Salute and Her Big Stick

"Mine’s bigger than yours!" writes Bernie Barden, Docent at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. "We spend our summers in Porto Venere, Italy, where we see some of the world’s classic yachts drop anchor every summer. Among them, Tom Perkins’ 289-ft Maltese Falcon by Perini Navi, and the 184-ft Rosehearty, also by Perini Navi.

"Then, on June 11, in came Salute, a Ron Holland co-designed sistership to Rosehearty. What makes Salute different from her six sisterships is that she’s a sloop rather than a ketch. Her mast is 246 feet tall, which according to information on the web, makes it the tallest in the world. Too tall, in fact, to slip beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, so I guess we won’t be seeing her on the Bay any time soon."

Actually, Bernie, Joe Vittorio’s 247-ft sloop Mirabella, another Ron Holland design, still has the tallest mast in the world, at 290 feet tall. If you read closely, you’ll learn that her mast is made of carbonium, which means that Salute‘s 246-ft mast is only the tallest aluminum mast in the world.

By the way, we like your first sentence, which is a play on the title of Mine’s Bigger, the fine book by David Kaplan about the design and building of Maltese Falcon, with lots of good info on Mirabella, and Jim Clark’s 292-ft clipper ship Athena.

Folks who have been sailing the Bay for many years will remember that Ron Holland, originally from New Zealand, kicked around the Bay for several years, and eventually designed Dave Allen’s San Francisco YC-based 40-ft Imp, which set the racing world on its ear. The soft spoken Holland moved to Ireland long ago, where he’s become one of the premier designers of mega sailing yachts. In fact, another design of his, the 190-ft ‘super green’ Ethereal, for Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is soon to be launched by Huisman. Hasn’t Ron done well for himself, proving that you don’t have to be a loudmouth to be successful.