Luders 16s Reprise their Championship Regatta

Photographs by Nick Johnstone

The Luders 16s trade tacks en route to the windward mark.

After a 19-year hiatus, the Luders 16 class held its “International Championships” in the waters off Northeast Harbor in July 2024. The two-day regatta represented an affirmation of the resilience of sailboat racing on our coast, somewhat in contrast with the wider world of one-design racing, which in other locales could be said to be past its heyday.

The Northeast Harbor Fleet, one of the oldest and most estimable summer-place yacht clubs, can rightly claim to be a hotbed of sail competition and training in the region. This rekindling of a class championship points to the vision and intrepid promotion of Nick Johnstone, general manager of the club, with the enthusiastic backing of local Luders sailors. If the Johnstone family name sounds familiar, it should. Patriarch Rod and Bob Johnstone were founders of brands such as J/Boats and MJM Yachts, and Nick’s father, Peter, was the creator of Gunboat Catamarans.

Multi-hued spinnakers and hulls make the Luders a colorful class. Racers have club manager Nick Johnstone (below) to thank for a well-run regatta.

Nick Johnstone signed on as general manager two years back. Prior to that, he’d had major fun while working in the Charleston, South Carolina, area, where he raced aboard a rare and quirky local class called the Sea Island One Design. Sea Islands are hard-chined, flat-bottomed, last-century sailing workboats, all jazzed-up with modern sails and gear. The class stages an annual “World Championship” that provides great sport and has brought in a vast spectator party and has become a tourist attraction.

As manager, he got wind of the fact that the Northeast Harbor’s Luders class has many similarities with its Sea Island counterparts, with the Luders being the lone remnants of a widespread class that once had fleets all over America and in Bermuda. Like the Sea Island One Design, the Luders class has morphed into a hybrid, developmental version of a one-design. The Luders, designed by Bill Luders just prior to World War II, retain the unbeatable aesthetics of a small racing sloop, with beautiful long ends. But Northeast Harbor’s local sailing experts chose to abandon the original genoa headsail in favor of a much smaller sail that Mount Desert Island skippers refer to as the MDI jib. The jib actually performs much better than the bigger genoa, particularly in terms of pointing remarkably high into the wind.  

Photo courtesy Nick Johnstone

The Northeast Harbor class also sanctions a bit of experimentation, including spinnaker launchers and deployable twin-pole gybing systems that require nobody to leave the cockpit. Diversity is the spice of life, and the class mixes super-pretty with super-hot. There are over 40 Luders 16s in nearby waters, and nearly 20 hit the starting lines in local races this past August.

This area has had Luders 16s for ages. Almost the first ones built—out of hot-molded mahogany veneers—arrived at Hall Quarry aboard a steamship. They were launched using a quarry crane, and headed for the nearby Bar Harbor Yacht Club. The next year, on August 13 and 14, 1947, the first-ever National Championship was held off Bar Harbor. For the next 46 years, similar Nationals (sometimes going International with entrants from Bermuda) were held around the country. A combination of factors caused the event to be sidelined in 1993. Active fleets still thrived in just a few places—Chicago, New Orleans, California, and western Long Island Sound—but over time, as a racing entity, Luders 16s were left by the wayside in favor of sexier and sportier types. 

But in the interim, various Mainers familiar with the Bar Harbor Luders, particularly Sturgis Haskins of Sorrento, began promoting and even importing boats, and racing remained vibrant at Southwest Harbor. The class is very nearly a miniature clone of the big and magnificent International One Designs, often called IODs. But the Luders are far less expensive, almost equally fast, and extremely maneuverable. The class caught on, and following the wholesale destruction of the New Orleans fleet by Hurricane Katrina, a big charge of boats was brought here and rebuilt. The strange thing is that despite enthusiastic racing around MDI over the past 20 years, nobody gave thought to re-establishing a regional or national championship.

Hearing that the class had an unbroken 46-year history of national championships, but hadn’t organized a regatta in years, Johnstone proposed restarting the event, with a good bit of frivolity alongside. Then he donned his manager hat (which fits exceptionally on him) and sweated out details about hosting visiting crews, finding charters for competitors from away, and countless small details. Johnstone is also captain of the race committee boat, and somehow further managed to take terrific photos of the action he directed. His photographs accompany and enhance this report. 

There were two days of competition in extremely variable conditions, from thick fog to brilliant sunshine, plus puffy and shifting northwest winds. Johnstone’s course choices, mark setting, and starting line adjustments were accomplished in always trying conditions, and every competitor praised the fairness that resulted. Competition was intense to the degree that boats were clearing the second windward mark overlapped in several races, and after multiple rounds there were photo finishes under spinnaker. The final standings point to keen rivalry. Only a single point separated the winning skipper from the second, and the second from third place. This after five exhausting races that counted, without a throw-out, in extremely variable and always challenging conditions.  

Teams from out of state came from Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich, Connecticut; Daingerfield Island Sailing Club in Alexandria, Virginia; Pass Christian Yacht Club in Pass Christian, Mississippi; and the New York Yacht Club. Among the visiting skippers was Nick Johnstone’s dad, Peter, hailing from Newport, Rhode Island, and the NYYC. He sailed a local Luders that he and his crew chartered for the occasion. Since then, Peter has bought a Luders that he is fixing up to sail in the summer in the Northeast Harbor fleet. 

In fact, virtually every visiting competitor affirmed they’d be on the scene for another International next year. Given that the word is bound to spread far and wide about the super fun and competitive sailing in the gorgeous Somes Sound fjord and in the shadow of Acadia National Park’s Cadillac Mountain, the 2025 Internationals should be a much-anticipated event. 

Nineteen boats registered for this past summer’s regatta, named in honor of Jim Fernald, skipper of Sea Bee, who perished last winter as a result of a skiing accident. Fernald was a top Luders competitor, with legendary standards of sportsmanship—and a firm personal friend of this author and skipper.

Winner of this 47th annual Luders International Championship was Ned Johnston, in Domino. Just one point behind came Peter Johnstone, and half a boat length behind him came Bill and Otto Smith, father and young son, in Slingshot. Attesting to the versatility of Luders 16 boats, the number of crew varied from two to four sunburned and salty individuals. Upon completion of two of the most memorable days ever enjoyed on the Great Harbor north of Greenings Island, one and all retired to enjoy Dark ’n Stormys, no doubt chased with Tylenol (not a good idea). 

✮

MHB&H contributing editor Art Paine lives in Bernard, and is a self-proclaimed Luders-ite and owner of Ludicrous, which he profiled and praised in his story “Fast and Pretty,” in our March/April, 2016 issue. Read that story HERE.