Carl Alberg's designs and boats will live on forever
More than 50 years ago Carl Alberg, one of this country's premier designers of fiberglass yachts, decided that Marblehead, Massachusetts was to become his permanent home. It was only appropriate that he eventually found himself living in a house that overlooked the town's harbor and its 2,200 moorings. Looking out from his studio high on a hill you can't help but wonder at the feeling Alberg must have had when he'd lean back from his drafting table and gaze out on a summer's floating forest of masts to see actually hundreds of boats that were of his own design.
In fact, Carl Alberg's designs, from his early years with John G. Alden design firm of Boston to his latest design, the Alberg 40 being produced by Cape Dory Yachts of East Taunton, Massachusetts, represent a phenomenal number. And his designs still are popular.
Now retired at 83 years of age, Alberg is probably most known for his notable 28-foot Triton built by Pearson Yachts of Rhode Island and Aeromarine Plastics of Sausalito, California. Describing his design philosophy Alberg remarked, "Contrasted to the modern IOR boats where you have six gorillas sitting on the weather rail with their feet hanging outside trying to keep the boat upright, my boats are strictly family-cruising boats. In all my designs I go for comfortable accommodations and a boat you can sail upright without scaring the life out of your family or friends. I gave them a good long keel, plenty of displacement and beam, and a fair amount of sail area so they can move." An informal count of Alberg designs actually built and sold numbers over 5,000. He must be doing something right.
Born in 1900 in the harbor city of Gothenburg, Sweden, Alberg remembers being brought up around and literally in small boats. "The harbor was always filled with ships and boats of all kinds and when we weren't sailing there the family usually vacationed on an island off the coast where my father, brother and I used to race each other in small sailboats." Having caught the sailing bug, Alberg later enrolled at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg for naval architecture and after two years of taking courses specifically geared toward sailboat design he left to come to the United States in 1925.
Settling at first in Lynn, Massachusetts he landed a job as a rigger at the General Dynamics shipyard in Quincy. After one year he became a spar-maker at the Lawley boatyard in Neponsett where he eventually met John Alden, who was having several boats made there. After convincing Alden to look over some of his sketches, Alberg was hired as a designer. It was the beginning of a relationship that over the years would greatly influence Alberg's own designs.
"I enjoyed working with Alden very much," Alberg said. "He was a wonderful guy, pleasant, calm, never getting excited, and I learned quite a bit from working with him. His designs were conservative. He concentrated on seaworthiness, comfort and boats that would sail on their bottoms, and that's pretty much what I've tried to do with my boats."
Several years later during the Second World War Alberg went to work for the navy's conversion section in the Charleston Naval Shipyard. Afterward he went back to Alden's for two years during which time he drew the lines for the U.S. One Design. In 1946 he left Alden to start his own firm.
For three years he was successful, designing wooden boats such as the Sea Lion and an Alberg 46-foot ketch, but business dwindled during the Korean War and he went back to Charleston for a six-month stint. There he secured a position as chief marine engineer/architect for the Coast Guard. During the latter part of the 10 years Alberg was with the Coast Guard he started designing fiberglass boats.
Alberg recalled how he got started in fiberglass production design. "The Coast Guard wanted a dinghy repaired and I arranged to have it fixed by two kids who were always hanging around by the boats. They were bright sharp kids, and when they did a good job repairing the dinghy with a fiberglass patch, I approached them about building one of my designs out of fiberglass." As it turned out, those two kids were the Pearson cousins and they ended up establishing Pearson Yachts on the popularity of that first design: the 28-foot Triton, of which 709 were built.
Compared with wooden boats of the same size the fiberglass Triton was considered a revolutionary design because of its spacious interior accommodations and sleek lines. At the Triton's first boat show orders came pouring in and soon, after designing several other boats such as the 22-foot Ensign (1,600 built) for the Pearson cousins, Alberg retired from the Coast Guard in 1963 to concentrate full-time on his own designs.
By this time Alberg had been in contact with Andrew Vavolotis of Cape Dory Yachts, who had purchased the mold for what was to become the Cape Dory Typhoon, an Alberg design, from a bankrupt builder. After realizing how popular Alberg boats had become, Vavolotis called the designer and asked him to draw up some lines for a 28-footer. Since his association with Vavolotis, Alberg has produced at least one sailboat per year.
Although Alberg is generally regarded as being one of the pioneers to set a solid foundation for the fiberglass boat industry, even he admitted that "fiberglass boat building has come a lone way in a relatively short period of time. The major builders today know so much more about fiberglass construction and the different methods of laying it up than when I first got involved. Processes like sandwich construction and the application of materials to keep boats from sweating were unheard of years ago. Consequently the glass boats built nowadays are considerably better."
He also believes that any differences in design approach for fiberglass boats can be attributed to the new ocean racing rules that didn't apply when he was designing his classics. "There are still some designers around who share my ideas about glass boat design. Everyone else is trying to conform to the new rules. My boats are more designed to follow the waves and stay relatively dry and stable."
To bring his point home Alberg cited the example of an Alberg 35 on its way to England in 1979 that encountered a fierce storm off the coast of Ireland. "It was really blowing and though they shortened sails and did everything else they could in order to keep going, they eventually took everything off, went below, battened down the hatches and just ate, drank and played cards. When it had blown over they hoisted sail and continued to England, where they were told they had just sailed through the same gale that had taken 16 lives in the Fastnet race. They had ridden out the storm by just sitting in the cabin while everyone else was capsizing."
Carl Alberg's designs and boats will live on forever. As one of the forerunners of the movement toward fiberglass boats, it's understandable that his one big wish is that one day a museum will gather up all his designs and preserve them for everyone's use. Besides they might very well stumble upon the plans for the 52-footer that he has tucked away under his drafting table.
Reprinted from SAILING, Feb. 1984.
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