isn’t that… 74 p o r t l a n d monthly magazine Built in Skagen, Denmark, in 2003, the new Ranger, a full-scale replica of the 1937 America’s Cup winner, glides across the yacht universe like a starlet on a runway. We don’t see the new Ranger in Maine much because she’s home-ported in Georgetown, Bahamas, with frequent voyages to glamor ports in the Mediterranean. As the summer of 2017 opened, she was racing in Bermuda with a crew from England, Scotland, and Ireland. She’s fast, maybe the fastest of the new class of J-sloops that people with ‘roaring plenitude’ are creating to tack into the past. On first learning about the new Ranger, I felt a lump in my throat. If only co-designer Olin J. Stephens (1908-2008) could have lived to see his incredible inspiration rise again from the draw- ing boards. Imagine Stephens looking up at the doppelgänger of the super J that beat Thomas Sopwith’s Endeavour II to win the Cup. Imagine the 180-foot mast, the 64-foot boom. “He did see J5 [the new Ranger] during construction, and he visited her again once it was commissioned,” says J5’s manager, Dan Jackson. “Ours was the first new J- Class yacht to be built since the 1930s.” Today, a J Class is built for around $16.5 million. Though both the first and the more recent Ranger had steel hulls, the “car- bon-fiber mast and rigging” are improvements, and the salon is a good deal more comfortable, with custom mahogany furniture from Sardinia. “The last time she was in Maine was Summer 2017.” As for when her next visit here will be: “Un- known due to [the] recent passing of the owner,” who died at 75 on April 16, 2018. W hich begs the question, who was the mysterious owner? Who’d have had the means to fall in love with a lost Maine yacht design to this de- gree? John Williams was nicknamed “The Apartment King” of Atlanta, according to his obituary. The Atlanta Journal- Constitution hailed him as a “vision- ary Atlanta developer who managed multi-billion dollar businesses in re- 2018