this brilliant and understated man, Stan Grayson has written a fascinating biography entitled “A Genius at His Trade: C. Raymond Hunt and His Remarkable Boats,” recently published by the New Bedford Whaling Museum (www.whalingmuseum.org), from which this volume can be ordered.