Commander 147

[ebb]

Ben, Amazing find of the actual race!
Can't argue with you, it's like how you like your coffee.
And coffee surely was the fashionable thing once before it became cultural.

So using the evidence at hand we find Alberg penning the yet to be fashionable un-named rudder onto the Ariel lines back in 1961, at least two or three years before it appeared on the 12meter.

The A/C rudder of bronze and mahogany, as I see it, a holdover from good old wood boat hertitage......is a folk rudder. It is intuitive, honed and perfected over time on countless vessels by countless waterboat professionals.
Probably count on one hand how many builders in the old days water tank tested models of a working sailboat they built for a customer.
And have to confess my bible once was/is Chapelle's Small Sailing Craft, so at least I'm aware of your passion.

So here we have this fashionable new rudder sitting on an Alberg drawing of an Ariel/Commander in nineteen sixty-one.
1961, right at the cusp of Ariels and Commanders coming into existence.
If you believe the provenance in Alberg's hand then you have to ask why the round rudder was chosen?
I think the original A/C rudder is a masterpiece of the dying art of wooden boat building. We can argue these rudders outlast any fashionable frp/ss rudders that have appeared on countless watercraft since.
Imco the Pearson cousins got a better deal on the traditional rudders, I wouldn't be surprised to read they were farmed out to a woodworking boat shop that had been making rudders for 50years..... you know. I think it was a dollar choice made that didn't give us the hard edged rudders that needed to be developed more scientifically. And did shortly there after.

Can't argue that airfoil shapes to the rudder surface is fashionable.
BUT it is more like a Darwinian mutation because the change is way more efficient at moving a shape through water.
It appears on stand-alone rudders, and probably had to be applied to keel hung rudders, by back thinking. Since it is the slender half of a wingfoil on the end of a keel.
And I'm certain that Alberg was aware of the changes happening in his field. Full keels and internal ballast by the time A/Cs appeared were already going out of fashion - altho it took a decade or more for the wooden-boat-translated-to-plastic way of boat design moved wholly into recreational boats for the middle class. Where I'll grant you: fashion sleight of hand and hype went arm in arm to the bank.

Alberg's fame rested on safe, wholesome, fullkeel sailboats - and we know he was a genius and a tyrant for that style of blue water boats. The board rudder was on its way out and what the speedos found out about rudder efficiency couldn't be denied. In fact those advances were more to what Nature had already figured out since fish swam in the sea.

[Ariel 109]

Here's a picture of a Sparkman and Steven rudder of the Constellation style from one of their ocean racers from the mid sixties. You can glean some interesting details!