Stormy Weather (yacht)
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Stormy Weather is a 54 feet (16 m) ocean-racing yawl that was designed by Olin Stephens when he was only twenty-five, and launched from the Henry B. Nevins yard in New York in 1934.
She was named after the song of the same name, written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. Her first owner, Philip LeBoutillier, was President of the Best & Co. department store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Apocryphally, he first heard the song sung by Lena Horne, while he was dining at The Montauk Manor resort on Long Island in 1933, and promptly chose the name for his new boat.
In 1935 she won both the Newport-Bergen Transatlantic race and the Fastnet race. She was later won the Miami-Nassau race on four occasions in 1937, 1939, 1940 and 1941, and has raced continuously to the present day, now competing in the Panerai Classic Yacht series in the Mediterranean.
An evolution from his equally famous Dorade (1929), Stormy Weather was often named by Olin Stephens as one of his favorite designs. Sparkman & Stephens later created many successful variants of the same basic design, such as the sloop Sonny, and the larger and smaller yawls Bolero and Loki.
Stormy Weather has crossed the Atlantic thirty times, and undergone at least two major restorations, one in the Caribbean during the 1980s, and most recently at the Cantiere Navale dell' Argentario in 2000-2001.
In 1995, Stormy Weather was still competitive enough to place sixth overall in the Fastnet race, the sixtieth anniversary of her victory. Olin Stephens last raced on Stormy Weather in Argentario, Italy in 2007, when he was 98 years old.
