When Art Meets Wind:
Northeast Harbor’s IODs Set Sail for the World Championship Northeast Harbor Fleet Hosts Worlds This Week
NORTHEAST HARBOR—The International One Design (IOD) is the heart and soul of the Northeast Harbor Fleet community—classic, gorgeous historic. When a group of them head out to race, sails aloft, ropes pulled or lax, depending, they soar across the water.
They are the kind of sailboat that make people swoon.
There will likely be a lot of swooning and fawning this week as the Northeast Harbor Fleet hosts the 64th Annual International One-Design Class World Championship for the seventh time. It begins Sunday.
“We have the most amazing collection of boats in the world. There is nothing like the boats we have here,” said Steve Madeira, co-chair of the event. Nicholas Schoeder is the other co-chair.
The championship brings together sailors from all over the world, including Bermuda, Norway, Canada, and various American fleets, to race against each other in beautiful antique racing sloops to earn the honor of being a world champion.
Twelve of the original 14 IODs delivered to Northeast Harbor in 1938 still race each summer. The sloops have their own stories. Number 5, now named Tundra, was once called the Queen Mary and was raced by Nelson Rockefeller.
There will be twenty boats racing this week, many of them on loan from local families and sailors who will also be hosting the competing crews who come from all around the world. Each boat has a crew of four or five sailors.
But it’s not just how the community comes together to quietly and loyally support a world champion event that makes it all so special, it’s also about the sloops and their history.
“We have these particular boats because back in 1937,” Madeira explained, the fleet was looking to rebuild.
At the time, the boats the fleet was sailing were getting pretty old and were gaff rigged.
They were wondering: What’s the next big thing?
“So they decided on these boats. They were very well built, additionally, in Norway,” Madeira said.
Originally wooden, the hulls are fiberglass now and there are only three boat builders in the world who are sanctioned to build new IODs. There are a few no-longer-used hulls scattered about the world.
One of those was in San Francisco where the boats take more of a beating than Mount Desert Island. Kevin Schneider took that boat, worked three years on it. Now?
“It looks brand new,” Madeira said.
Most of the Northeast Harbor Fleet’s IODs are almost ninety years old. They’ve survived, Madeira said, because the owners and community takes care of them, knows these boats are something special, knows they are living history that they get to sail.
It helps, he said, that on Mount Desert Island, “you have a lot of people who are very skilled with wooden boats.”
They attract owners who like to maintain things.
“They are works of art,” he said, and so is the world championship. When Northeast Harbor Fleet hosts, which happens every seven years or so, “it’s a fairly big deal. Enough owners have to be willing to loan their boats.”
They have to find sixteen houses for the international competitors to stay in. They have to feed them. Entertain them. Then there’s the logistics of the multi-day event.
“You have to change boats every race. That’s a lot of logistics,” Madeira said.
You need people who can fix things quickly. You need protocols for injuries. International judges to come and officiate. The Fleet house them and feed them, too.
It’s all worth it, he said.
“When you actually get onto them, you realize this is almost 90 years old, look at how good this looks. It’s amazing,” Madeira said.
And sailing on the waters of Mount Desert Island is pretty amazing, too.
“It’s a unique place to sail in terms of the topology of it and the scenery,” he said.
When people get a chance to see the boats in action (which is best done in the water and can sometimes happen in Manset, the western point of Sutton Island or Cranberry Island), that’s when the swooning comes in. To sail on one? That’s even better.
“What is unique about these boats is they are very smooth going through the water. It’s the difference between a Rolls Royce and a Porsche,” Madeira explained.
They are both amazing vehicles, but different. One takes fast corners precisely. One is more leisurely. The rides in either vehicle is amazing.
“These boats are more Rolls Royce than Porsche,” he said.
Still racers get the same thrill racing.
“They don’t pound through waves. They slice through waves. They are heavy and long so they move through waves well,” he said.
And they also allow community to grow and build across not just years, but across decades.
“There are going to be skippers in their seventies,” Madeira said. “There are going to be skippers in their forties.” There will also be potentially a crew of people who are in their twenties. “You don’t have to have a team of gorillas to handle the boat. It’s something you can do for your entire life even at the highest level.”
According to the Northeast Harbor Fleet, “The Northeast Harbor Fleet, which is running September’s Worlds championship, has produced a disproportionate number of elite sailors. Several IOD sailors from this fleet have won America's Cup campaigns, and some have raced in the Olympics or are preparing to do so.”
Madeira raced the first time in 1966.
“My parents were racing and they took me because they didn’t have a babysitter.” He laughed.
The family got the Auriga in 1953, named after a constellation. It’s the Latin word for charioteer. The name, along with the boat, came over from Norway.
“Ours is one of the original fourteen that came over in 1938,” Madeira said. The fleet has ten of its original boats still.
“To keep something going for that long . . . “ Madeira said.
It’s a legacy of love, of art, of adventure, and history.
TO LEARN MORE OR SEE THE RACE IN PERSON
Madeira said that if people come down to the Fleet House on one of the mornings and say that they’d like to go out on the water to watch the race, there are some volunteers who have other boats that can carry spectators. To do so, people need to go to the site early in the morning.
Channel Five will likely be at the championships on Monday and air a report that night.
If you have any further questions or inquiries, please feel free to reach out to IODWorlds25@gmail.com & NEHFGeneralManager@gmail.com at any time.
To learn more about the organization.
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