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Eight Bells – George Olson

We’re sorry to report that George Olson lost a long battle with cancer last weekend. He died on November 12 in Santa Cruz, surrounded by wife Lyn Neale, his two grown children Adrian and Kristina, and other family. George was 68.

Olson was a true renaissance man — a jack of many trades and master at more than a few. Antique car restoration, model railroading, surfboard maker, boatbuilder, landsailer and amusement park ride designer were just a few of the passions during his life. We don’t know what sort of a mark he left on most of those pursuits, but the one he left on sailing is huge and indelible: George was a key ingredient in the primordial soup that gave the world ultralight sailboats.

George Olson was born in San Diego to a Navy family. He moved around quite a bit during his childhood, living variously in San Pedro, San Francisco, Hawaii and Japan — where he learned to sail at the Navy base yacht club at age 14. His father finally retired in the mid-’50s and the family settled in Santa Cruz. George got involved in local sailing right from the start. At 19 he had built his first boat, a trimaran. A decade later, he he was working as a hod carrier — the guy who carries bricks up the ladder to the mason — by day, while spending the weekends doing crazy things like ‘turboing’ Cal 20s with bowsprits and outsized rigs. One day, low on money as usual, he and some buddies got the idea of building the longest-waterline hull possible to which they could attach a Cal 20 keel, rudder and rig. Two young boatbuilders named Ron and John Moore took notice of the result, a crazy-fast 24-footer named Grendel, and a few years later, the design was tweaked to become the Moore 24.

Later, George went to work for Bill Lee where he helped build boats and design tooling. While delivering Merlin back from the ‘77 TransPac, George, Don Snyder and Dennis Bassano put their heads together and birthed yet another Santa Cruz ULDB stalwart. They called the design the SOB 30 (for their initials), named the resultant boat Pacific High, and later went into partnership producing it as the Olson 30. Later still, he enlarged the design and the Olson 40 was born.

Through it all, George never finished his formal education and never got a naval architecture diploma. He was a ‘natural’ with an intuitive sense of how wind and wave interacted — with an artist’s eye for designing pretty boats. In a Latitude interview way back in 1979, in response to a question about what calculations he used before changing the size and shape of the Olson 30 keel from that of Pacific High, he said, “I just look at boats. Everybody asked me what the NACA numbers are for the foil sections — that’s a book of aircraft section foils where you can get all these drag ratios and laminar flows out of it. Well, I can’t understand any of it. I tried, but it’s way over my head.”

George’s ever fertile imagination eventually drifted away from sailboats (although he remained involved in landsailers and model boats), but his legend lives on. We’ll have more about Olson’s life and stories in the December issue. And we invite you to share yours for possible inclusion. Please forward your remembrances of George Olson to John Riise. But don’t delay, we have only a few more days until our December deadline.   

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Loick Peyron is first to the doldrums in the 2008 Vendee Globe. © Jean-Marie Liot DPPI/Vendee Globe Ten days into the singlehanded 2008 Vendée Globe Race, the leaders are running into the doldrums with Loïck Peyron and his Farr-designed Gitana 80 leading the charge.