Almaran was born as Swell (wave) and is the third ship built for the famous class of New Yorker 32 (NY32), designed by Olin Stephens to replace the famous NY30 designed by Nat Herreshoff. For Stephens, who was very young at that time, meant a huge success because he had to win the best Navy Architects cabinet at that moment in a Yacht Club contest of New York.
Among the losers there were important figures like Alden, Luders or Payne. This class, like many other initial projects of Stephens, was influenced by the designs of International Formula, for which Olin designed some “6 meters” that were his first successful ships. Regarding to a metric formula, the NY32s have a much higher freeboard and, thanks to that, they’re more liveable and adapted to celestial navigation, which was a requirement of the contest. Furthermore, the Almaran is the only NY32 sailing in Europe. That’s because a passionate Italian brought this ship to his country in order to proceed an important restoration project.
Nowadays, it’s still a very fast ship in races, and no only in the classic ones! Almaran is able to frighten many actual race ships, its great-grandchildren.