June 18, 2015

In ten days, the legendary ocean racing yacht Dorade will attempt to repeat her first significant victory when she starts on the 2015 Transatlantic Race from Newport, RI, to Plymouth, UK. The 52-ft yawl first made her mark in the sailing world in 1931, when her then-21-year-old designer Olin Stephens, along with his brother Rod, who supervised her construction, their father, and four other young sailors, raced her to victory in the 2,800-mile race across the Atlantic. Dorade’s 2015 crew, led by owner Matt Brooks of San Francisco, has their sights set on beating Dorade’s time of 17 days, one hour and 14 minutes this summer, 84 years after that first victory.

The Transatlantic Race is the third in a series of four major ocean races in the “Return to Blue Water Campaign,” conceived shortly after Brooks and his wife Pam Rorke Levy bought Dorade in 2010. Soon after the completion of a year-long refit, Dorade began winning races in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and on the West Coast, proving that she could once again be competitive. In 2013, Dorade was the overall corrected time winner in the 2013 Transpacific Yacht Race, 77 years after her first victory in that race. That was followed by an IRC class win in the 2014 Newport Bermuda Race. The campaign wraps up this August with the Rolex Fastnet Race, which Dorade won overall in 1931 and 1933.

To learn more about Dorade, see www.dorade.org. To follow the Transatlantic Race, see www.transatlanticrace.org.