Ed Dubois passes away

Ed Dubois 1952-2016 © Dubois

Lymington's local sailing community and with it the wider world of sailing was shocked and saddened to learn of the unexpected death of world-renowned designer Ed Dubois last Thursday, from cancer at the too early age of 63 years.

Ed had trained with Alan Buchanan in the early Seventies in the Channel Islands, then moved to work, briefly, on the editorial staff of Yachts and Yachting, then a fortnightly magazine in the UK at the cutting edge of yacht racing reportage.

He hung up his shingle - in reality a brass plate - in Lymington just two years later having designed the Three-Quarter Tonner Borsalino Trois and from then on never really looked back.

His real breakthrough came, however with the seminal Police Car, for Peter Cantwell for the Australian Champagne Mumm Admiral's Cup team of 1979, of which years later he wrote: "Police Car only came to be because of what I considered at the time to be a personal disaster. Peter Cantwell, Police Car's owner, had previously tried to buy the successful three-quarter-ton design Nardia - which I drew in late 1977. He missed it by an hour - she was instead sold to a buyer from Jersey, Channel Islands.

"Not to be outdone, Peter asked me to design a new three-quarter-tonner which was built in Singapore - where he was living at the time - to compete in the China Sea Race series. We tuned her up during the first race and then won the second in-shore race and then the third before competing in the China Sea Race. Halfway down the track, while doing well, the rudder fell off. I thought it was a calamity and that my career as a yacht designer could be over!

"Anyway, consumed with guilt and self-pity we motored the boat back to Hong Kong and the very next day a local British architect - David Thornborough - sauntered down to the dock and made an offer to buy the boat because he'd seen it be so successful. Pink Panther, as this three-quarter-tonner was called, went on to win practically everything in the Hong Kong season and on the basis that he'd just sold the boat, Cantwell went on to ask me - that evening - to design the Two-Tonner Police Car.

"Police Car was good in light to medium conditions and spectacularly good in a breeze. We won the Australian Admiral's Cup trials - a tightly contested event in itself - in Melbourne in February 1979 and I knew that if it was a windy season in England, she would excel in the Admiral's Cup. Police Car went on to be the best performer in the winning Australian Admiral's Cup team along with Impetuous and Ragamuffin. The success of Police Car, particularly in such a gruelling and tragic race as the Fastnet that year, meant that I had international recognition properly established.

"As I woke in the Holiday Inn Hotel, Plymouth, the morning after the race had finished, I knew that for the time being at least, my career as a yacht designer was assured. By that time, we also knew that 19 families were suffering dreadful misery and grief from having lost relatives. 15 in the race and four to be unlucky enough to be on a cruising boat in that storm and they also drowned.

"Later that day, I signed up six new orders for racing boats of various types because of Police Car's success - there and then in Plymouth. It was a weird paradox - I felt such a mixture of emotions..."

The rest, as they say, is history...