Eight Bells- Carleton Mitchell - July 16, 2007

by John Rousmaniere on 19 Jul 2007 The winner of a record three straight Bermuda Races in Finisterre, a cruising sailor and powerboater of great accomplishment, and one of boating’s best and most influential writers and photographers, Carleton Mitchell died of heart failure on July 16, 2007, at his home in Key Biscayne, Florida. He was 96.

Mitch (as he was always called) first sailed as a boy in an uncle’s racing sloop off New Orleans. He kept a scrapbook in which he pasted pictures of boats, and when he was 12 he answered an inquiry about his plans for a career by announcing, 'I want to sail and write about it.' That dream survived college in Ohio and mundane jobs in the Depression (for a while he sold women’s underwear at Macy’s). It even survived a wretched experience in a leaky old ketch that almost sank in the Gulf Stream. When the ketch staggering into Nassau, he began his lifelong love affair with the Bahamas, where he later worked as a writer and photographer. (Photo Credit: John T. Hopf, 1958, copyright Mystic Seaport Carleton Mitchell Collection.)

After wartime service in the U. S. Navy’s photography department, he bought one of John Alden’s old Malabars and, renaming her Carib, sailed to the West Indies, which then were barely known by American sailors. Out of this cruise came the first of his seven books, Islands to Windward (1948), which introduced the charms of Caribbean sailing to Americans and fueled the enthusiasm that produced the first charter fleets. Moving on to a 58-foot Rhodes yawl he named Caribbee, he won a transatlantic race to England and wrote a book about it, Passage East (1953), that was illustrated with some of his best photographs and infused by his affection for the sea. 'To desire nothing beyond what you have is surely happiness,' he mused. '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.'

All the while Mitch was thinking about the ideal boat. She had to be small enough for a couple to handle easily, beamy enough to be comfortable, shallow enough to cruise in the Bahamas, strong enough to cross an ocean, and fast enough to have a chance at winning some silver. With the concept of a beamy little centerboard yawl in his head, he went to Olin Stephens for the design. The vessel that came out of this collaboration he named Finisterre because he intended to survive happily in her, far beyond the end of land.

Though designed without attention to the rating rules, Finisterre ended up winning three straight Bermuda Races, a record nobody has come close to matching. In the vast firmament of sailing records, the polestar is the one set by this tubby yawl. It is hard enough to win one Bermuda Race. A favorable rating can help, and, Finisterre had one in the first race, but not the other two. Quoting John Nicholas Brown, Bolero’s owner, to the effect that the Bermuda Race is 'the great Atlantic lottery,' Mitch sometimes credited blind luck for his successes. But it was not luck that made Finisterre one of the few boats in 1958 to avoid chaos on the starting line and press on to victory through 50-knot squalls. He credited his crew: 'On Finisterre we have a basic tenet to keep moving at maximum speed in the wind of the moment. There must be either a trim or a shift in sails every time there is a variation. . . . In no other race in my memory have so many strings been pulled or so many bits of cloth gone up and down the mast. Crew work and helmsmanship have never been more important.' (Photo Credit: Mystic Seaport Rosenfeld Collection)

His crew, meanwhile, credited their skipper. Bunny Rigg put it all down to Mitchell’s 'good admiralship' – meaning his powers of forehandedness, organization, and leadership. Two-time Bermuda Race winner Dick Nye explained Finisterre’s success this way: 'For one thing, she’s got everything. And he sails the hell out of her.' Mitchell said as much. 'My theory was that the time to get everything right is before you leave the dock. And then, once you leave the dock, to be able to drive the hell out of the boat and never have to worry about something carrying away. And if anything did let go on you, the spares were on board with the know-how to put it back together.'

Consider his approach to navigation in that era before long-range electronic position finders. He himself was a bold and skilled celestial navigator. He told me that Finisterre once got lost near Bermuda. 'We didn't know where the hell we were. Then with Bunny Rigg holding me, I took a moon sight and we came out right at Northeast Breaker. It was an easy sight.' It may have been easy for him, but sighting the fast-moving moon from a pitching little boat can be like grabbing a firefly. Still, Mitch was careful to sign on at least one more sailor of equal navigational ability so each watch was prepared for an opportunity to take a sight when the overcast momentarily cleared.

If Finisterre had everything, it was the best of everything, as demanded by her owner. Examples of Mitch’s obsessive, painstaking approach fill his correspondence, which is collected at Mystic Seaport. On the day after Christmas, 1953, he wrote a four-page letter to the sailmakers at Ratsey & Lapthorn laying out his high expectations. 'I realize all these wants of mine add up to a lot of trouble for you and your people,' he wrote, no doubt correctly, 'but I want Finisterre to be a very special little craft, and to me – as I know to you – perfect sails are necessary for performance and pleasure.' Good admirals can be demanding clients.

With her 22,000-pound displacement and 11’3' beam on a waterline of just 27’6' – 'the fat little monster,' Mitchell cheerfully called her – Finisterre had the inertia and initial stability that add up to sail-carrying ability. In her first race, as she was beating fast into a hard blow in the company of 50-footers, one of Mitchell’s crew, an amiable Bahamian Star sailor named Bobby Symonette, mused, 'I wonder how the little boats are doing tonight.' Something about Finisterre’s performance in this rough stuff had made him forget that she was, in fact, the littlest boat in the fleet. Finisterre did have a problem in light going, but as Olin Stephens has admiringly commented, 'her skipper and her crew maintained an almost magical degree of concentration to keep her moving in light airs.' In the long, calm run that made up the early going in the 1960 Bermuda Race, Finisterre tacked downwind and kept up with the lighter boats.

As anybody who ever ate a meal or shared a bottle with Carleton Mitchell knows, the man thoroughly enjoyed his creature comforts. Finisterre may have been only 38 feet long, but her sailing crew of six were looked after by a full-time professional cook, and the off-watch was not merely advised but ordered to get their sleep. This paid off nicely in the final 100 miles of the 1958 race, when line squalls appeared. 'Finisterre passed many of her competitors right there,' recalled Rigg, 'rolling reefs in and out and changing headsails no less than 20 times with the fluctuations of the breeze simply because she had a well-rested crew.' Two reasons why they were well-rested were the eye shades and ear plugs provided by their skipper.

Few vessels have enjoyed the influence of Finisterre. From the mid-1950s until well into the 1970s, one of the most popular and successful boat models was universally called 'the Finisterre-type yawl.' Many beamy, shoal-draft centerboarders in the 32- to 45-foot range were inspired by Finisterre’s racing prowess and by the loving tributes that Mitch paid to his pride and joy in his articles in Yachting and Sports Illustrated. When fiberglass construction came along, these boats cost much less than Finisterre, and sailing enjoyed one of the biggest booms in the sport’s history. Where the 1954 Bermuda Race had just 77 starters, all but a few over 40 feet, in 1966 there were 167 starters, and a whole division w