July/August 2018 | view this story as a .pdf

The ambassador from Maine stuns the Puerto de Mahón.

By Colin W. Sargent

The fog slowly clears. An impossibly tall sloop emerges from the mist. It can’t be the J Class Ranger, adrift in time. She was scrapped in 1941. But here she is.

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 drawing 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 “carbon-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: “Unknown due to [the] recent passing of the owner,” who died at 75 on April 16, 2018.

Which 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 degree? John Williams was nicknamed “The Apartment King” of Atlanta, according to his obituary. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hailed him as a “visionary Atlanta developer who managed multi-billion dollar businesses in real estate” and a “minority owner of the Atlanta Falcons.”

What a jolt it would be if the new Ranger were bought and brought back here to Maine.

The original Ranger cost $164,628.30 in 1937 (including one mast replacement). In 2016, the new Ranger was up for sale for $7.9M, according to Boat International. Today, she’s listed by Northrop & Johnson in Newport, Rhode Island, for $6.9M–priced for a quick summer sale. “There are only nine of these in the world,” broker Ann Avery says of the J-Class sloops. “Here, suddenly, is a boat with a crew and plans, and they’ve all been canceled.” Prospective U.S. buyers will need to make the trip to Palma de Mallorca in Spain to have a look at this incredible looker. 

For more information on the new Ranger’s past races and events, visit the online story at www.portlandmonthly.com/portmag/2018/07/blast-from-the-past-extras/