This is the biography of a yacht designer little known outside such specialised fields as the International 14 Foot class and the Little America’s Cup. Small catamarans were used for the latter competition, and Austin Farrar was a pioneer in their wing-sail rigs. He should have been better known because of his breadth of knowledge, ingenious ideas and life-time devotion to yacht designing and building. He was a polymath, skilled in a whole range of subjects including naval architecture, marine engineering, sail-designing and aerodynamics.

This is a chatty book, packed with anecdotes and a little bit of tittle-tattle about famous yacht designers, owners and builders. It is also something of a history of yachting between 1930 and 2000. Every yacht now has a pulpit, but none had them before 1937 when ‘Clarence’ designed the first one for the offshore racer Ortac.

A yachting book needs a technical gem, a cherry on the ice-cream. This book has one – ‘Clarence’ did some wind-tunnel tests on spinnakers, and discovered that the horizontal top area of a spinnaker has no useful forward ‘pull’, so if the shape has lots of more or less horizontal upper cloth, much of the area is wasted. This is obvious when the matter is given consideration, but I have spent a lifetime reading yachting publications and never seen this technology anywhere else.

I knew ‘Clarence' for more than 40 years, and one of my family worked for him. He was always charming, patient, clever, inventive, ingenious ... a man of wide-ranging talents. Its a pleasure to read about him if you are interested in the background to our sport.

IN