Buzzer. Hmmm…next. “ For $ 300, this graceful daysailer was a celebrated designer and builders ’ personal boat, which he took to Bermuda in the off-seasons, and which served as his lunchroom in Bristol, RI during the years before, during and after the first World War. ” Cue the doorbell. “ And ultimately, for $ 500 ( and our winner ), this is the entirely Nathanael Greene Herreshoff design whose critical interior designer “ Brown Book ” is cryptically missing from the 13,000-item Herreshoff archives in Boston, creating a design mystery worthy of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie which remains unsolved. ” clock ticks as the dissenter mulls the answer. doorbell : “ What is Alerion III ? ” “ Correct ! ” Alerion is a boatload of stories, from the 1912 launching of NG Herreshoff ’ randomness ( henceforth referred to as “ NGH ” ) personal boat to 2020 ’ s relaunch of Alerion Boats and its Alerion-derived designs. Let ’ s get to the history of the design : Alerion III: NGH’s Favorite Child The Alerion is a design born in local anesthetic Bristol, RI waters from a succession of daysailing designs done during the Golden Age of the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company ’ s persistent design and construction campaigns of massive America ’ s Cup yachts at its complex load east-west down pin down Burnside Street. The Alerion logo itself is an outsize double of a fabulous boo, a cross between an osprey and a gull, in black or red. Its cachet as NGH ’ s personal boat and its hardy combination of sea kindly hull and surprisingly potent school draft has led to newfangled interpretations of the design. There have been at least four generations of Alerions build and sailed on american waters. When we say Alerion in this article, we mean Alerion III ( or “ A III, ” ) HMCo. Design # 718, the personal boat that Capt. Nat sailed, frequently solo, from 1913 to 1924, when he was well into his 70s. personally, I never set foot in Alerion III. She was on her manner to Mystic Seaport Museum ’ s little gravy boat solicitation when I first came to Bristol as a junior bluejacket with my Blue Jay from Long Island Sound. My own boat had been built by aerospace engineers with features Capt. Nat would have appreciated : bright finished transom, forest mast, high technical school floorboards. But early on, I did sail in one of A III ’ randomness descendants, the Twelve-and-a-Half, the most ample of NGH ’ second designs and the rear of the fiberglass Bullseye and Doughdish models seen throughout the Northeast. In the family of Herreshoff daysailers, the 12 ½ ( rig gaff or Marconi ) was Alerion ’ s little buddy. In the late 1960s at the Bristol Yacht Club, the 12 ½ was the hot competitive class. As a preteen with long arms, I got to crew on this 1920s-style wooden boat, gaff-rigged with its club-footed jib and a handkerchief non-poled spinnaker I constantly seemed to wrestle with. Go ahead more than thirty years to 1998. Moving on after a seafaring career of performance boats from Thistles to Lasers to E Scows and back to Thistles with the alleged “ Westport Mafia, ” I settled into keelboat middle age in Nantucket. That experience came in the new Nantucket fleet of Chris Hood-built International One Designs derived from the norwegian builder of the original wood versions commissioned by Larchmont Yacht Club sailors in the mid-1930s. In 1999, I migrated with my young syndicate from summers in Westport, CT to summers in Nantucket. This was where my New York City grandma had gone earlier World War I, and where my ancestor, John Darling, had come from Martha ’ s Vineyard to go to sea when the family land gave out in Gay Head in the 1760s. today, most visitors arrive in Nantucket by ferry…at least those with two small children and a trunk wide of american Girl dolls and beach toy. The exercise is load your car on the ferry, then nap for a pair hours on a hard formative Steamship Authority seat. When you return to your cable car, you peek out through the portholes on the starboard side, looking for a glimpse of Nantucket Town with its church steeples over weather-beaten grey
buildings. Looking out that hoary port as we rounded Brant Point, I saw it : a fine-looking knockabout, royal blue, riding at anchor, her mahogany brightwork blind in the summer solstice sun. It was love at beginning sight. Riding nearby was a pale grey boat that resembled the royal aristocratic one. The bluing boat was and is A 2, Serendipity, owned by Harry Rein, the original captain of the Nantucket evanesce. The grey gravy boat was Owl, owned then by Eric Holch, a well known Nantucket graphic artist whose cards are a staple of Nantucket tourists and whose neckties are popular at what we used to call, pre-pandemic, “ cocktail parties. ” These two boats represent the historic record of this, the largest assiduity of Alerions in the global. When they raise sails, every gravy boat ’ second mainsail has an “ A ” for Alerion, a daunt, and a number. Hull # 2 startle construction in 1977. The latest, # 32, was finished fall of 2019. The count on a boat ’ south sail gives you an idea of her vintage. It ’ mho forty-one years back to the construction of A 2. later that summer, my first sailing experience in an Alerion was less than auspicious. A DNF. Exactly how did that happen ? I was a choice up off the bobtail on a airy, showery nor ’ east wind day. The master ’ south wife had gone home and he needed a crew. We were charging upwind on starboard when our main topping pilfer, flying free, snagged the spreader of a dipping port tack boat and pulled the rig straight on top of me. instantaneously, I was seeing stars from being clonked by a hundred pounds of sliver Sitka spruce. not the omen I would have liked to start my Alerion know with. But today, twenty-one years belated, we find ourselves a share of the happy inheritance of the Nantucket evanesce, a group that will get full coverage in Part II of this piece. Back to the Future of the Alerion Design In Episode One of my “ Conversations with classical Boats ” podcast ( conversationswithclassicboats.com ) on Dolphin, the 36-foot Newport 29, I had listeners send us the postdate questions : Who was this Herreshoff character ? Where or how did he work ? What boats did he design and build via the Herreshoff Method ? What precisely is the Herreshoff Method ? All adept questions that require a brief history of the Wizard of Bristol Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, one of MIT ’ s earliest students ( class of 1870 ), was trained as a mechanical engineer and a self-taught yacht couturier and builder who for more than sixty years from the late 1800s to the 1930s exerted more influence on marine invention and technology than any other human body. His fabled design brilliance, engineering innovations and manufacturing efficiencies led to the production of six America ’ south Cup winners and hundreds of other highly regard vessels ( Alerion was # 718 ), the introduction of advanced catamarans, the first gear gunman boats for the U.S. Navy, and the first steam powered fish boats in the U.S. Running through May 1, 2021 at the newly remodel MIT Museum at Sullivan Square on the north bank of the Charles River in Cambridge, MA is an exhibition called “ Lighter, Stronger, Faster : The Herreshoff Legacy. ” We were fortunate to have prior research done by wooden boat sages like Maynard Bray at Off Center Harbor and builders like Eric Fingers of Nantucket to guide us through Alerion history. We relied in particular on two pieces of diachronic report including 1 ) excerpts from Maynard Bray ’ s beautiful book AIDA, published in 2012 ; and 2 ) an article in the September/October 1997 edition of WoodenBoat
Magazine. We refer to both hera as “ AIDA ” and “ WoodenBoat ” in parentheses. Alerion III: Design for the modern daysailer Keel-centerboard daysailers were derivations of New England “ knockabouts, ” a liberally rigged, low-freeboard designs not conducive to keeping the crowd dry. The Herreshoff customer was overtone to a act more comfort. short overhangs and hollow bows were the design features that led to a boat throwing the feature southern New England chop aside. Alerion was a quantum leap in that regard. But the initiation came by way of NGH ’ s sharp center observing native craft during his winter trips to Bermuda. Those beautiful hollow sections up forward are what thus many of us consider as Herreshoff signatures, along with the round of golf port and the rectangular coachroof. In their book Herreshoff of Bristol, Maynard Bray and Carlton Pinheieo noted, “ Alerion and her successors were remarkable in their short but elegant overhangs, high bows and humble sterns with a beautiful sheerline connecting them, and generous beam on deck… ” narrow at the waterline with a ballasted keel and centerboard musical arrangement, the easily driven hull condition culminated forward in classifiable hollow waterlines carried well up into her topsides. Built by the choice crew in the Small Boat Shop at the Bristol yard, Alerion was, in Bray ’ south words, “ one of Herreshoff ’ s most exquisite creations. ” That classifiable submit, as we noted in past articles about her bigger cousin, the Newport 29 ( windcheckmagazine.com/article/dolphin-and-mischief-mischief-the-herreshoff-twins-and-their-rogue-cousin/ ), was thought to come from one of Bermuda ’ sulfur fitted sailing dinghies named Contest ( AIDA ). Yachtsmen appreciated this hull shape, in naval architect ’ randomness terms “ particularly the combination of a fully forward deck tune and a reversing load waterline that produce Alerion ’ s cover girl hollow bows. ” ( AIDA ). These 1912 construction drawings for Design # 718 do not do justice to that dainty turn of submit – the “ Herreshoff Sheer, ” as I call it. In a news, pretty, pretty, pretty. 
What is this Herreshoff Method? One hears from design historians and authoritative boat builders about the alone way Herreshoff Manufacturing built boats. The headquarters was on Burnside Street south of the business district area of Bristol, today known well in New England for the red, white and amobarbital sodium center wrinkle on its main street and its big 4th of July parade. NGH ’ s approach to design and build was meticulous and relentlessly documented. celebrated entrepreneurs from early industries studied how NGH produced indeed many high quality boats in thus little time, including steam, sail, and America ’ s Cup giants. But the NGH Method revolved around a pair of core principles : 1. design from the half model. If you came to Burnside Street, chances were adept you ’ five hundred find NGH whittling a hull form from a boastfully piece of wood. The Herreshoff Marine Museum and the MIT Museum hold the collection of these models. once faired, that exemplar was measured with a appliance of his design that looks like to my eye like a big alloy spider. That yielded the measurements of the diverse stations, the alleged offsets, the numbers at each frame…think of them as a fashion couturier ’ sulfur snip make patterns. From that, the factory made customs shaped frames which, with the hull top down, took the individually-shaped planks. In wooden boat build up circles, that was and is known as the Herreshoff Method. 2. amply integrate manufacture. Herreshoff built every component of each gravy boat. Everything was made in Bristol, down to the screws and even the sails, which were made of custom-specified cotton sailcloth. Alerion was built in the minor boat department on Burnside Street, in between the major build up programs for the America ’ randomness Cup yachts Reliance and Resolute. Capt. Nat had Alerion III shipped to Bermuda soon after her launch in 1913 for his winter trips to the island. He then returned home plate to Bristol in 1920, sailing her for a twelve years before retiring for commodity to Coconut Grove in Florida in 1924 with a more livable Alerion derived function called Pleasure. It was in those post-World War I years that an older Nat Herreshoff found time to take his day by day lunch, hop on Alerion III waiting at the dock, and singlehand her around Bristol Harbor. A relaxing lunch late, he had solved a barbed trouble or two in that polymath mind, and he hopped off his gunter-rigged favorite and went back to work This all changed when NGH stepped back into retirement in 1924. The Twenties were roaring, but business was slow. He held on to Alerion until September 1928 ( WoodenBoat ) when he sold her to his friend Charles Rockwell. At 79, NGH felt he had to give up sailing alone. meanwhile, it was time for Pleasure, the following, more livable adaptation of Alerion III. This boat was Nat ’ s equivalent of the post-retirement RV. It was designed to either go down the Intracoastal Waterway or be put on a string. Pleasure was built in only a few weeks in fall 1924 ( the yard was short of work at the clock ), and shipped by rail to Key West and launched January 24, 1925. Captain Nat ’ s Alerion days on the water were by, but the design moved forward in modern incarnations. The post-WWI era was besides the time of yacht clubs commissioning their own one-design keelboat fleets. Commodore Benedict of the Seawanhaka Corinthian YC had immediately ordered a twin of Alerion which he named Sadie, and then a few years late arranged for a fleet of smaller and less expensive Fish Class sloops with like bows to be built for other members of the club. Likewise, Robert Emmons of the Beverly YC had become enamored of this same bow condition and commission NGH to employ it for a fleet of scaled-down Fish Boats that went on to be branded as the Herreshoff 12 ½, of which HMM turned out about 400 over the next thirty years. ” ( AIDA ). In past articles, we have told the floor of the Newport 29. The early similarly-sized variation on the Alerion theme, the Buzzards Bay 25, was his father ’ sulfur favorite model, said son Sidney H. Counting all the designs related to Alerion, close to 500 of Alerion III ’ second offspring have hit the body of water. The proliferation of designs that evolved from this hull “ indicates that for Nathanael Herreshoff the initiation of Alerion was in truth inspirational. ” ( WoodenBoat ). great artists and craftsmen always carry secrets with them. At least two mysteries existed, in at least my own heed, before I did my work on Alerion. One case below I solved and one remains. Mystery #1 for Alerion fans: What is it about that Alerion III color? After Dolphin, Alerion was the first gear gravy boat I wanted to interview for Conversations with classical Boats. Dolphin is white, in the first place with the signature Herreshoff mid-green bottom…pretty straightforward as a color schema. In the Small Boat Shed at Mystic Seaport Museum, the repair Alerion III gleam in her restore glory since her reinstallation in the early 1970s. Her idle greens topsides are jewel-like. On the water, the color changes with the light and the water system conditions. What is that color ? When we were involved in repainting a gravy boat for my Nantucket skipper, Brian Simmons, I told the history of when I final saw Alerion III in the water, on the end of the dock in the center of the HMM waterfront in 1963. My father had taken over running the Pearson boatbuilding facilities in the HMM quad on Burnside Street after Grumman took over the Pearson cousins ’ business. I swear that I saw a boat of the same semblance. Looking on-line, I traced the color way to of all places, the Smithsonian. There in the Smithsonian archives, along with other NGH artifacts, was the phonograph record of that tinge : Seafoam Green. sol over the future winter, Brian’s First Track s got the lapp treatment as Alerion III : Seafoam Green topsides, black boottop, white buttocks. First Tracks is the southeasterly most Alerion in the anchorage, close for the ferry passengers to admire and photograph .
Mystery #2: The Case of the Missing Offsets When Eric Fingers, who today builds and services the Nantucket Alerion Fleet, consulted on the holocene MIT Museum parade on the Wizard, he found something quite odd. There were no Alerion plans. All the MIT Museum had were two sheets of production line drawings – none of the alleged offsets, the dress patterns of a boat builder, nor any specifications, be it for hardware, ballast for a keel, or a thousand other details. Where were they ? For every one of over 1,000 designs, NGH kept the vital statistics of each gravy boat in a brown covered notebook ( like to a Moleskine ). This contained all the specifications, including the measurements and the all-important offsets, basically the measurements for the patterns for the frames over which go the planks. But Design # 718 has no book…
Our primary source article ( WoodenBoat ) tells the following report : In 1964, the fifth owner of A III, Ike Merrimen, donated her to Mystic Seaport. Standard procedure for a contribution to the museum ’ s erectile boat warehouse ( across from the independent Seaport grounds ) was software documentation of a gravy boat ’ second sail, deck, construction and lines plans. This was done by naval architect Edson Schock in 1966, and a dispatch refit of A III was done under the supervision of Maynard Bray. When in the early 1980s a class was looking for a boat for Buzzards Bay sail, the search for the then well-worn plans turned up less than expected. Where was The Book ? Where should we look ? Where would a nautical archeologist start their search ? This is a mystery that we throw out there for the classical boat community to ponder .
meanwhile, the gravy boat building team at Mystic Seaport Museum ’ s DuPont Shipyard under Warren Barker built Curlew, the subject of the 1997 WoodenBoat article, which launched in 1994. The article ’ second photograph layout shows the construction procedure from rub, from milling logs to setting ballast resistor. A Maine bluejacket had commissioned a replica called appropriately, Phoenix, launched in 1985. All of this was done with the authentic measurements, but not by The Book. previously in 1977, when another aspiring builder, Alfie Sanford and his assistant looked for the offsets, they were evenly stumped. They came up with their own newly set of plans that reflected underbelly changes they made for Nantucket ’ s shallow waters. Did NGH lose The Book ? Did he intentionally hide it so no one who came after him would have the recipe to build an Alerion IV ? The Case of the Missing Offsets remains exposed. In Part II of this narrative ( in the August consequence ), we visit the largest flock of Alerions in the universe, the one that floats in Nantucket Harbor. Since 1979, that fleet, identical to Alerion III above the waterline, has become the most competitive on the island. ■ Tom Darling organizes Team Dolphin for its annual Opera House Cup sail, and sails Alerions in Nantucket Harbor. He has written articles on Reliance and Dolphin , among other Herreshoff classics. You’ll find Tom’s excellent podcast, Conversations with Classic Boats, at conversationswithclassicboats.com.
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