The Tale of the Comet
Keeping a 1932 design hot is no small task. But a group of Comet stalwarts continue to fan the flames.
Sailing World, April 1995 by Dave PowlisonThe maple tree in front of Dick Harmon's, Ohio, home bore strange fruit last July. There, suspended from one of thebranches, beneath the dial of a large scale, hunt the hull of a blue Comet. Standing with Harmon, a small band of Comet devotees fretted about the weight of the deck-less , empty hull. "The question was," said Harmon, "do we just put bow and stern tanks in, which are lighter, or do we go with floor tanks. With one month to go before the Comet Internationals, Harmon and company worked late hours on the blue hull, sustained only by their enthusiasm for the class and leftovers from church potluck dinners delivered by local parishioners who took pity on them. As the group left Columbus for the Chesapeake with two Comets in tow - Harmon's own boat and the blue one - the latter was still incomplete. Harmon's crew, Judy Heeg, recalled: "Every time we stopped at a rest area, Dick would do something elso on the boat."
What Harmon and company did for the blue boat is what Comet class organizers are trying to do for the class, using a lean budget and more than a dash of elbow grease. No one will argue that today's Comet class is not burning as brightly as it once did; but given some of the obstacles it's working to overcome, from the lack of a builder to organize the class to competition from modern designs, that not surprising. Today, the class yearbook lists 30 active fleets, most in the Midwest and Northeast. That's a far cry from the 150 it once included; however, the fact that it has survivied is a testament to the people behind it.
Concerns about the class were on the back burner when, 11 hours after their departure, Harmon and his compatriots reached the tred Avon YC, host of the 1994 Comet Internationals. The blue boat that was just a shell less than a month earlier had metamorphosed into an almost-complete Comet with a magnificently varnished deck. A few more hours of work in the parking lot at Tred Avon and the boat was ready to be weighed. "My big concern was not whether or not it was overweight," said Harmon. "I was more concerned about how much it was going to be overweight." Harmon and company held their breath as the chain hoist was tensioned and the black needle reached the magic number -- 260 pounds. There, it hovered for a moment, teetering on the edge of 260 like an egg on the edge of a kitchen counter, and then, remarkably, came to rest just a hair under it. The half-dozen or so people who had a hand in the blue boat's construction breathed a collective sigh of relief. Harmon added a few more parts to the vang and cunningham, and the blue boat was pronounced a Comet.
Thirty years ago, Harmon's accomplishment would have been ordinary -- C. Lowndes Johnson designed the Comet in 1932 to be constructed by home builders. In fact, a handful of homemade boats sailed in the 1994 Internationals, including one that finished sixth. But that boat, owned by class measurer Mark Garriga, was built while Truman was still president. Maintaining the fleet has not been not been easy. For starters, the class has shifted among a handful of builders since entering the fiberglass era. The Comet market is not large. Just over 4.000 boats have been built since 1932, and many of those were homemade or from kits. And, like an other one-design enthusiasts, Comet sailors demand high quality. Not surprisingly, the results have been mixed. Apart from the wide range of boats that came out of the homemade ear, some excellent Comets were built by Lippincott, Oberg, and MacCausland, all of whom actively campaigned the boats. But the most recent builder was unable to produce a boat that could measure in. Part of the problem was that he was not a Comet sailor. "We now realize that is very important," said Harmon. Eventually, the builder who owned the hull and deck molds left them outside where they were damaged by the weather. For a while, it became impossible to use the words "new" and "Comet" in the same sentence. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. An ad hoc committee, led by Garriga, has picked up the torch by purchasing the molds, and is preparing to repair and modify them for future production. Harmon has the only other known Comet mold, which he picked up from a St. Louis, Mo., builder, and used it to build the blue Comet. "I got the mold mainly because we wanted to get production going in Ohio," said Harmon.
Tragically, the class also lost a key organizer and Comet visionary, Russ Hyslip, who died in May 1994. Mark Hess, a three-time Comet international champion, summed up the thoughts of many Comet sailors: "I'm concerned about what's going to happen." Hyslip, who was retired, had the time and ability to run the class. Accordingly to Harmon, Hyslip's plans included financing for a new builder, setting specific goals for the class, and having a double trailer made to take a new boat to various regattas. "His goal was three new boats a year and haul a new boat around for a guest skipper," said Harmon who has picked up the slack by not only transporting a guest boat, but also by building it. Harmon made the new blue Comet available to me, and brought along Kathleen Beatty for my crew. However, the lack of a full-time builder remains a significant problem. Harmon hopes to recruit two -- one for each of the two main hotbeds of Comet sailing: the Midwest and the East Coast. "Mare [Hess] looked at two of the more popular classes in Ohio," said Harmon. "They are the Interlake and the Thistle. He noticed that they both also had builders in Ohio." If Harmon and Hess can locate one in the Midwest and Garriga's plans to restore the damaged molds come together in the East, that element of Hyslip's plans may be realized.
Yet, that is only part of what Hyslip had in mind for the class. "Once he died, no one knew exactly what he had lined up and what he hadn't" said Harmon. Now, the class is in the process of putting the peices back together. "Fortunately, we have Anne [Filbert] to fill in as acting president," said Hess, "and she's done a tremendous amount of work." Filbert, also from Ohio, has her own boat and, crewing for Hess, finished second in the 1994 Internationals. Like many other traditional one-designs, the Comet has had to go head-to-head with the new breed of one-designs that, with significant financial support from their manufacturers, seem to ruthlessly chew up and spit out the classes in which they are rooted. After all, this is a class whose existence does not ride on the wake of the Kelvar and carbonfiber industry, nor does it have a bow-launching spinnaker pole. Want to go downwind faster in a Comet? Get out the whisker pole!
One of Harmon's objectives in building the blue boat, and a timeless strength of the Comet's design, is simplicity. For a 16-footer, the Comet has a huge mainsail -- the boom alone is 11 1/2 feet long -- and requires a significant number of adjustments. But while some boats had a half-dozen controls on each side of the deck, our deck was almost barren by comparison: a cleat for the mainsail and one for the vang. Apart from the sheets, the vang is probably the Comet's most important adjustment, since the mainsheet runs off a transom bridle. All other adjustments -- cunningham, centerboard, jib cloth, jib wire, and outhaul -- were either along the side of the centerboard trunk or on the aft side of the triangle of the deck through which the mast is stepped. Having to lean into the boat to reach some of those adjustments is not optimal in conditions where the wind velocity varies greatly. For new sailors in the class, like Kathy and me, keeping our heads out of the boat gained us much more ground around the race course than any small adjustments ever would. We quickly learned that you don't sail a Comet like most other hard-chined monohulls. To begin with, it is very close-winded. Don't sail with both jib telltales streaming aft in classic textbook fashion. We tried that and had good speed; but compared to the boats around us, we were almost close reaching the windward legs. a round table discussion of Comet techniques that hess organized at the end of the first day of racing set us straight.
Over 30 skippers and crews attended. Score one for sharing information. In fact, the basic Comet is pretty simple and perhaps that's why several family crews, like Carl and Victor Oberg, sail it. Seven-year-old Carl, who has been crewing on Comets since he was five, raced with his father at the 1994 Internationals and finished 14th out of 29 boats. Ed McLean, who first sailed a Comet in 1939 and is still skippering and turning in respectable results, finished 16th. You don't have to be young, strong and agile to race these boats. If you want to do very well, it helps. And while optimum crew weight for the Comet is 285 pounds, if your goal is simply to be competitive, almost any crew combination will work.
Today, the international element of the Comet racing comes mostly from the presence of Bermudian sailors. From the 30-plus Comets in Bermuda, four teams went to the 1994 Internationals, including Gladwynne Lambert and crew Charlie Swan Jr. "Comets started in Bermuda in the 1940's," said Lambert. "My dad and others built them in their backyards from kits and they weighed about 400 pounds. They've been in my family for over 50 years." As in Lambert's family, Comet class blood runs thick. Race a Comet and you'll probably be in the company of descendeants of Comet sailors from decades ago. And, in keeping with family tradition, the first Comet is prominently displayed at the Chesapeake Maritime Museum, just a short drive from its Oxford, MD., birthplace.
The question class organizers continue to face is which way will the Comet go? Increasing the fleet and finding builders will no doubt be vital to the class's survival. But added to those challenges is another more difficult task -- addressing the Comet's "image problem." Is the Comet really an out-of-date design born in an era now gone from the sport? The class might remind the skeptics and next generation enthusiasts that other, aged, hard- chinned peers of the Comet, most notably the Star, Snipe and the Lightning, are still some of the most popular classes in the country. Elegantly simple and forgiving both to crew weight and wallets, the Comet still offers the thrills and challenges that over the years have drawn some of the top names in the sport to the class. Dave Powlison is a Contributing Editor to Sailing World.