"I don’t think that there is a designer of yachts in this country that has not knowingly or unknowingly copied Joe’s ideas".

Naval Architect, Bob Perry, Technical Editor of Sailing Magazine.
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One of the principal elements of an industrial designer’s education is creativity. We are trained to "think outside the box", to strive for new and better ways to solve design problems. I don’t know how much of this is learned and how much is innate but it has always been important to me. I used to argue passionately with my grade school teachers that spelling would be so much easier to learn if only it were phonetic.

When I started ocean racing in the 60’s, I soon became aware of how much more difficult and dangerous it was to move around the boat in an extreme heeled condition. This naturally led to imagining how much better it would be if the crew could walk on a horizontal surface throughout the range of heel, as if the deck were "gimbaled".

Unique, Groundbreaking Design Innovation

The first chance I had to incorporate elements of this feature was when I was commissioned to develop the Islander 36 production sailboat in 1969. The deck version of this concept was too radical for Islander at the time and I was only able to use the "heelwalk" feature in the cockpit.

I did find a receptive audience at the Ranger Yachts Division of Jenson Marine however. Ranger immediately modified their new tooling to incorporate elements of the "Gimbaled Deck" concept in Gary Mull’s Ranger 1-Ton. By radically slanting the cabin sides so they could be walked on, the mold was broken, so to speak, and led the way for the rest of the fleet to begin experimenting with new, slanted cabin side and deck configurations.

After all, there was no longer any reason to be constrained to the limitations of wooden boat building shapes as fiberglass allowed us much more freedom to explore new forms and better function.

The Yankee 26 interior had nothing to do with deck design but ironically it was the Gimbaled deck concept that got me the commission. I had taken my deck concept to my neighbor, yacht racer Bill Ficker to get his expert opinion on its feasibility. Ficker, who had just signed the contract to steer the latest 12 meter Americas Cup defender from Sparkman & Stephens, asked me if I would like to work on the new 12. I was stunned to say the least and figured that that would be the last of it until I got a letter from Olin Stephens asking me to come back to New York as a consultant. We looked at the deck concept from all angles and ultimately decided that the 12’s just didn’t heel enough to warrant the application of the feature. However, Olin did have a project for me…The Yankee 26 interior.

Yankee Yachts was an S&S client, a privately held company that produced an extremely well, if not over built, line of sailboats that were ultimately too highly priced to be competitive in that market. Yankee was on its last legs and Olin asked me to do what ever I could do to try to save it. The deck was already tooled so that left the interior for me to work with.

I was very flattered to be in this position and was absolutely determined to do the best job I knew how to help S&S and Yankee. I knew that we needed a radical new approach that would cause the market to sit up and take notice if we were going to turn things around.

At that time, in the early seventy’s, there were only two interior arrangements that were available for boats in that size range: (1), Port & starboard settee with drop-leaf table between and galley aft, or, (2), Dinette opposite galley. Both of these arrangements had the head opposite the hanging locker immediately aft of the v-berth. (See illustration, The two standard arrangements prior to the Yankee 26 )

Personal Comfort

My principal design objectives were real, "get your feet up" comfort as well as an increased visual sense of space. The conventional solutions were so claustrophobic. I thought that if I could only capture the visual space in the v-berth area and move the head and hanging locker aft and out of the way, that would really open things up. And so it did. But I explored the concept feeling that this was a useless exercise for my extremely conservative clients. Who ever heard of getting rid of the privacy for the v-berth, moving the head aft and putting the hanging locker in the head?

An Increased Sense of Visual Spaciousness

As I worked with the new layout though, I became more and more excited about it. The privacy problem was mitigated with a heavy privacy curtain and a gasket on the hanging locker door would help solve that problem. The great thing was that the lounge area could run down one side, across the v-berth bulkhead and up the other side. The table could rotate about the mast to a variety of positions including totally out of the way. The "openness" and "flexibility" were wonderful!

When I presented the new layout to Yankee, my client held the drawing for a long time without saying a word. I figured that he didn’t like it and was trying to figure out a way to let me down gently. Finally I asked him, "Well, what do you think?" He turned to me and said, "It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen". Then he said, "But Joe, no one has ever asked me for anything like this!" With great relief, I confidently replied, "Of course not. No one has ever seen this layout before".

The new layout was introduced at the Annapolis Boat Show and was immediately adopted by several production builders of both sail and power. A couple of years later, almost half of the boats from 22’ to 30’ used this new "wrap around" layout.