C. Raymond Hunt and the Development of the Deep-V Hull

C. Raymond Hunt and the Development of the Deep-V Hull

One pleasant morning in late summer of 2014, James “Sham” Hunt pulled into my driveway with a trunk full of reference materials relating to the life of his father, Charles Raymond Hunt. Soon enough, we were having lunch overlooking Marblehead Harbor and discussing my writing a long-overdue biography of Raymond, whose genius as both a sailor and innovative designer was known to a core of racing yachtsmen, both sail and power, but had yet to be chronicled in the book he richly deserved.

As the writing process progressed, I developed some insight into Raymond’s inimitable abilities and the reasons his work hadn’t been more widely celebrated. I also took the opportunity to ride my bike around Marblehead, pausing at places where Hunt and his family had lived for a few years beginning in 1947. Having Sham’s documents reduced my research time by six to twelve months. The resulting book—A Genius at His Trade: C. Raymond Hunt and His Remarkable Boats—was published in 2015. A second, slightly updated, soft-cover edition followed in 2017.

My story focused on Hunt’s conception and development of what remains known as the deep-V hull and its revolutionary impact on powerboat design. The story drew a thoughtful response from an English powerboat enthusiast who noted that Hunt’s deep-V had gained wide acceptance in the UK slightly before it did in the United States. The writer also mentioned that yachtsmen in the UK were surprised that Hunt “does not even appear in your National Sailing Hall of Fame.” This matter was rectified two years after the book’s publication. In August 2017, at the New York Yacht Club’s beautiful Harbour Court facility in Newport, Rhode Island, Ray Hunt was inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame.

“Even to one unfamiliar with the type it was obvious she was a wonderful sea boat: 30 feet over-all, built to designs by C. Raymond Hunt of Marblehead in the yard of Richard H. Bertram in Miami by workmen only recently from Havana, Moppie’s underwater form was unusual—V-shaped not only forward but all the way back to the transom.” —Carleton Mitchell, Sports Illustrated, April 25, 1960.

C. Raymond Hunt dressed to the nines in one of his shipyards.

On the morning of April 12, 1960, Dick Bertram boarded a 30’ powerboat called Moppie. The boat’s driver, Sam Griffith, proceeded to steer her into the smooth waters of Miami’s Government Cut. Griffith had Moppie’s two big Lincoln engines burbling away at just above idle speed as he and twenty-two other racers waited for 7 a.m., when the flag would drop and send everyone off on what the Bahamas Tourist Bureau billed as “The Most Rugged Ocean Race in the World.” Also aboard was yachtsman and writer Carleton Mitchell, who had sailed with Bertram in the legendary yawl Finisterre to win three consecutive Bermuda Races.

All anyone knew before the starter’s flag dropped was that this edition of the 185-mile Miami–Nassau Ocean Power Boat Race was likely to live up to its billing. A northeast wind had not subsided until the previous day, and it was expected that thirty-knot winds would still be blowing against the flow of the Gulf Stream. When the flag dropped, reported Mitchell in Sports Illustrated, “I was slammed back into my chair as Skipper Sam Griffith gunned the engines, the fleet dropped astern and the wake stretched like a wide white road back toward our nearest competitors, a road that grew steadily longer.” Outside the breakwater, the men donned diving masks for protection against spray and held on to what they could as Griffith opened the throttles. Moppie literally took off.

Nothing could really have prepared Mitchell for the violence of it. He had placed a tube of sunscreen 7 feet away and, for the next seven hours, never felt it was safe enough to try to reach it. “The ocean,” Mitchell wrote, “was as rough as I had ever seen it. . . . At times the effect was something like diving from a second-story window into a neighboring cellar piled with bricks.”

Griffith held the Lincolns’ RPMs down as Moppie left the Miami skyline behind. “Mitch and I both marveled,” Bertram would later write, “at his judgment of the waves as he would throttle back just in time to keep us from leaping off a big one. . . . About an hour out of Miami, the two aluminum deck chairs on which Mitch and I were sitting disintegrated and were thrown over the side.”

1960 Race Moppie

Moppie’s wooden hull had been very strongly built, but 10’ seas, mechanical smarts, and the fact that no competitors were in sight suggested to Griffith—known as “Wild Man” to friends—that he throttle back to fifteen knots. Moppie dashed along in this fashion, all alone for an hour, until they spotted spray to the north. The boat churning that spray was Jim Wynne’s twenty-three-footer, Aqua Hunter, with its two Volvo Aquamatic drives. Aqua Hunter was named in deference to her two major pioneering concepts: she was being pushed along by a pair of stern-drives, a concept that was brand-new at the time, and her hull had been designed by C. Raymond Hunt. Hunt had also designed Moppie. Mitchell reported this impression of Aqua Hunter: “His little vessel was coming off crests, leaping clear with sky showing beneath the entire length of the keel. Moppie promptly ran away from Wynne because of our greater overall length and advantage in horsepower.”

Bertram’s boat, the big Lincolns turning 4,100 rpms in smoother water under the lee of the west end of Nassau, finished the race at 3 p.m., eight hours and ten minutes after leaving Miami. Not only was it a race record, but it also was set in difficult conditions. “She never once rolled a propeller out, something we had often experienced in other boats under similar conditions,” Bertram wrote. If anything, Jim Wynne’s arrival in second place two-and-a-half hours later was even more impressive, for his boat had less than half the horsepower of other racers. “It was,” Carleton Mitchell wrote, “a remarkable demonstration of the efficiency of the Hunt design in rough water.”

The “Hunt design” was the newly conceived deep-V hull form, and its performance surprised even Bertram and Wynne. They had anticipated they might have an advantage in rough seas offshore and in the chop on the Bahama Bank. But their boats had outperformed very powerful and well-proven competitors right from the start. In fact, it was not until the following day that the third-place boat arrived. Al Martin, a pre-race skeptic, told the Miami Herald’s Jim Martenhoff: “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised next year to see a whole fleet of Hunt designs in the race.”

C. Raymond Hunt was a yacht designer of boundless creative energy and extraordinary breadth, straddling the upper echelons of both the power and sail communities. Bill Wallace, reporting on the results of the Miami–Nassau Race for the New York Herald Tribune (April 17, 1960), observed that “the winner blended Gasoline Alley and sailing’s Hall of Fame.”

During the 1930s, Hunt had foreseen the market for an affordable racing sailboat and developed a most unusual design, the 110-class sloop. Their cigar-shaped hulls were built of plywood—an unheard-of proposition at the time—and were launched to much skepticism. Within a few years, however, the hard-chined, slab-sided one-design had become the dominant fleet on Massachusetts Bay and beyond. Illustrating his incredible range, Hunt designed the Concordia Yawl, the quintessential New England cruising sailboat, in 1938—the same year he unveiled the 110. Following on the 110’s success, Hunt returned to a companion prewar design, the larger but similar 210, in 1946. During the mid-1950s he developed with his lifelong friend Dick Fisher, the small outboard-powered boat that became the 13’ Boston Whaler.

Hunt had begun work on powerboats during the war years, but the 110 had its influence. Kingsley Durant, a young 110 sailor in Cohasset where Hunt then lived, still recalls an encounter with him. Hunt told Durant that the hard-chined one-designs had an optimal angle of heel that would most effectively present a V-bottom when the boat was sailing. In this encounter, Hunt went on to muse about the possibilities of this shape in a powerboat. 

Hunt believed that a production powerboat that could run fast and smooth even in rough conditions would have a wide audience. He spent much of the 1950s pondering this idea, and by the spring of 1958 he knew he was onto something—probably something big. He’d been studying up on this. He’d been thinking. He’d been sketching out ideas for a hull form that would impress everyone as something distinctly new.

This story has been excerpted from Boat Crazy: The Collected WoodenBoat Stories of Stan Grayson, printed with permission from Globe Pequot.

This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/boats/c-raymond-hunt-and-the-development-of-the-deep-v-hull

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