Camden Classics Cup: Eleven SWD Boats, Shared Design Thinking.

Camden Classics Cup opens this Friday under conditions that’ll suit the fleet: a building breeze through Thursday’s deliveries, then a weekend settling into fair skies and steady sailing wind. Exactly the kind of conditions that lets 84 boats actually race rather than just survive.

Interestingly enough, eleven of those boats in this year’s event happen to carry a Stephens Waring hand somewhere in their design.

Seven sit in the Modern Tradition fleet alone, out of the twenty entries. Anna, Cavallino, Isobel, Falcon, and Cirrus were built from a clean sheet in our studio. Zingara, our company boat and design test platform, is built on a Bill Peterson hull and keel. But she’s wrapped in a full SWD redesigned superstructure, deck layout, rig and interior. Mystery, drawn by Joel White with Bob Stephens assisting him, and Paul Waring running the build, rounds out the group.

Elsewhere on the scratch sheet, Acor, the sleek 50-foot SoT daysailer once known as Ginger, has just been moved from PHRF into CRF Modern Tradition by her owner. A better home for her, and one more reason to keep a close eye on that division this weekend.

The rest of the fleet carries our fingerprints in smaller ways. A new mast on Polly. A wood and composite boom on Loki, built around modern sail controls and reefing hardware. Even a new steering pedestal and mainsheet traveler on Juliett, the J46 running under PHRF, all from the SWD drawing board.

Eleven boats, work that runs from a full hull to a single boom. It’s the same form-to-function thinking that inspired last week’s feature on Azulita, then scaled up or down to whatever the brief calls for.

The boats change, but the thinking doesn’t.

If you’re racing CCCs this weekend, stop by and introduce yourself. And for those who can’t make the event, we’ll be sure to share a race report and pictures next week.

Sail fast, everyone!