Whirlwind

Whirlwind was a 1930 yacht of the J Class built as a contender for the New York Yacht Club's defence of the 1930 America's Cup. She was ordered by a syndicate headed by Landon Ketchum Thorne, designed by Lewis Francis Herreshoff, and built by Lawley & Son. Whirlwind was unsuccessful in her bid to become the Cup defender, an honor that went to Enterprise. She never sailed again after the Cup races, and was scrapped in 1935. Design and development When the New York Yacht Club accepted Sir Thomas Lipton's challenge for the America's cup, they decided to form two syndicates to build one yacht each for the defense of the cup, and also to welcome other syndicates who might want to offer a defender. Landon Thorne put forward one such syndicate, comprising: Paul Hammond Alfred Lee Loomis Landon Thorne Unlike the other contenders for the defence of the cup which had hulls of Tobin bronze, Whirlwinds hull was built from an innovative semi-composite material. The Boston Globe suggested (perhaps jokingly) this was because the competing syndicates had already bought out the available stocks of brass on the market, but Hammond explained that this was not so, and that designer Herreshoff preferred working in wood. Herreshoff designed Whirlwind with a pointed, "canoe"-style stern, quite different from the other J-class yachts, because he was following the lines of his successful M-class yacht Istalena. Herreshoff also stated that he had tried to incorporate recent learnings from the smaller R-class and Q-class yachts that had been recently built.