Sailboat Racing
Walter Greene is a multihull sailor who loves boats. He is well-known in "the rarified world of ocean racing" as a designer, builder, and skipper. (Edgar Allen Beem, Maine Times) Walter has sailed across the Atlantic 23 times, four times racing on monohulls and ten times racing on multihulls. Joan has sailed across the Atlantic seven times, participating in two trans-Atlantic races.
Walter Greene has designed or built many built boats which have taken top places in transatlantic races.
Mike Birch won the 1978 Route du Rhum sailing "Olympus Photo", the first boat which Walter designed and built. Walter built "Moxie" which won the 1980 OSTAR. Two boats which he designed also finished third and fifth in that race. In 2010 those two boats and two others of his design raced in the Route du Rhum, and some are entered in the 2014 edition of the race.
Greene boats aren't just for transatlantic racing. " Friends" and "Scout" are racer/cruisers. "Friends" has sailed in the Jamaica Race and the Fort Lauderdale-Key West Race. Both boats have participated in the Yarmouth Cup several times. The 60' trimaran "Earth Voyager", which Walter designed, holds the course record for the Port Huron-Mackinac Race.
Greene boats have sailed in these races, among others:
- OSTAR/CSTAR (Plymouth, England to Newport, RI)
- TwoSTAR (Plymouth, England to Newport, RI)
- Route de Rhum (France to Guadalupe)
- Round Britain
- 8-Metre World Championship
- Port Huron-Mackinac Race
- Yarmouth Cup (Maine to Nova Scotia)
- Monhegan Cup
Walter has been quoted as saying, "Ocean racing is 90 percent boredom and 10 percent sheer terror." In an article in the Maine Times, Edgar Allen Beem told about how Walter used one OSTAR race to catch up on his reading:
"The image of a lone man in the middle of the ocean reading a book about an even more challenging ocean race [Ultimate Challenge, about the single-handed around-the-world race] is somewhat comic, but the part of the craziness of ocean racing is that only those who do it really know anything about it. For one thing, it is not a spectator sport. A few hours out from England, Greene himself had lost sight of other competitors.
"'The twelfth day, I did see another sail,' Greene told a Portland reporter. 'This is not Casco Bay Sunday sailing.'
"But beyond that, Greene does not elaborate. Phil Weld wrote an entire book about his 1980 OSTAR win, but you could write down a Walter Greene account of OSTAR on the back of a cocktail napkin."
- Maine Times, Edgar Allen Beem
