USA ORC Fleet

US ORC racing — East Coast, Gulf Coast, Great Lakes, West Coast

Annapolis Charleston Key West Newport Block Island San Francisco Miami Detroit
1,051 boats 56 events 489 races 1,552 obs Domestic competitive fleet · as of 2026-04-21 · build a2e90234
Kinship

American waters hold their own story.

Annapolis, Newport, Key West, Great Lakes, Block Island — find US offshore racing.

 Hidden Shape

11 archetypes across 31 dimensional features.
How this fleet clusters before the results arrive.

How every American boat clusters, before the results arrive.
Fleet DNA

How the USA ORC fleet is built.

916 boats in the fleet. 908 ORC-rated and 8 IRC-synthetic attributed across 11 archetypes.

The USA ORC Fleet Signature

The US ORC fleet is a J/Boats-anchored, narrow-envelope collective at scale. KEELFLEX leads at 26.4% (242 boats) — sharp-edged high-performance hulls where precision trim pays the most. AEROMAX follows at 17.2% (158 boats) and BALANCECORE at 13.0% (119 boats), with GLIDEFORM and STEELFORM tied at 10.9% (100 boats each) completing the top-five at 78.8% of the classified fleet. The designer signature is a J/Boats fleet with a Farr cruiser-racer underlayer: J/Boats at 20.1% (211 boats) is more than double Farr Designs at 13.1% (138 boats), and every other drawing board sits under 4%. A structurally aggressive fleet built around one designer's line, backed by the largest national rating roster in ORC.

  • KEELFLEX 26.4% · 242 boats
  • AEROMAX 17.2% · 158 boats
  • BALANCECORE 13.0% · 119 boats

Dimension emphasis: Comparative Time · Crew Effectiveness · Sail Drive

J/Boats (211 / 20.1%) anchors the designer signature with J-120 (30), J-105 (31), J-109 (25), J-111 (27), and J-88 (7) forming the production-class backbone. First 36.7 (38 boats) is the single most common class in the fleet. In 2026, Charleston Race Week, Block Island, and Annapolis anchor the flagship US ORC calendar.

High confidence Production

The full 11-archetype distribution.

Keelflex

Narrow stability window; fast when perfectly balanced, punishing when not.

Boats 242
Share 26.4%

Aeromax

Power-efficiency hybrid with strong upwind drive and moderate displacement.

Boats 158
Share 17.2%

Balancecore

Heel-sensitive platform with a wider, more forgiving performance envelope.

Boats 119
Share 13.0%

Glideform

Low-drag hull with efficient upwind flow and moderate displacement.

Boats 104
Share 11.4%

Steelform

Heavy-displacement hull with strong directional stability.

Boats 100
Share 10.9%

Headforce

High righting moment, upwind-biased hull that powers through chop.

Boats 50
Share 5.5%

Deepframe

Deep-hull efficiency paired with a stiff platform for drag-optimised flow.

Boats 42
Share 4.6%

Gravityrun

Heavy-mode momentum boat with strong downwind power in sustained breeze.

Boats 33
Share 3.6%

Stormline

Rough-water specialist with a hull shape optimised for steep, short waves.

Boats 31
Share 3.4%

Aeroblade

Light, agile platform optimised for quick acceleration and flat-water speed.

Boats 15
Share 1.6%

Ironwind

Stiff, stable-drive platform with predictable load behaviour.

Boats 10
Share 1.1%

Keelflex leads at 24.9% of the classified fleet, with aeromax (17.7%) and balancecore (13.6%) close behind — an American fleet built around sharp-edged high-performance hulls, upwind-biased power platforms, and forgiving offshore cruiser-racers.

At a glance

USA ORC — structural snapshot.

Scope
916 boats
908 ORC-rated · 8 IRC-synthetic
Top 3 archetypes
  1. KEELFLEX — 242 boats (26.4%)
  2. AEROMAX — 158 boats (17.2%)
  3. BALANCECORE — 119 boats (13.0%)
Eleven canonical performance archetypes cluster the fleet by dimensional signature. See the full map →
Top designer cluster
Johnstone R
202 boats (22.1%) — the most-represented design voice in this fleet.

Counts and archetype assignments above are measured from the current corpus. Commentary below is interpretive.

Domestic competitive fleet · as of 2026-04-23 · build e775022a
Latest story

J/Boats anchors the home fleet; Norwegian hulls swept the 2024 DH Worlds USA slice.

The domestic US signature is a J/Boats fleet at 20.1% of classified boats — the strongest single-designer share on any national fleet hub on the FleetEdge grid — with a KEELFLEX platform preference (24.9%) that concentrates around the J-111, TP 52, and Farr 395 at the sharp end. The 2024 ORC Double Handed World Championship is the selected spotlight for this fleet; the cohort selection algorithm ranked it first by intersection even though its named class champions are Norwegian programmes whose USA attribution reflects a known fleet-tagging crossover. Both stories below.

→
Looking forward

The 2024 ORC Double Handed World Championship handed all three class titles to Norwegian programmes (White Shadow Class A, Hyrrokin Class B, Flux Class C) across three different archetypes (DEEPFRAME, GLIDEFORM, AEROBLADE). Hyrrokin's triple-surface win — leading both Comparative Time and Crew Effectiveness and winning Class B — is the rare performance verdict where one Dehler 30 carried an entire regatta across the allowance, crew, and standings lenses at once. In April 2026 the US fleet reconvenes at Charleston Race Week, the institutional flagship of American ORC racing and the spring anchor that draws from the J/Boats domestic backbone — a different kind of racing entirely, and the one that actually measures the US fleet against itself.

With the domestic US signature so J/Boats-heavy, will Charleston 2026 surface the same J-111 / TP 52 / Farr 395 KEELFLEX top that the fleet-wide distribution predicts, or will a strong Gulf or Pacific entry shift the race archetype balance?

Read the USA country preview →
Designer-Structural Anchor

J/Boats carries one in every five US ORC hulls.

Rod Johnstone's J/Boats line accounts for 211 of 1,051 boats in the US ORC fleet — 20.1% of classified boats, more than double the next designer (Farr Designs at 13.1%, 138 boats). J-120 (30 boats), J-105 (31 boats), and J-109 (25 boats) are the top three J/Boats models on the domestic circuit; J-111 (27), J-99 (9), J-122 (9), and J-88 (7) fill the long tail. No other designer approaches this density — German Frers comes third at 38 boats (3.6%), and every other drawing board sits under 4%. The American fleet is structurally a J/Boats fleet with a Farr cruiser-racer underlayer — a 20-percent-of-the-fleet concentration that is unique to US ORC racing and drives the KEELFLEX archetype signature at the fleet level.

  • J/Boats: 211 boats · 20.1% of fleet
  • Top J/Boats models: J-105 (31), J-120 (30), J-111 (27), J-109 (25)
  • Next designer: Farr Designs at 13.1% (138 boats)
High confidence FE Structural Analytics
Archetype Platform Preference

KEELFLEX leads the US fleet at 24.9% — the sharp-edged American signature.

KEELFLEX — narrow stability window, fast when perfectly balanced, punishing when not — leads the classified US fleet at 257 boats (24.9%), ahead of AEROMAX (183, 17.7%) and BALANCECORE (140, 13.6%). The top KEELFLEX models on the US circuit are J-111 (26 boats), TP 52 (17), and Farr 395 (7) — sharp-edged high-performance hulls concentrated in the J/Boats and Farr lines. The American fleet races a structurally aggressive distribution where precision trim pays the most, a long-running design preference distinct from Mediterranean cruiser-racer dominance (AEROMAX-led) or Baltic heavy-displacement ballasts (BALANCECORE/HEADFORCE-led). KEELFLEX plus AEROMAX carries 42.6% of the fleet — the top two US archetypes are both narrow-envelope power platforms.

  • KEELFLEX in US fleet: 257 boats · 24.9%
  • Top KEELFLEX models: J-111 (26), TP 52 (17), Farr 395 (7)
  • KEELFLEX + AEROMAX combined: 42.6% of classified fleet
High confidence FE MPAE v3 taxonomy
Performance Verdict · Multi-Dimension

HYRROKIN: allowance, crew, and Class B on one regatta.

Hyrrokin (NOR-30048, Dehler 30, GLIDEFORM) led both Comparative Time at 4.44 sec/nm and Crew Effectiveness at 3.73 sec/nm at the 2024 ORC Double Handed World Championship — nearly 11 sec/nm clear of the second-best boat in each family, and won Class B on the standings (1st of 20, the largest class of the regatta, on a 2-point margin over LIGHTWORKS). Leading the fleet on the allowance lens, leading the fleet on the crew lens, and winning the largest class on low-point scoring is a triple-surface presence, not a single-metric leader. GLIDEFORM is the low-drag hull with efficient upwind flow and moderate displacement — the Dehler 30 platform read the double-handed regatta conditions exactly, and two sailors extracted every margin the boat allowed. Caveat: the 52-boat USA-attributed cohort includes a cross-border attribution crossover; Hyrrokin is a Norwegian programme whose tagging under the US fleet slice reflects a known cross-border attribution at the fleet-membership layer, not a domestic US campaign.

  • Hyrrokin Comp Time: 4.44 sec/nm · 1st of 40 (11 clear)
  • Hyrrokin Crew Eff: 3.73 sec/nm · 1st of 40 (11 clear)
  • Hyrrokin Class B: 1st of 20 · 2-point margin
High confidence RR ORC DH Worlds 2024
Multi-Champion Cluster · Cross-Border Attribution

Three archetypes, three Norwegian class wins on one regatta.

All three class titles at the 2024 ORC DH Worlds went to Norwegian double-handed teams, each on a different archetype. White Shadow (NOR-12443, Landmark 43, DEEPFRAME) won Class A with 1st of 14 on 1 point over Zorro (NOR-12545, Swan 45) and Snakkas (NOR-15560, Aquatich 40) — the same boat also posted the second-best Comparative Time at 15.16 sec/nm. Hyrrokin (NOR-30048, Dehler 30, GLIDEFORM) won Class B as the regatta's multi-dimensional leader (Card 3). Flux (NOR-9884, X-332, AEROBLADE) won Class C ahead of Lethe and PuraVida. Three archetypes — DEEPFRAME, GLIDEFORM, AEROBLADE — no single hull type carried the regatta; different design answers for three different class conditions. The USA attribution on this cohort reflects a known cross-border fleet-tagging crossover: the predominantly Norwegian championship is included in the US slice because of a cross-border attribution at the fleet-membership layer. The domestic US story lives in the J/Boats anchor card above.

  • Class A: White Shadow NOR-12443 (Landmark 43, DEEPFRAME)
  • Class B: Hyrrokin NOR-30048 (Dehler 30, GLIDEFORM)
  • Class C: Flux NOR-9884 (X-332, AEROBLADE)
High confidence · cross-border flagged RR ORC DH Worlds 2024
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