Tom Wylie

It would be difficult to find a designer who defies stereotyping as well as the Bay Area's Tom Wylie. Consider the four projects in which he's currently engaged: a 21-ft single-handed ocean racer, a 60-ft aluminum cruiser, a 30-ft production fiberglass catboat and a 52-ft wood-composite cruiser.

Any way you cut it, variety has definitely been the spice of a 30-year career in boat design and construction for the tall, rangy 48-year-old who favors worn jeans and plaid shirts. And that's just the way he likes it. "All four of these boats are just different ways of skinning the same cat," says Wylie. "In each case, I'm responding to the client and trying to marry what he or she wants with the wind, the water - and the budget."

As one of the local yacht design "hall of famers" - a roster which includes the late Gary Mull, Carl Schumacher, Jim Antrim, Bill Lee, Ron Moore, and George Olsen - Wylie is perhaps a bit more low key than his colleagues. Tom himself admits he's not a whiz in the business promotion department. Nevertheless, he has produced an amazing number of high quality boats, many of which are still sailing actively and a high percentage of which are still with their original owners.

"If I wanted a boat for myself", says Sausalito boatyard manager and former grand prix sailmaker Steve Taft, "Tom would be at the top of my list as the designer. As well as being one of the more intuitive and pragmatic designers around, he has a very good eye for the boat.

Wylie didn't grow up with salt water in his veins. Raised in the University of California Village off San Pablo in Berkeley, a teenage Tom just turned up one day at the John Beery basic sailing class at Aquatic Park. Up until then, he had had minimal exposure to the sport, building a couple of simple boats which he sailed with his father (he also helped his dad build a family cabin up at the Russian River), but those were more "my father introducing me to as many things as he could think of" than true introductions to sailing. His siblings, an older sister and two younger brothers, expressed minimal interest in the sport.

However, after learning the basics and sailing out of Richmond for a while, Tom became fascinated with how the notion of wiggling the rudder and pulling some strings made the boat go. Predating the local junior Laser scene, he just grooved on the wind and the water. Racing was a means of learning more about the interface of these fluids and eventually, he developed some considerable talent.

He also had some great teachers along the way, including Jim Dewitt, Don Peters and Commodore Tompkins. "In the middle and late 1960s," he recalls, "Commodore was the leading edge of the sport. If you were a good sailor, you could learn a lot from him. His obvious skill and his generosity in sharing it were pretty attractive."

Ocean racing was the next step in Tom's development as a sailor, and he attacked it with a passion, racking up miles with quality skippers like Ted Turner and Bob Derecktor. He campaigned his first Southern Ocean Racing Conference (SORC), which was then the World Series of the sport, in 1968 on George Kiskaddon's Spirit. A year later, he served as watch captain and sailmaker for another version of Spirit called Esprit, which won her class in the TransPac.

By then a graduate of San Francisco State, Tom had his teaching credentials and put in some time at Oakland Tech dispensing his knowledge of drafting, metal shop, history and math. In his heart, though, he wanted to design boats. He applied several times to the offices of Sparkman & Stephens and C&C, but never received a job offer.

In 1969, Tom started working on his first design, a 24-ft Bay boat that he wanted to go upwind well in a breeze and still be fun and fast downwind. With the help of friends like Robert Flowerman, Tom coldmolded the hull in a barn in Davenport. He then moved the project up to Tito Rivano's shop at the Pacific Marina Boatworks in Alameda. "We worked out a trade," Tom says. "I got to use Tito's shop rent-free in exchange for letting him build a mold and produce the boat in fiberglass."

In 1971, Nightingale hit the water. With more than half of her 4,200 pounds of displacement in the keel, the boat proved to be slippery through the water and a winner on the race course. Rivano raised the flush deck for a cabin on the production version, which sold more than a dozen boats. As a designer, Tom Wylie had put himself on the map.

Looking back, Tom sees those days as sort of his "Jurassic" period. He breaks his design career into separate eras, the first of which began with the Nightingale and culminated with him designing and helping build the half-tonner Animal Farm in Tito's shop in 1973. Chris Corlett and Bill Carter finished the boat off and went on to win a couple of North American championships with it.

Another success of the early days was the 31-ft, flush-decked Moonshadow, a boat that still brings a wistful look to Tom Wylie's eye. Built to the Midget Ocean Racing Circuit (MORC) rule, she weighed 7,500 pounds and had a ¾ inch balsa deck with mat and roving on either side. Characteristically, many of Tom's friends took part in the project, including Don Peters, Dave Wahle, Chris Benedict, Bard Chrisman, Kim Desenberg and Caroline Groen. To symbolize their communal spirit, the group painted a small star at the bow of the white-hulled sloop.

"She was a sailing machine," Wylie says of Moonshadow. "The deck plan would still be considered modern today. I remember going against Panache (a 40-footer) in one race down south and we just pounded her. We commuted the boat between the Gulf of the Farallones races up here and the Whitney series in Southern California. We won both of them."

In 1974, Tom opened his own shop under the rubric Wylie Design Group on Willow Street in Alameda. This second era of design included boats like the 28-ft Hawkfarm (a marriage of ideas from Animal Farm and another Wylie half tonner called Hawkeye), a pair of identical 31-ft, coldmolded sloops designed for match racing called the Gemini Twins, the Two Tonner No Go 8 and the 40-ft fractionally rigged IOR racer Lois Lane.

In the grand scheme of things, Lois Lane, built for Bill Erkelens late in 1977, was supposed to be Wylie's ticket to the major leagues of yacht design. Tom crewed aboard the 40-ft Imp, designed by Ron Holland, during that same year when the Bay Area boat won sailing's triple crown: SORC, England's Admiral's Cup and the St. Francis YC Big Boat Series. Lois was slated to appear at the big regattas as well, but the program never really jelled, and while Ron Holland's career blasted off, Wylie's seemed to fizzle on the launching pad. Tom vividly recalls fixing Imp's rudder in England while Holland was nearby taking orders for new designs.

The "what ifs" linger on about Lois. Steve Taft, another Imp crewmember, remembers that when Lois Lane finally got sorted out, the boat was incredibly fast. On one race to the Farallones, Lois blew by Imp on the way out of the Gate and never looked back. In another Bay race, Wylie's boat was chewing the butt off Imp until the mast fell down. "Imp was a great boat," says Taft, "but here was one in our own backyard that had even more potential."

Tom can only look back with 20/20 hindsight on the experience. If the Lois Lane project had worked, he might have joined his contemporaries like Holland, Doug Peterson and Bruce Farr in making the quantum leap to superstardom in racing boat design. He didn't, though. And in the long run, the world of the cruiser and weekend sailor may be the better for it. "My design career never focused on racing success," he says. "I wish for that special client had come to me to do a boat that would have gone all the way. But I wasn't picking my clients, they were picking me."

Tom Wylie's revolutionary American Express, the only American boat to ever win the Mini-Transat singlehanded transatlantic race (England to Antigua) in the history of the event. Read more about this breakthrough design.

Boats continue to emerge from the Willow Street shop in the mid through late '70s, including Norton Smith's Mini TransAt winning 20-footer American Express, the ¾ ton Great lakes winner Tortuga and the fractional half tonner Moving Violation. Over at C&B Marine, two 36-ft Wylie-drawn cruisers were completed. Wild Spirit was built for sailmaker-turned-cruiser Peter Sutter, and a sistership, built on speculation, eventually became Mike Lingsch's Alert. The former is still out cruising the South Pacific. The latter has enjoyed success both as a racer and a cruiser.

In 1980, Tom relocated to his current digs, a hilltop workshop near his home in Canyon, a small residential community just east of the Oakland hills. For the past decade and a half, he's concentrated on his design work there as well as making patterns, lofting designs and fabricating small parts.

The Canyon shop ushered in the third era for Tom's design work, one which expanded his repertoire considerably. First and foremost was the 65-foot cruising yacht Saga, which he designed in 1980 for the late Arlo Nish. Tom had met Arlo, who built the boat himself, when he built sails for the Nish family's first world cruiser Sonic, an Alden 56. Saga turned out to be a big, fast, comfortable yawl that measured 18 feet in the beam, drew 6 ½ feet with the centerboard up and sported a steel hull with a composite deck. She also had a forward-thinking water ballast system for long hauls, which allowed Arlo to level the boat out for more comfort. "She's a serious passage making yacht," Tom says of the boat, which completed a circumnavigation in the 1980s.

Tom harbors some pretty warm feelings about Saga, his friendship with Nish (who died last year) and the crew that built the boat, including Jeff Baker, Mike McCormick and Jeff Olsen. Another design built by the same crew - right alongside Saga, as a matter of fact - was the 60-ft lightweight cruiser Lightspeed. "I considered Lightspeed one of my more beautiful designs," he says of the boat. But, like Lois Lane, she never really distinguished herself out on the water.

Tom's most successful production boat has been the 24-ft, 875-pound Wabbit, which he designed in 1981. The idea behind the long, narrow hull with a small cabin was to have a fun sailing boat that he and his wife Cindy could also use for boat camping. Other people thought it would be more fun to race it and, to date, 63 units have been built and the sporty one design continues to enjoy a healthy following.

Unfortunately, Tom never got to enjoy the boat that much. During the 1980s, he underwent three back surgeries for herniated disks. He's pretty sure he crushed the disks in his lower back while steam bending oak frames for Nightingale. By the time the pain progressed to the point where he couldn't even crawl, much less sail a bouncy little 24-footer, he made the decision to have surgery.

His recovery has been good, though he still experiences numbness in his right leg much of the time and the herky-jerky movements on a boat can be problematic. These handicaps haven't dampened his design work, however. The 1980s saw more successful race boats, including a pair of 46-ft IMS winners called Heartbeat and Kropp Duster (with an assist on the lifting keel design from Jim Antrim), and 1993 TransPac class winner Warspite.

A dozen 38-footers have come out of the same mold at Westerly Marine in Southern California, with each owner customizing the result to their specific tastes. The results range from Ciao Baby, a Catalina cruiser with a big stateroom and a galley for overnighting, to the cat-rigged Sabra, to the PHRF racer Absolute 88 to the racer/cruiser Punk Dolphin. The latest boat of the series is Commodore Tompkin's almost completed carbon-fiber-decked cruiser that's slated for an extensive cruise in the near future. "I just produced a hull shape and let each owner do with it what they wanted without having to pay for a one-off hull," says Tom.

Rage broke course records for the Pacific Cup ocean race (California to Hawaii) in both 1994 and 1996. Rage's elapsed time in 1996 was 7 days, 22 hours.

Currently, Wylie is into what he sees as the forth era, where he's matching modern building materials with the client's desires. Perhaps the signature boat so far is Rage, an ultraslim, ultralight and ultrafast 70-ft 'cruiser' built and owned by Portland, Oregon, boatbuilder Steve Rander. Described as a 'Wabbit on steroids', Rage was conceived as just about the biggest cruiser that Rander and his wife could handle by themselves - and fast enough to break the legendary Merlin's TransPac speed record of 8 days, 11 hours. Rander also had serious budget restraints. "He told me I couldn't put coffee grinder winches on it," says Wylie, because he couldn't afford them!"

Rander adds that part of the success of the boat, which did break Merlin's mark by almost four hours in the 1994 West Marine Pacific Cup, was that he could talk to Wylie as both a designer and builder. Rage's hull is made with wood veneers and a foam core, which were both familiar materials to Wylie. "Sometimes I'll approach a designer about ideas I have that could improve a boat's construction," says Rander, "and they'll just tell me to build it as drawn. Tom's not like that. His flexibility allowed us to achieve the same results at less cost."

"I was fortunate to get a lot of experience building in wood, fiberglass, steel and aluminum," says Tom. "You couldn't buy a comparable education at a university. Nowadays, there's so little boat construction going on that it's hard to get diversity and repetition like I had.

The four current projects mentioned earlier reflect more of that diversity. With longtime friend and partner Dave Wahle, Tom's just delivered two 30-ft catboats that are easy to rig and sail. Rander is building the 52-ft wood/composite cruiser for sailmaker Keith Lorence. This boat is similar to Rage, but has a fuller hull shape and more cruising amenities. The 60-ft aluminum cruiser for Dr. Tom Petty is now underway at Jim Bett's shop in Truckee. And the 21-ft single-handed racer should, at the time of this reading, be making its way across the Atlantic for the Mini TransAt start this fall. Skipper/owner Joe Cooper says he chose Tom as the designer on the recommendation of people like Commodore Tompkins, and on Wylie's enthusiasm for the project and his previous success in the Mini TransAt with American Express. In fact, Wylie is the only US designer to have drawn a winner in the race.

Coincidentally, Cooper has dovetailed his sailing efforts with an educational project for school children that has also embraced Wylie. Cooper's Sailing As Integrated Learning (SAIL) program involves taking his boat to kids so they can actually see and touch it while he gets into elements like weather, navigation, sailing and marine life.

For his part, last year Tom and his friend Jonathon Livingston took a group of school children sailing to Angel Island for a sleep over aboard Livingston's Wylie 38 Punk Dolphin. Among their passengers was Tom's 12-year-old daughter Lindsay (for whom he assumed full custody after a divorce a few years ago).

"We had a nonsailor-to-sailor ratio of about 15 to 1," says Tom, "and it was so exciting to these kids. For me, the thrill was seeing people who weren't sailors having so much fun. Those of us who've sailed so long tend to get lost in the technical aspects, and we forget that this wind and water stuff is really a blast!"

The concept of the sailing environment as a school setting has become a pet project for Wylie. He's been talking with a client about doing a 103-footer - sort of a Rage on steroids - that would be a perfect platform for an oceangoing classroom.

In the meantime, there are more boats to be drawn and built. Even though he hasn't achieved the reputation of some of his design colleagues, Wylie knows he's added a lot of value and fun to what's going on out in the water. And as proud as he is of the boats that bear his name, he's even more pleased about all the friendships that have been forged and maintained in the process.

"I may not have been the best at business," he says, "but of all the people I've worked with over the years, I can't think of one who I couldn't go up to today and shake hands. To me, that's every bit as important as the career."