June 26, 2017-Doug Peterson

wingssail images-fredrick roswold
Doug Peterson

The world of yachting lost a great designer when, after a long battle with cancer, Doug Peterson died in a San Diego Hospital on June 26, 2017.

We only knew Doug slightly, but we consider him to have been a great friend of ours; after all Doug Peterson designed Wings, this lovely boat of ours, so we have a connection with him. And now he is gone.

For giving us Wings we owe Doug Peterson a lot, and we will miss him.

Doug was a boat nut. He grew up in Los Angeles and moved to San Diego as a teen-ager and was often found hanging around the San Diego Yacht Club. Members there remember a scruffy young man who really liked boats. He stated in an interview: "I started putting boats down on paper when I was 10, and have never wanted to do anything else." "My father is an aerospace engineer, and he taught me a lot from the beginning about design," Peterson said. "I was the kind of kid who used to crawl around boat yards looking at things. I was the one always looking over the side of a boat at the wake."

Doug sailed a lot and as young man decided to make his career designing yachts. He drove to the east coast and got a job with one of the established firms but he must have had his ideas already in his head and he was impatient. He only stayed one week, sleeping in his car, and then suddenly, he announced that he was going back to California to build a boat. That boat was Ganbare, a wooden 35 footer which turned yacht design upside down. It was his first boat and it won just about everything.

But it wasn’t easy. Doug was 28 years old 1973, still wore his hair maybe a bit too long to get a real job and he was not an established designer. He didn’t have a commission from anyone to design a boat for them. He didn’t really have the money himself. He had however impressed some of the local sailing community with his ideas and enthusiasm, including Carl Eichenlaub, the fabled San Diego sailor and wooden boat builder, and Carl agreed to build Doug’s design, on a budget. In eleven weeks they completed Ganbare, an IOR One Tonner which shocked the IOR fleet with her speed and sweet sailing ability.

After nearly winning the 1973 International One Ton Cup with Ganbare, clearly the fastest One Tonner in the series despite being built on a shoe string budget, Doug’s career took off. He sold the boat in Italy, paying back all of his costs, and was rewarded with several new design commissions.

Another of Doug’s boats, 'Gumboots', swept the fleet the next year. By then Doug Peterson was a design sensation and his office was producing design after winning design. After Ganbare,and Gumboots, he produced many well known and successful boats including Kindred Spirit, Vendetta, Racy, Great Pumpkin, Petrified, High Noon, Anabelle Lee, High Roler, Country Girl ( Half Ton ), Louisiana Crude, Stinger, Checkmate, Eclipse, Yena, Rubin, Ragamuffin', and Moonshine. Besides pure speed, Doug Peterson’s designs were known for being moderate boats with great all around sailing characteristics. Because of this his designs dominated both offshore racing and production racer/cruisers fleets as well. Production boats such as the Contessa 35, the NY 40, the Baltic DP Series and the Serendipity 43, sold well, were commercially successful, and sailed well, being winners in race fleets around the world.

Wings was the first Serendipity 43, a production boat built from the Louisiana Crude lines by Tommy Dreyfus in his shop in New Orleans.

By the early 80’s much more radial boats, which the IOR rule encouraged, were being designed by others. Peterson preferred moderate boats and his later IOR designs, still moderate instead of radical, were not winners. In a way though, Doug was right about that. The new boats were not popular with the owners and IOR racing soon faded from the scene. Doug continued designing boats even though the IOR design faded from popularity. He moved on and designed several well known cruising boats such as the Peterson 44 and later became involved in several Americas Cup campaigns. He was a key design member of the winning 1992 America3 and in 1995 the was part of the Team New Zealand design team which produced NZL 32 Black Magic, another breakthrough boat. Black Magic dominated the 1995 America’s cup series. He designed the winning Louis Vuitton Cup boat for Prada Challenge in the 2000 cup.

We met Doug the first time in the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club basement on a snowy night when he and Laurie Davidson attended a workshop with the owners of several IOR boats for the purpose of adjusting the IOR rule to make older designs, such as Peterson’s Serendipity 43, competitive with the newer boats, such as Davidson’s fractionally rigged one tonners (Mad Max was an example). Doug and Laurie understood why the newer boats rated better under the IOR and they proposed an adjustment which leveled the fleet. Although Judy and I did not win many races under the IOR in the 80’s even with that rule change, we appreciated Doug Peterson’s easy going approach to solving the problem.

Later I spent a little time around Doug in Auckland New Zealand while I was covering the 2000 America’s Cup and Doug was working for Prada. One time I mentioned to him that I owned one of his boats, Wings, and that it had turned out to be a great cruising boat. Doug was surprised, he said, “It did?” I replied, “Yes, it did.” He seemed happy to hear that.

On another occasion I shared with him a joke I had made to people we met cruising that the Serendipity 43 was one of Doug’s better design and that he had taken many features of it over to Black Magic, his famous breakthrough AC boat. When I mentioned this joke to Doug he surprised me by agreeing, “Yes, I did.”

Doug was hard to manage in a corporate world however, and the America’s Cup was definitely corporate. When I tried to schedule interviews with him, he never showed up. Other reporters had the same experience. Finally a rather flustered Prada PR manager told me I’d just have to find him myself and that the press conferences were a good place start. It was and once I buttonholed him he was friendly and open. He told me one day that he loved the lines of a Swiss AC boat called “Be Happy”. When I saw the boat on a pier prior to being shipped back to Europe I understood Doug’s statement. I liked the boat too and if Doug Peterson thought it was a good boat, I knew it was. I thought of making it into a cruising boat. What a fantasy.

Through the 2000’s Doug continued to design beautiful super yachts for European clients and builders, and he spent time racing classic wooden boats in Europe as well. In 2008 the 227ft replica of the schooner Atlantic, for which Doug was the consulting engineer was launched. Atlantic, built at the Van der Graaf BV shipyard in the Netherlands, was completed in 2010.

His most recent design is a 104ft Jongert Sloop, the design was done in 2015 and the boat is under construction now.

In March 2017, Naval Architect Doug Peterson became the fourth SDYC member to be inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame

Doug Peterson isn't the first of Wings' creators to die. Tommy Dreyfus Wings' builder, died in 2007.

Peterson died Monday, June 26, 2017 in a San Diego hospital after a long battle with cancer, aged 71.

click here for more photos of Doug and his boats.

Fred & Judy, SV Wings, La Cruz Huancaxtle

May2, 2007-Tommy Dreyfus-Wings' Builder

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Tommy

Tommy was born March 2, 1934 and passed away May 2, 2007

Tom Dreyfus, the guy who built Wings, died this month.

Tommy Dreyfus was boat builder and an employer in the marine industry and we are sad at his passing.

Tommy’s passing is also a milestone for us and for Wings:

The guy who built Wings is now a part of history and so also Wings becomes more a monument to the past than part of the present. Wings was built by a builder who once was, an old boat not quite a classic but definitely not quite modern. “Still looks good” has a special meaning when you were created 30 years ago by a guy who is now dead and gone.

But maybe we should talk less about us feeling sorry for ourselves for having an old boat and more about the guy who built her? What about Tom Dreyfus?

Tommy Dreyfus was nothing if he wasn’t a character. He had a zest for life and a wacky knack for doing the unexpected. He wore a pistol strapped to his ankle. He built fast boats and he drove fast cars. He lived on a house boat and some people said he liked fast women.

Jim Gardiner reports that Tommy was wild with cars: Once Tommy picked up his Jim’s wife Ginger in a 5.0 Mustang GT convertible, and “off to Commander's Palace in New Orleans they went. Upon arriving, Tom executed ten 360-degree donuts and finished with a massive burnout before stepping out of the 200' cloud of burnt rubber wearing an all chartreuse green suit and tossing the keys to the valet. Seeing was unbelievable!”

Butch Ulmer also says that Tom Dreyfus was someone you had to see to believe: ”Yes, Tom’s sailboats were fast and dominated the SORC in the early 80s. He was also a good sailor and shipmate. However, to those who knew him, he will best be remembered for his antics”

One famous story was Tom’s arrival on board Burt Keenan’s “Acadia” for an SORC Race in the early 80’s. Butch fills in the details, “Tom was on a plane that was running late, heading down for the start of a race of the SORC and sitting next to him on the flight down was a reporter for Sports Illustrated…when Tommy lamented that he would miss the start, the reporter offered him a ride on the helo SI had chartered so he could at least watch the start. When they neared the starting area, Dreyfus convinced the pilot to go near Acadia so he could just wave to them and tell them he was OK. When they got near, the door flew open and Tommy threw out his sea bag and promptly followed it into the water. Estimates of the helicopter’s altitude started at 75 feet and went up from there. He made the race! That was Tom Dreyfus!”

The FAA almost yanked the pilot's license because of the incident until Tommy flew back down there and testified that the pilot had no idea that he was going to do it.

Guns were a big part of Tommy’s persona: On shore he had a snub-nose ALWAYS on an ankle holster. One ex-crewmate says: “He was fun to sail with and the only guy I ever knew who flashed a chromed pistol at a New York Yacht Club annual regatta dinner, not as a threat to anyone but to put emphasis on a conversational point”

Another story has him firing his .45 across the bow of Ted Turner's Tenacious as it was trying to pass Acadia, yelling "don't pass me or I'll shoot!" and a boat builder from the south tells about how he was introduced to boating by Tom:

“When I crawled below on "Your Cheating Heart" as a 12 year old I knew boatbuilding was what I wanted to do. When I saw Tommy show up for a regatta with a .50cal mounted to the bow pulpit, there was no doubt in my mind he was what was cool.”

And cool he was. From living on his pimp house barge with his dogs and babes, to driving the coolest powerboats in the world to work, to traveling the world in search of a good time, Tommy was cool. People thought of him as a sailing Hunter Thompson.

We have always had photos in our scrapbook of the building project when Wings was born in Tommy’s New Orleans shed, but one of the builders reports a typical days during Wings’ construction: “”We were pouring a keel one Saturday for a Serendipity 43 and ran out of propane to melt the lead, by the time we ran out and had the tank refilled, it was very late but the job had to be done. We got the lead melted around 10:30. This was in the springtime and the steel keel mold was much cooler than the moist surrounding air and a lot of moisture had condensed inside the mold and collected on the bottom. When that lead hit the mold it exploded up into the air raining down on all of us.”

I don't think Tommy Dreyfus would want you to wish that he Rest in Peace, more like "Rest in Fun".

RIF - Tommy the world won't be the same without you.

Fred Roswold, SV Wings, Singapore