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Classic Boat MARCH 2016

£4.75 US$13.75

T H E W O R L D’ S M O S T B E A U T I F U L B O A T S

MINI J-CLASS

We join the Q boat revival

How hollow spars changed sailing

Hitler’s tender

Under Tower Bridge in a gaff cutter

Sweden’s Riva 1919 Pettersson

ON THE MARKET

OWNER’S STORY

HEAVY, SLOW, LEGENDARY

9 770950 331141

03

seth

Pilot cutters for less Kim Holman classic Lively Lady

www.classicboat.co.uk

BARTELLI II The beautifully lined BARTELLI II is ready to go anywhere, designed to be sailed short-handed and built to very high standards.

BARTELLI II received a substantial maintenance upgrade in 2015 and moreover her keen owner has recently instructed to reduce the asking price to â‚Ź 595.000 (VAT paid).

For more information please visit www.hoekbrokerage.com or contact: +31 (0)299 315 506 - info@hoekbrokerage.com

ROB PEAKE, EDITOR

GLOVES ARE ON (AND OFF) Do you understand that antifouling is a potentially hazardous substance? Do you wear gloves and a mask when applying it? Do you ensure you don’t spill the stuff everywhere? I’ll bet your answer to all of these questions is “yes”. Yet the European Union’s health and safety team has suddenly become concerned that the opposite is true. And consequently there’s a chance that parts of the EU might ban private boat owners from applying antifouling themselves. One reader emailed me to say: “If DIY antifouling is banned, the price for my family to have our 34ft Buchanan hauled out and commercially done each year would bring a close to our boat ownership.” Plan B would see antifoul not banned, but weakened until pointless. All power to the British Coatings Federation, which is lobbying to have this ludicrous measure stopped in its tracks (see p12).

classicboat.co.uk Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TQ EDITORIAL Editor Rob Peake +44 (0)207 349 3755 rob.peake@classicboat.co.uk Associate Editor Steffan Meyric Hughes +44 (0)207 349 3758 steffan@classicboat.co.uk Senior Art Editor Peter Smith +44 (0)207 349 3756 peter.smith@classicboat.co.uk Senior Sub Editor Henry Giles +44 (0)207 349 3708 henry.giles@classicboat.co.uk Technical Editor Theo Rye Publishing Consultant Martin Nott ADVERTISING Advertisement Manager Edward Mannering +44 (0)207 349 3747 edward.mannering@chelseamagazines.com Brand Manager Ginny MacLean +44 (0)207 349 3750 Advertisement Production Allpointsmedia +44 (0)1202 472781 allpointsmedia.co.uk Published Monthly ISSN: 0950 3315 USA US$12.50 Canada C$11.95 Australia A$11.95 Subscribe now: +44 (0)1795 419840 classicboat@servicehelpline.co.uk http://classicboat.subscribeonline.co.uk Subscriptions manager William Delmont +44 (0)207 349 3710 will.delmont@chelseamagazines.com Subscriptions Department 800 Guillat Avenue, Kent Science Park, Sittingbourne, Kent ME9 8GU Managing Director Paul Dobson Deputy Managing Director Steve Ross Commercial Director Vicki Gavin Publisher Simon Temlett Digital Manager James Dobson Follow the Classic Boat team on Twitter and Facebook THE

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GO FURTHER I SAIL BETTER I BE INSPIRED March 2016 | sailingtoday.co.uk | £4.20

YO

MARUR GU TU M IDE RK AR TO EY IS

High Atlantic tales from three decades of rallyers NEW BOAT

TOP KIT, BOATS, SAILORS: Y&Y AWARD WINNERS REVEALED INTERVIEWS

ON TEST: EXCLUSIVE

Ainslie’s new ride

K8 Sport

Wingsail sportsboat

ANALYSIS

T2 uncovered PLUS Martin Whitmarsh: from F1 to BAR

X-factor Punchy winter cruising in the Xc-42

Predicting the future Offshore races in the Olympics?

INSIGHT

Giles Scott

EXPERT ADVICE

Nav tips

With fellow Brits on the road to Rio

Anticipate patterns and get ahead

INTERVIEW

Harrier down

PRACTICAL

Circumnavigator Mustoe on sinking in the North Sea

Repaint

The pros explain how to get a shiny new hull SEAWEED

Sargassum blooms threat to Atlantic sailors ST227_001_Cover v5.indd 1

WEST SCOTLAND

Exploring a landscape of islands and lochs

YACHTS YACHTING

CHELSEA ARINE M MAGAZINES

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CHELSEA ARINE M MAGAZINES

02

WEEKENDER

The Viko 30 is great value and bang up to date

COVER STORY

4 . JOUR DE FETE The return of a historic Q boat COVER STORY

20 . 1960S KIM HOLMAN DESIGN Cerinthe, a much-loved family cruiser COVER STORY

34 . PETTERSSON LAUNCH A speedy 1919 Swedish motor boat COVER STORY

40 . HOLLOW SPARS’ HISTORY Theo Rye traces a fascinating story 48 . TWIST BE YOUR FRIEND The benefits of a heavy boom 50 . WE MEET TRISTAN STONE Timber supplier supreme

9 771367 586100

KEEP CLEAR

We take the fear out of crossing shipping lanes 19/01/2016 17:32

For adventurous cruising sailors

9 770044 000205

DOUBLING UP

SUMMER 2016

KEELBOAT A-Z

RACING RE-THINK

Dinghy technique with Team GBR 49er pros

Holiday inspiration – from foiling cats to shark flotillas

Our comprehensive listing of the top racing yachts

Spice up your club or class programme with fresh ideas

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COVER STORY

54 . LIVELY LADY Who really designed her?

56 . TOM CUNLIFFE “You mean take a pick-axe to the hull?”

COVER STORY

58 . UNDER TOWER BRIDGE Sailing a gaff cutter into London 64 . HITLER’S TENDER Awaiting restoration in a field in Kent 68 . COCKLESHELL Story behind a unique Solent dayboat 88 . MORWENNA’S INTERIOR Final part of the schooner’s refit REGULARS

£4.30 Issue #1694 February 2016 yachtsandyachting.co.uk

TRANSAT

30th ARC

CONTENTS 4

COVER STORY

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The Chelsea Magazine Company Ltd Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TQ +44 (0)207 349 3700 chelseamagazines.com Copyright The Chelsea Magazine Company 2015 all rights reserved ISSN 2059-9277

TOM CUNLIF F DIGS FO E R A LEAK p56

12 18 29 30 33

. . . . .

TELL TALES US NEWS SALEROOM OBJECTS OF DESIRE ADRIAN MORGAN

54 72 73 74 96 98

. . . . . .

20 50

BY DESIGN CLASS NOTES NEW CLASSICS PILOT CUTTER SPECIAL LETTERS STERNPOST

58 CRAFTSMANSHIP 82 86 92 93

. . . .

YARD NEWS YARD VISIT BOATBUILDER’S NOTES TRADITIONAL TOOL

COVER BY: JAMES ROBINSON TAYLOR

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

3

EMILY HARRIS

Q

THE CELEBRATIONS We join Frank C Paine’s 1930 design Jour de Fête, part of a revival of Q boats, only six of which remain

STORY KATHY MANSFIELD

INGRID ABERY

Above: After a major rebuild in Maine, the boat was brought to Europe

by Bruno Troublé (centre)

B

runo Troublé, of America’s Cup and Louis Vuitton fame, has a new project. He is promoting a renaissance of some of the smaller classes of the Universal Rule, discovering and restoring boats in north America and bringing them to race in the Mediterranean. The Universal Rule, devised in the USA in the late 1890s by Nathanael Herreshoff and adopted by the New York YC in 1903, is most famously known by the J-Class, the largest of these racing classes denoted by letters of the alphabet. Jour de Fête, ex-Falcon II, is a Q-Class design, more the size of an International Rule 8-M class, designed by Frank C Paine in 1930.

Jour de Fête’s arrival five years ago on the classic scene in the Med has developed into many wins and some fine match racing with a Johan Anker designed Q boat, Leonore, ex-Cotton Blossom, introduced by another America’s Cup legend and friend of Bruno’s, Dennis Conner. A larger P boat, Olympian, was brought to the Med in 2014 by Bruno with great racing success and another, Chips, is being restored at the moment. Perhaps five P boats still exist, and they are fast coming out of obscurity to be given a well-deserved new racing life.

There are probably six Q boats still surviving out of an initial 20 before World War I and perhaps over 40 built after that, by such fine designers such as L Francis Herreshoff, John Alden and Sherman Hoyt besides those already mentioned. These boats are turning heads and are winning prize after prize.

The Q-Class was the first to use the Universal Rule, with Starling Burgess’ new design of Orestes in 1904, 36ft (10.97m) overall and 25ft on the waterline, with a sail area of 770sq ft. The new rule was much needed, promoting displacement and penalising sail area. At a stroke it moderated the dangerous extremes in shape and scantlings that were becoming prevalent under the earlier Seawanhaka Rule. The new system provided more balanced, seaworthy boats, much as the International or Metre Rule did a few years later in 1907 in Britain and Europe.

6

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

In the first version of the Universal Rule, there were no scantling rules, so boats were lighter than those built under the International Rule. This partly explains why fewer of the Universal Rule have survived, and when they have, they need a more comprehensive rebuild. But then they are light, fast, responsive and a joy to sail.

“They are rocket ships with 10 knots of wind and flat seas,” comments Bruno. However, by the time Jour de Fête was built, the Universal Rule had adopted Lloyd’s specifications, so the boats were stronger.

The Universal Rule boats were also designed for a different environment in New England – racing in sheltered inshore bays where waves and tides are small and summer winds light. Sailing in the Solent or Scotland means being often subject to a weight and strength of wind that requires strong boats and less sail – not that sailors there were any more averse to piling on sail.

The Universal Rule evolved into 10 classes, from the 88ft (26.8m) I-Class, the J-Class, down to a 17ft (5.18m) waterline for the S-Class, 20ft (6.1m) for the R-Class, 25ft (7.62m) for the Q-Class, 31ft (9.44m) for the P-Class. Over the years and thanks to several rule changes, the boats were designed longer: the 1930 Jour de Fête has the longest waterline of the Qs at 32ft (9.75m). She’s 52ft (15.8m) LOA and less beamy than earlier Q boats.

The Q boats were raced both in Long Island Sound near New York, Sherman Hoyt’s Capsicum winning many races there, and in Marblehead and other bays of Massachusetts. By 1913 the larger P-Class was the choice of the top skippers and owners. After WWI, however, things changed. The Ps were deemed too expensive to maintain and crew, and at that time all boats were moving quickly away from gaff rigs to the new bermudan (Marconi) rig. The R-Class, about the size of the earlier Q boats, began to dominate and some of the P boats were sold to racing clubs in the Great Lakes and Canada. One of the designers in the Marblehead area of P and R-Class boats was Frank C Paine and his first R-Class Gypsy was seen to win many

KATHY MANSFIELD

KATHY MANSFIELD

JOUR DE FETE

EMILY HARRIS

Previous spread and above: Jour de FĂŞte brings the Universal Rule to Cowes as she races in Panerai British Classics Week 2015, where she won her class against a clutch of International Rule 8-Ms

KATHY MANSFIELD

EMILY HARRIS

8 KATHY MANSFIELD

EMILY HARRIS

races. By 1928 the larger Q-Class began to re-emerge and many of these were designed by Paine in his office established in 1921, Burgess & Paine. They also hired a young draftsman by the name of L Francis Herreshoff.

Starling Burgess designed the Q boats Hawk, Hayseed VIII and Falcon I before the office was dissolved in 1926, and Paine designed Hornet, his first Q-Class.

This beat the reigning Q-Class champion of the time, Johan Anker’s 1925 Sally XIII. All three designers went on to design further Q boats, interpreting the rule in their different ways. L Francis Herreshoff’s 1928 Nor’easter V was very successful in light airs once her rig was tuned, as was Paine’s Robin of that year. She is still in existence, awaiting restoration. A year later Paine designed Cara Mia, the third of his four Q boats, the last being Falcon II in 1930, now Jour de Fête.

Frank C Paine was the son of General Charles J Paine, who in the late 1800s had asked Starling Burgess’ father Edward to design Puritan, Mayflower and Volunteer as America’s Cup defenders. Frank had an introduction into the top echelon of the Massachusetts racing world and he quickly showed talent and an ability to innovate. His designs ranged from the J boat Yankee, the Bermuda Race winner Highland Light, the fishing schooner Gertrude Thebaud as well as racing yachts designed to both the Universal Rule and the International, Metre Rule.

The Hart Nautical Library at MIT has 21 of Paine’s half models and about 2,300 of his plans. Just launched this June in the Netherlands at Holland Jachtbouw is his J-Class boat Topaz, sail number J8, designed in 1935 but never built. Topaz is 88ft on the waterline, the longest J-Class ever built, and with the lowest wetted surface and highest keel aspect ratio.

Many of Paine’s designs were built at the renowned Lawley & Son yard, where he was company president for many years. George Lawley & Son, who built Jour de Fête, was the major boatbuilding yard in New England other than the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company, which did not build boats by other designers.

Lawleys built about 6,000 boats between the 1860s and the 1940s, with three generations of the family involved, Fred Lawley attending MIT to study naval architecture in the late 1890s and designing boats such as Seminole, which still races today.

By the time Falcon II/Jour de Fête was built, the International Rule was superseding the Universal Rule as the favourite for interclub racing in America, particularly in Long Island Sound. In 1929 there were 14 Q boats racing in Marblehead, the peak year for the class. Shortly after that the Qs were competing with the similar-sized 8-Ms, and eventually shared starts and courses.

The Eights began to take over and most of the Q boats, except for Robin, moved west, bought by owners racing in the Great Lakes. Questa is still sailing on Flathead Lake, Montana, along with Herreshoff’s Nor’easter V. The history of Falcon II goes quiet at this point, until she was discovered in poor shape near Milwaukee and was bought in 2003 by Konrad Ulbrich, moving her east to his farm in Camden, Maine.

EMILY HARRIS

JOUR DE FETE

The French connection Bruno Troublé had been sailing his own boat in Maine when he moored alongside Falcon II, then called Hayday. “I loved her,” Bruno says. The boat was raced successfully in the 2007 Eggemoggin Reach Race and then sold to Tom Hill, who raced her in Newport. Finally Bruno managed to convince his close friend Pascal Oddo, a French businessman, to buy her. Pascal had owned a motorboat until Bruno had introduced him to racing sailing boats.

What does a former motorboater make of classic sailing? Pascal Oddo is no ordinary motorboater and his “Minister of Sea Affairs”, Bruno Troublé is no ordinary sailor, but Pascal’s comments still ring true. He had turned first to a modern 86ft (26.2m) Philip Brianddesigned superyacht and he enjoyed racing on various boats at St Tropez. “But at a certain level, if you race with a modern boat, you have only employees on board,” Pascal notes. “I realised that classic boats are a fantastic area for racing and sailing: competitive but not as specialised, it’s something you can do with your friends and your family. The boats are so beautiful and it’s very nice to sail on an historic boat that has a story. It’s another kind of ambience.”

“When we got her, we adjusted the rig and the sailplan for racing,” Bruno says. “In the Med, the CIM rules don’t measure the foot of the jib, and these boats never sailed with the big genoa overlaps like the 8-Ms did. So we put in a big overlap and this helped make her faster, particularly in light winds.” Bruno used other workings of the rules to his advantage: “CIM doesn’t measure the sail area, it measures the distance, for example the exact length of the boom and the distance from the lowest part of the mast to the block at the top. Therefore the sail has now been cut to end right at the end of the boom. There is no point having the mainsail end 30cm short!”

The boat has more than repaid everyone’s hopes. There’s no sign of weather helm, for a start. “I’ve been sailing all my life on the best boats and these Q boats are a dream to sail,” says Bruno. “They are true racing boats, you ease an inch on the main and it changes the boat completely. Adjusting the runners makes a difference. They’re extremely sensitive and subtle.”

“I’ve been sailing all my life on the best boats and these Q boats are a dream to sail” Bruno Troublé

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

9

NEW BEGINNINGS

In the Med she

Konrad, or Koni as he was known, already had an R-Class boat that he sailed in the Eggemoggin Reach Classics Race with his Boston-based daughter Wilhelmina, or Willy. They had sailed well enough that their handicap was probably going to be increased, and the thought of a new classic to restore and sail was tempting, one that he could race but also cruise a bit in Penobscot Bay. He knew that a Frank Paine boat was bound to be fast, which was important: Koni had been on the crew of American Eagle in 1964 in the America’s Cup races, and had sailed on the 73ft (22.25m) S&S yawl Bolero. His good friend Knight Coolidge tempted him to go ahead and added his help to the project. Koni bought the boat for a fraction of the asking price.

Koni had projects tucked away in corners of barns and fields and relished the challenge, and his daughters Willy and Cecile were pleased to be involved as far as they could. It was a major job. There were 88 ribs to replace, deadwood, every bolt in the chainplates, keelbolts, all the planking beneath the waterline.

The boat was riding 9in below her waterline when last measured. Part of this was the outsized 20in bulwarks around her decks, added to increase her freeboard to the height specified by rules in the Great

has won her class in Imperia in 2013, Antibes 2014, Marseilles 2013 and 2014, and St Tropez in 2014

Lakes. Part of it too, they later realised, is that the measurement was taken in the Great Lakes where the fresh water is less buoyant than salt water.

They also had to work through inconsistencies in Paine’s drawings and undocumented alterations in the intervening years. She had done well in races on the Great Lakes under the ownership of David Pappas, but they were not sure how she would sail after their work, or whether they would cure the weather helm they had heard about. “You gotta be a fantastic screwball to do this,” Koni commented.

Various people put their effort into the restoration: Dave Stimson replaced the frames, deadwood and keel timber, George Emery worked with Koni to design stronger metal floors and worked on the rudder and engine, Scotty Rome made custom bronze hardware. A telescoping ventilator designed by Paine at Lawleys was added. A rig was designed by Walter Wales – Koni wanted a larger foresail and later discussed it with Olin Stephens, who had agreed with him, but suggested the mainsail should be smaller so a permanent backstay could be installed: she needed more than just the running backstays. John Anderson joined in time to replace all the underwater planking, and remained with the project until the end. The coachroof is new and everything below was John’s work too, painted white with much mahogany trim in classic New England style. A pine deck was laid and John made all the spars. He has since restored the Q boat designed by Starling Burgess, Falcon I. And sadly there was an end, and not the one expected. The boat was launched and motored around the harbour to test the engine, but Koni did not live to sail the boat he had worked so hard on. It was a poignant loss. There was a beginning too, however.

Koni’s daughter Willy had been committed to the project from the start and she now left her career in Boston to help her mother run the family farm in Warren. She was also starting a relationship with her father’s new boatbuilder. Now they are married with two children, Willy running the farm and John building boats in the workshop. This is where the 1913 Burgess P-Class Chips is being restored, set for launch in 2017, and the Q boat Robin awaits restoration there too.

JOUR DE FÊTE LOA 52ft

(15.85m) LWL 33ft 7in (10.2m) BEAM 9ft (2.74m) DRAUGHT 7ft (2.13m) SAIL AREA 889sq ft (82.6m2)

10

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

M.I.T MUSEUM/HART NAUTICAL COLLECTIONS

JAMES ROBINSON TAYLOR

JOUR DE FETE

Winning 1930 Paine Burgess Q Boat

FOR SALE

Central agent: Barney Sandeman.

Jour de FĂŞte ( ex Falcon ) is on the market. She is a Q boat - like a small J boat - built in Boston in 1930.

She was fully restored a few years ago. Are you ready to win ?

This rare beauty won most of the major events in Europe (Imperia, Marseille , St Tropez, Antibes and Cowes last July.)

She is at her best with new sails , new engine and tuned up to win races . . . L:15.80 - Beam 2.80 The boat is in St Tropez -VAT paid - well priced for a quick sale

Please contact Bruno TroublĂŠ: bruno@coyoteandco.eu Tel: +33 661004321 or Barney Sandeman: barney@sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)1202 330077

Tell Tales

Classic Boat’s address: Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TQ cb@classicboat.co.uk Follow the Classic Boat team on Twitter and Facebook

COWES, IOW

Businesses and private boat owners were cleaning up and counting their losses after a serious fire in Cowes, Isle of Wight, as we went to press. The fire broke out in the Medina Yard near the West Cowes end of the chain ferry at around noon on 25 January.

According to eyewitnesses, the fire started in one of the businesses on the site. Eleven fire engines arrived on the scene, four of them drafted in from Hampshire Fire Service, and around 50 firefighters worked until dusk to douse the flames, which covered an area of around 10,000m2.

The extent of the damage is still unknown, but confirmed losses so far include the

BARRY PAYNE SOLENTT NEWS

Inferno destroys classic yachts

36ft (11m) Charles Sibbick yacht Witch (1902) that has been under restoration for a (17.8m), Mylne yacht Fedoa built in 1927, also the subject of a long, ongoing restoration, this one by boatbuilder Patrick Moreton at his yard, Moreton Marine, for a private owner. Early reports indicate that a fleet of about 15 Etchells yachts and at least one wooden Dragon and five original X One Designs have gone too. An 1896 steam pinnace and a Dunkirk Little Ship are also feared lost, as well as around 50 GRP production yachts. There are thought to be no serious injuries. The owner of the Medina Yard was helping the clean-up operation, and was unavailable for comment. Evacuated residents, who spent the night at the Corinthian Yacht Club, have returned home.

‘Churchill’s yacht’ for sale C/O COLDWELL BANKER

There have been a number of stories in the mainstream press about the recent

12

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

listing of ‘Churchill’s yacht’ in Limay, near Paris. The 1936-built Amazone, a 128ft (39m) twin-screw Thornycroft, has been put on the open market for just €2 million (c£1.5m). According to broker Coldwell Banker, the yacht is in need of some serious work. It also seems highly unlikely that she belonged to Churchill, even though the British PM had use of her in the war. The 1937 Lloyd’s Register lists her as belonging to a Commandant L Hemeleers-Shenley.

ISLE OF WIGHT COUNTY PRESS

long time by her owner Martin Nott, CB’s publishing consultant; and the 58ft 6in

EU

C/O ENTERPRISE ASSOCIATION

Survey rebuts antifouling concerns In response to concerns that new EU regulations on the use of biocides might prevent private boat owners from using antifoul, the British Coatings Federation (BCF) launched a survey to learn about the public’s use of the potentially dangerous paint.

The survey, which attracted a

Cross-Channel Enterprises at 60

response of 2,500 boat owners,

The beach at Dover during the small hours of a January morning with a full Force 4 blowing is hardly

the vast majority of whom

conducive to the idea of dinghy sailing, but at 3.28am on 9 January, 1956 two Enterprise dinghies left

antifoul their own boats annually,

Dover to make a cold night crossing of the English Channel to Calais, in one of sailing’s great, largely

revealed that more than 90 per

forgotten, small-boat voyages. The boats, known simply as Enterprise 1 and Enterprise 2, were crewed by

cent are “well aware of the

Bruce Banks with wife Rosemary, and Bobbie Prenger and Flavia Nunes. The publicity stunt made quite

hazards involved” and that they

an impact not just because of the derring-do, but because the Enterprise class had been commissioned

use “the appropriate level of

as an affordable ‘Everyman’ dinghy from designer Jack Holt just a year before by The News Chronicle,

personal protective equipment”.

who covered the crossing in full. On 9 January, the crews pushed off from Dover beach and planed most

The BCF is now reviewing a

of the way to Calais in the lively conditions, experiencing thick fog at the French end. They had to delay

14-page preliminary report on

their entry into Calais for this photo to be taken by an aeroplane chartered by The Chronicle, a photo that

the responses, and was to hold a

would appear on the news that night and in papers all over Britain the next day. They eventually arrived

meeting on 3 February to discuss

at 10.10am. This was the era when newspapers would get behind sailing in a big way: in 1962, Holt would

how best to use the findings as a

collaborate with the Daily Mirror to design one of the most successful dinghies of all time, the

tool for lobbying.

eponymous Mirror, and later that decade, the Sunday Times sponsored the famous Golden Globe yacht race. The Enterprise continues to race to this day to the same design; more than 23,000 have been built.

C/O YJA

Lone Wolf 1905

Known to take the odd prize...

The 26ft 4in (8m) gaff cutter Lone Wolf was built by Ashton

pleasure yacht’. She cruised as far as the Baltic and

Cartoonist Mike Peyton (left) received

Mediterranean between the

a long, standing ovation when he was

wars and sat out World War II

given a special Diamond Jubilee

at Pin Mill, remaining on the

Lifetime Achievement Award at

East Coast until 1983 when

London’s Trinity House on 12 January,

OGA stalwarts Dick and Pat

at the Yachting Journalists’

Dawson bought her. Following

Association (YJA) annual lunch. The

a refit at Hillyards in

'jubilee' refers to the YJA, 60 this year.

Littlehampton she was moored

Mike Peyton is 95. The Yachtsman of

at the Elephant Boatyard at

the Year award went to Ian Walker,

Bursledon and more latterly in

first British skipper to win the Volvo

Yarmouth, IoW. She has made

Ocean Race, and the annual Young

a comfortable cruising home

Sailor of the Year award went to

for the current owners for more

Topper champion Eleanor Poole (15).

than 30 years and has been

Yachtsman of the Year has been

known to take the odd prize in

won by, among others, Sir Robin

gaffers and club races.

Knox-Johnston, Edward Heath and

Poole, in 1905 as a ‘gentleman’s

C/O TH EOWNER

LONDON UK

‘Yachting knighthood’ for Mike Peyton

and Kilner in Hamworthy,

Dame Ellen MacArthur.

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

13

Loa: 15.85 m

Loa: 14.65 m

JOU R DE FE T E

HENR IE T T A

1930 FR ANK PAINE Q-BOAT Q16

1909 SQUARE-METRE SK30

|Beam: 2.74 m |Dr aft: 2.13 m |Price: EUR 700,000 | |Loa: 11.85 m |Beam: 1.86 m |Dr aft: 1.40 m |Price: EUR 75,000

S VA NE V I T

OP T I M IS T III

1939 TORE HOLM 8METRE YACHT

1968 ABEKING & RASMUSSEN TYPE OPTIMIST ONE-TONNER

|Beam: 2.44 m |Dr aft: 1.90 m |Price: EUR 280,000 | |Loa: 11.48 m |Beam: 3.20 m |Dr aft: 1.90 m |Price: EUR 60,000

JONN Y

BIRGI T

1947 HENRY GRUBER / BURMESTER UTILITY

TORE HOLM INTERNATIONAL 8METRE YACHT

Loa: 11.93 m

|Beam: 3.20 m |Dr aft: 1.10 m |Price: EUR 59,500 | |Loa: 14.10 m |Beam: 2.47 m |Dr aft: 2.02 m |Price: EUR 180.000

Member of t he Robbe & B erk i ng f a m i ly

YA C H T S

+49 (0)461 31 80 30 65 路 BAUM+KOENIG@CLASSIC-YACHTS.DE 路 W W W.CLASSIC-YACHTS.DE

C/O JAMIE GALLANT, AFG

NEWS

NORWAY/NZ

From Nordland to North Island A new boatbuilding school is about to open in Russell, on New Zealand’s North Island, thanks to the efforts of two organisations – Wood 2 Water and Adventure for Good.

Principal instructor will be the Australian boatbuilder and steamboat conservator John Clode, but in a great coup, Adventure for Good have flown in Ulf Mikalsen, a traditional Norwegian boatbuilder whose shed in Kjerringøy is 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

C/O JAMIE GALLANT, AFG

Ulf is a fascinating character, as an award-winning documentary about him reveals.

He lives a timeless woodman’s existence – a real tree-to-sea purist who hunts for grown bends with a chainsaw in the forest. Ulf will spend four weeks at the school, teaching students to build a Spissbat (above and right).

Designed in 1895, of clinker build, and between 12ft and 18ft in length, these were once popular to the point of ubiquity (7-8,000 built, reckons Ulf), plying north Norway’s coasts under sail and oar until the 1960s.

SUFFOLK

Awards

SOUTH AFRICA

Sextant winner

JOHNNY BLACK, C/O NHS

Dredging finds Rolex Routine dredging at

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Suffolk Yacht Harbour this winter turned up an aptly named Rolex

Alumni association for shipshape trainees

designed yacht in

Vote now in our awards!

plywood, won our

So far 2,352 have come

the marina in June

recent competition,

forward to vote in our

2014, losing the watch,

and received a Davis

2016 Awards, placing us

but is now delighted to

sextant. “Astro

on track to break the

be reunited with his

National Historic Ships, Britain’s government-funded

navigation is just one

record for number of

battered, but still

maritime heritage body, recently started an ‘alumni

of those things I really

voters (around 5,000).

working, timepiece.

association’ for the various training schemes it has

want to learn,”

So vote now. It’s quick,

implemented over the years, including the current flagship,

Richard told CB.

easy and it gives some

Classic Boat 2016 awards logo.indd 4

Reader Richard Kirk in Sandton, South Africa, currently building a

MARITIME HERITAGE

28ft Dudley Dix

rare recognition to

(SHTP) one-year programme. The initiative is called MAST

the boatbuilders and

(Members and Shipshape Trainees) and was launched at a

others who make the

recent networking day. Members will receive a regular

magic happen.

newsletter, annual networking and social events, and

Go to classicboat.co.

discounts on all sorts of goodies. A video made by National

uk/awards2016.

Historic Ships about the SHTP programme is now on our

Voting closes at 0900

website – just to go classicboat.co.uk and search for SHTP.

CB

the successful Shipshape Heritage Training Partnership

23/11/2015 11:39

Sea Dweller. It belongs to a berth-holder whose wife gave it to him for his 50th birthday. He fell into

GMT on 7 March.

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

15

JAMES DODDS

Varuna, Horn Timbers

oil on linen

90 x 100 cms

353⁄8 x 393⁄8 ins

Renowned on both sides of the Atlantic, James Dodds is a painter of working boats.

“What all my paintings are fundamentally about is the balance between the known and the unknowable: the boats with all my knowledge about how they are made matched by the dialogue with the paint; using what skill I have to create a piece of art that contains more than just the sum of its parts but, hopefully, something of the human spirit also. It’s about using head (idea), heart (feelings) and hand (skill) – a creative holy trinity. And I do think that work is a form of prayer or meditation. I long for that timeless out-of-body moment when everything is working well.”

James Dodds

Exhibition 6th – 22nd April 2016 Exhibition catalogue available £12.50 inc p&p

MessuM’s www.messums.com 28 Cork Street, London W1S 3NG Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545

FRANCE

Boat collector opens museum Boat and car collector Jean-Pierre Osenat has fulfilled a dream and opened his private classic speedboat

Q&A

museum to visitors. Located in La Teste, a small oyster-farming harbour on the scenic and romantic Bassin d’Arcachon, the Centre Français du Canot Automobile displays much more than French-only boats.

In fact, the still-growing Osenat collection is international and currently comprises more than 30 boats, each of them representing a pivotal moment in motorboating’s evolution, from displacement to planing As an auctioneer world-famous for his Napoleonic sales in the Chateau de Fontainebleau where Bonaparte spent his last moments in France, Jean-Pierre Osenat knows what history is all about and each boat here is described in detail.

Among the collection are some very rare boats such as the stunning 1947 Portier 'Glisseur' runabout with sliding side windows like a Limousine, from Switzerland; or a unique 1924 Excelsior’s launch from Geneva Lake; a very nice American 1927 Gar Wood and a fine set of boats from Italy’s Rio boatyard, Riva’s direct competitor in its homewaters of Sarnico. Gérald Guetat

C/O BEDS ON BOARD

hulls and even racing three-point hydroplanes.

TIM LUDLOW of Beds on Board Where did the idea come from?

Have you had issues with novices

Sir Peter Ogden and Jason Ludlow

with unrealistic expectations?

were racing at Palma Vela in 2014.

Not so far. We work closely with our

Accommodation was scarce yet the

owners to ensure the listings are as

marinas were full of empty yachts

accurate as possible.

and the question of how we could solve this was asked, and the answer

What’s the appeal of a boat over

was ‘beds’ – bedsonboard.com was

a warm hotel room?

launched at London Boat Show 2015.

Apart from the sound of the sea, fresh air, the sense of freedom and well-

What’s been the reaction so far?

being? Perhaps just doing something

It’s been amazing. One year in and we

different or a first step into boating.

HENRI THIBAULT

have met hundreds of boat owners and organisations and have had

What are you plans for the future?

positive feedback. Articles in the

We aim to be the go-to destination

Telegraph, Sunday Times and

for global boat rental accommodation

Huffington Post helped our growth.

and to grow what we call the ‘three economies’: the sharing economy, the

AUSTRALIA

Sailing in the desert

Hopes are high that forecast rains will completely fill Lake Eyre,

WORD OF THE MONTH

Artificer

One who works by hand in

Australia’s ‘inland sea’ and one of

wood or metal;

the largest inland bodies of water

generally

in the world, for the first time since

termed an ‘idler

1974. If that happens, the Lake Eyre

on board’, from

YC will hold a dinghy regatta there

his not keeping

for the first time in four years, when the lake part filled.

CANADA/UK

Pilot returns

The 1899-built pilot cutter Carlotta

night-watch, and only appearing on deck duty when the hands are turned up.

The Sailor’s

owner and is coming home.

Word Book of

She is one of the 18 original

1867

PCs known still to exist.

boating economy and economies

or looking for a new experience?

around the marinas and waterways.

It’s been about 50/50 since taking

We will also continue our work

our first booking in May. The answer

with British Marine, The Yacht

rarely affects the owner decision – it

Harbour Association and the UK

just helps them frame the experience

government to help align the sharing

and expectations. Part of our vision is

economy and the marine industry.

to offer easy access to the boating lifestyle to help grow the boating

Are there any classic boats

economy so we very much welcome

onyour books?

those seeking a new experience.

Yes, quite a few now and all over the world including a former flagship for

How do you guarantee

the Royal New Zealand Yacht

a boat’s safety?

Squadron once crewed by a Sir Peter

We can’t offer guarantees but we

Blake; a 62-footer in the BVIs and a

certainly offer tools and advice to help

classic schooner in Southampton.

with owner confidence. Guests must have verified email accounts and

Are you looking forward

mobile numbers and we pre-authorise

to the CB Awards?

Of course, we’re proud to be

credit cards before a booking request

that has been in Canada since the 1970s has been sold to a British

Are most customers boaters already

is made. The owner then has 48

supporting the awards and look forward to seeing the

hours to communicate and decide as to whether to accept or decline the booking.

results. We’d like to wish all

Awards

entrants the best of luck.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Classic Boat 2016 awards logo.indd 4

23/11/2015 11:39

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

17

TELL TALES

DAN WALKER

BRUCE KERRIDGE, SYDNEY

NEWS

CHESAPEAKE

History’s fastest: Aussie skiffs vs US sandbaggers Historic yachting enthusiasts from around the world have ‘virtually’ toured each other’s collections for years, but rarely get to try out the antiquities in person, reports Chris Museler.

A chance visit to Chesapeake Bay made such an impression on an Australian 18-foot (5.48m) skiff veteran that an Aussie-American challenge is being arranged for 2017 between the indigenous sandbaggers of the US East Coast and a pair of historic 18 foot skiffs from Sydney Harbour. “I was aware

Above left: the identical Bull and Bear sandbaggers built in 1995/6 to match race Above right: Replica of the famous 18ft skiff Britannia (1919), racing in Sydney Harbour

of the similarities between the 18 footers and sandbaggers,” says Ian Smith, who races the historic skiffs on Sydney Harbour. “In 2010 I was passing through Annapolis and sailed on Bull and Bear. It occurred to me I’d love to return with a good crew and really push the boats.”

The 50ft (15m) LOS Bull and Bear, replicas of the late 1800s skimming dishes raced in New York Harbor, were launched in the 1990s.

The links between the 18s and sandbaggers are distant, but the similarities are striking.

“They are more like common ancestors,” says Smith, “with common social origins.”

The historic 18-footer group has now been in touch with the National Sailing Hall of Fame in Annapolis. A date has been set for September 2017, and half-a-dozen sailors and spouses are planning to travel there for a series of match races. Aussies vs Americans in Bull and Bear is a certainty, but the main aim is to get the 18s to the US. A reciprocal event in Sydney will be scheduled as a follow-up.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY

RHODE ISLAND

Bogie’s boat to re-launch soon Now in the last stages of her rebuild at LMI, the legendary 1934 S&S yawl Santana, once owned by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, will stay in New England for the 2016 season.

She was due for shakedown sails in January to be shipped to the west coast, but shipwrights and owner decided not to rush things and to sea trial her over the summer on the eastern seaboard. She will have other S&S yawls to race there, including Dorade, Sonny and possibly Stormy Weather (currently in Europe). CM 18

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

C/O HUNTINGTON LIBRARY

CB ARCHIVES

New 12s to race in ‘classic AC’ A concept springing from discontent surrounding the America’s Cup’s ‘battle of the billionaires’ is on track to create history. Tapping into the nostalgia of the 12-M era, former AC spokesman Tom Ehman has created the San Francisco Yacht Racing Challenge and has just released renderings of the one-design 12-M class that will match race for the cup. Like earlier AC races, it will have a nationality rule and also update its approach with a requirement for a number of females, under-20s and over 65-year-old crews.

The gem of this event will be the Farr 12-M with the classic lines of the pre-1987, winged-keeled 12s above the water, and a modern canoe body and bulb with wings below the water.

Syndicates from several nations that have raced in the America’s Cup have expressed interest in the challenge, which is scheduled for July 2017, after the 35th AC. Chris Museler

ARCTIC ALASKA

Meltwater reveals ships The melting of polar ice has meant that an area of the Chukchi Sea near Wainwright has given up the remains of whaling ships lost 144 years ago, including the famous ship Concordia, reports Kathy Mansfield.

The 128ft (39m) whaling ship Concordia that gave her name to the Raymond Hunt yawls of the mid-20th century was found by archaeologists working for the Maritime Heritage Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the US Dept of Commerce.

Sonar images and historical photos can be seen by visiting the website sanctuaries.noaa.gov/shipwrecks/ lost-arctic-whaling-fleet/ This news follows the recent discovery of at least one long-lost ship of the ill-fated Franklin expedition of 1845, to chart the Northwest Passage.

Mariquita

95 ft William Fife III 19 m Gaff Cutter 1911

€3.5M Lying United Kingdom.

This is a chance to enter classic yacht racing at the highest level. Since her restoration in 2004 MARIQUITA’s results have kept improving such that she cannot now stop winning. In restoring this unique yacht her owners sought not only to save her but to recapture the ethos that prevailed when she was built in 1911 and raced shortly thereafter. She remains a wonderful combination of Fife’s design talent and aesthetic with the superb qualities of his celebrated yard. MARIQUITA is totally ready for the 2016 season.

33 High Street, Poole BH15 1AB, England. Tel: + 44 (0)1202 330077 email: info@sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

www.sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

Flower POWER

What boat do you sail if you co-own Rustler Yachts? This 1967 Kim Holman design is good enough for Nick Offord STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS NIGEL SHARP

I

n 1967, Leslie Hills (“a seasoned East Coast and East Anglian campaigner” according to Yachts & Yachting) commissioned Kim Holman to design, and Tucker Brown to build, a new boat.

Hills’ choice of designer and builder was well judged, as seven of the nine divisional winners in that season’s East Anglian Offshore Racing Association championships had come from Holman’s board, and his new boat would be a near sister ship to Meriva – a recent Holman/Brown collaboration – which was second overall.

Meriva had been described in some detail in Yachting Monthly earlier that year as “a good example of the collaboration between an imaginative designer and a modern builder” and her construction included “prefabrication of unique interdependent parts working from drawings to limits that would not disgrace an engineer. Modern boatbuilding of this kind is a far cry from the skilled but less accurate methods of the past”.

Hills’ new boat was built with Honduras mahogany

22

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

planking above the waterline and pitch pine below on steamed rock elm frames, and was christened Negomi when launched at Burnham-on-Crouch in April 1968.

A month later Yachts & Yachting reported that Hills and his crew had been “practising hard since the launching. As a new boat with a keen crew and nothing to lose Negomi could be in for a good season”. After that prediction, Hills must have been disappointed with what followed: third in the West Mersea to Burnham race, albeit just 21 seconds behind Meriva; then fourth in the Harwich to Hook of Holland race, won by her sister ship, “having put in a much longer starboard tack after the last mark”, according to Y&Y; and in the West Mersea to Zeebrugge race Negomi grounded, having confused Blankenberg pier with Zeebrugge Mole. Meriva was third.

Hills kept Negomi for 14 years before selling her to Bernie Yendell, a shipwright from Penpol in Cornwall, and one more owner followed before David Offord, who had been looking for a family cruising boat, bought

CERINTHE Left: Sailing in Falmouth’s Carrick Roads

Below: The canvas was stripped off the original plywood deck and replaced by swept teak

her in Poole in 1992. By this time she had been renamed Cerinthe after an Alpine flower and, as David’s wife Monika is Austrian, there was no question of changing the name again. She has been based in the Fal estuary ever since and a couple of years ago David passed ownership on to his son Nick.

Throughout the time the Offords have had Cerinthe they have made a number of changes to her and ensured she is kept in first-class condition. In 1999 they bought the company Rustler Yachts and much of Cerinthe’s work has been carried out there, or at least by its refit and repair division Falmouth Yacht Services. However, Nick adds: “We’ve always pottered on the boat ourselves as well. I really enjoy working on her. That’s part of ownership.”

Cerinthe’s deck was originally plywood with painted canvas laid over it, and one of the first Offord modifications was to remove the canvas and lay a new swept teak deck on to the ply. The canvas had also covered the forward cockpit bulkhead and that was CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

23

photo by James Taylor

SAILMAKING SINCE 1790

Congratulations to Tern on her success at Les Voiles de St Tropez with her new suit of Ratsey sails

Please call 01983 294051 or 07798942159 and speak to Andy Cassell or email ratseysails@ratsey.com www.ratseysails.co.uk

FH 2016

Falmouth Classics 2016 Sponsored by Tilley Endurables

Fri 17th - Sun 19th June

A fun-filled weekend of classic sailing Sponsored berthing - Parade of Sail – 3 friendly races Includes a great social programme and the opportunity to enjoy the Falmouth International Sea Shanty Festival

Enter online at falmouthclassics.org.uk 24

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

@FalClassics /FalmouthClassics 08/01/2016 17:24

CERINTHE

replaced by a thick varnished veneer, in teak to match the rest of the brightwork. Although much of the interior is original, the Offords have made some changes, particularly to the area immediately inside the companionway under the coachroof, to give a more open feel. To starboard there is a chart table, forward of which there is a berth. This area used to be closed off behind bulkheads and with access through a sliding door.

Similarly, on the port side there was another small single-berth cabin and while its bulkheads and door have been retained, the berth has been removed and the space converted into a wet locker and second heads.

Furthermore, the bulkhead between the area under the coachroof and the lower saloon, which previously separated the two spaces, has now been opened up and has a large keyhole cut-out in it.

Cerinthe still had her original Perkins 4108 diesel engine when David bought her but “it was rather unreliable and leaked a lot of oil” so about eight years ago this was replaced with a Beta engine of similar horsepower.

Work carried out more recently includes replacement of the stemhead fitting. “It had got a bit bashed over years and was never intended to have an anchor stowed in it, so we made a new one to fit the Delta,” says Nick. Toerails have been stripped back and re-varnished, the mast has been painted and all internal lights were replaced with LED ones that can glow white or red. The hull has hardly needed any work at all – just the replacement of one mahogany plank at the waterline aft “where it dips in and out between sunlight and water, sunlight and water”.

Nick says: “Every year we have a particular project.

The next is to strip the rest of the brightwork back to bare wood and re-varnish it.”

Above: The bulkhead between galley and saloon has been cut back, to create a more open feel

The Offords have used Cerinthe for extensive cruising throughout their period of ownership, taking her to the Caribbean three times and entering Antigua Classics once, coming third in class and winning a Concours d’Elegance.

“The first time we went,” said Nick, “I took about six months off work. We took our time sailing to the Caribbean. Then I flew back and dad took the boat to Venezuela.” She was shipped back on that occasion, but the Offords concluded their two other Caribbean voyages by sailing her home, and they have also cruised her extensively to the Scillies, France, Portugal and Spain. At the moment the cruising programme has been somewhat curtailed, because Nick and his wife have a one-year-old son. “When our son gets a bit older we’ll sail more. We are just child-proofing the boat so he can’t climb out of his

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

25

TRULY CLASSIC 65 Immaculate condition - Handsome - Versatile - Automated sailing systems - Built in strong woodcore composite construction 1999 / 2014.

Asking price â‚Ź 1.350.000 VAT paid For more information please visit www.hoekbrokerage.com or contact: +31 (0)299 315 506

CERINTHE

CERINTHE LOA

43ft (13.1m) LWL

31ft 5½in (9.6m) BEAM

11ft 4in (3.45m) DRAUGHT

7ft (2.13m) SAIL AREA

786sq ft (73m2)

Left: Set up for family cruising but useful on the racecourse too Below: Nick and David (right)

bunk,” says Nick. In 2014, the Offords decided to race Cerinthe in home waters for the first time. “We never intended her to be a racing boat but we thought it would be fun to enter her for the Pendennis Cup,” says Nick.

“We took a huge amount of gear off the boat. You accumulate so much over the years.

“We had two big CQR kedge anchors and chain and all the tools and spares you need for long distance cruising.

You do need to be able to repair things, but I’ve always said that Cerinthe is a floating tool box.”

Two van-loads of gear later, the waterline was one and a half inches lower and Cerinthe was ready to race.

Cerinthe entered Division 2 of the Pendennis Cup along with three other boats, one of which was Ed Dubois’ 1965 Admiral’s Cup boat Firebrand (CB291) which had won the class in the previous event in 2012.

Cerinthe’s crew included Nick, Adrian and various local people who provide services to Rustler Yachts such as rigger David Carne and his son Ben, Gavin Watson from Penrose Sailmakers and Simon Carter from brokers Red Ensign.

“We made it a bit of a Rustler outing,” said Nick, “and we had a good laugh.”

Going into the last race Cerinthe was two points behind Firebrand but after a last-

minute comeback Nick and his crew were awarded the Little Dennis Cup. “It was great fun,” said Nick, “and we hope to enter again next time.”

Clearly the Offords’ extensive experience with Cerinthe has proved beneficial in their work at Rustler’s. While Stephen Jones is responsible for the naval architecture of all the boats in the cruising range, and provides a general layout, all the detailed design work is carried out in-house.

“Our long distance sailing experience really helps when we are designing a new boat,” says Nick.

“To know how things should be so they are practical at sea, proper sea berths, the importance of handholds, how things work in the galley, even small things like cup retainers. It definitely helps a lot.”

This has perhaps resulted in some obvious similarities between Cerinthe and the Rustler cruising yachts, their deep cockpits, for instance. “We’ve been in some quite hairy situations in Cerinthe,” says Nick, “caught out in Biscay storms and the tail end of Hurricane Lilly off Cape Finisterre. But however bad it’s been we have always known that she would look after us, and we know the Rustlers offer the same degree of reassurance.”

Nick also explained the link with Rustler’s smaller day sailing boats: “We have always loved being around classic boats and it’s great to be in a boat that attracts complimentary remarks. That’s one of the things that inspired us to do the 24 and 33 and we have plans to do a bigger version, maybe a 43.”

Nick tells me if he didn’t have Cerinthe he would have a Rustler – well he would say that, wouldn’t he? – but he clearly plans to keep his family boat for some time to come. “We have had her for half her life and hopefully we will keep her for a long time yet. She is perfect for sailing with a small family and I very much hope my son will take her on one day.”

Sadly as this article was put together, David Offord passed away. “He would love to have seen the article but will be happy that Cerinthe will continue to be loved,” the family said.

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

27

Altricia, 1965 McGruer 8M C-R. Exhibited at the 2016 London Boat Show

CORNWALL’S YACHT EXPERTS

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25/01/2016 13:12

Saleroom CHRISTIE’S

Four quid promise

BY DAVE SELBY

CHRISTIE’S

Why pay more than £10,000 for an ocean crossing to New York when you could get afloat on the Norfolk Broads for £4 a week?

That’s the scope of the tantalising choices promised by classic advertising images.

One of the top sellers at Christie’s latest London poster sale was an iconic 1930s image of the Normandie by celebrated artist AM Cassandre. Much imitated in modern cruise-ship advertising, it fetched £10,625.

Yet for just £2,000 you could have bought an evocative railway poster depicting the grimey glamour of the Thames in the 1940s. A 1930s resort poster for Bandol on the French riviera, bought for £2,250, offered a precious glimpse of summer to buoy you through the British winter. Perhaps more within your means and cruising range is “The Cornish Riviera”, yours for £1,375, as depicted in a railway poster advertising Penzance to American tourists. It’s not recorded whether any US visitors asked for a refund when they discovered the seas in the British dream destination weren’t quite as blue as promised, or skies as sunny.

But perhaps most tantalising was the prospect of a Broads sailing holiday on “200 miles of safe inland waterways” for £4 a week. In your dreams! Nevertheless it was one of the most attainable artworks in the auction at a relatively modest £1,125.

BONHAMS

Spritely Healey in a hurry In the 1950s as Austin-Healey sportscars were making waves on the road, the Warwickshire car maker also dipped its toe in the water with a series of sports boats.

Last of the line, introduced in 1960, was the pacy glassfibre 13ft 6in Sprite, which promised “jet-like acceleration” for just £225, considerably less than the cheapest new car. And this 1961 example certainly delivers, with its 80hp Mercury outboard which gives it a top speed of 50mph.

Fully restored in 2010, the four-seat Mimi is coming up to BONHAMS

auction on March 20 at Bonhams’ Goodwood classic car sale with an estimate of £7,000-10,000. You’d pay considerably more for an Austin-Healey Frog-eye Sprite, which has only two seats and is useless at towing water-skiers.

Take a closer look at more Saleroom lots at classicboat.co.uk/saleroom CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

29

Objects of desire PROSPERO MODEL A half-size (31in/78.7cm), free-sailing gaff-rigged, double-masted schooner with spruce deck and lead sinker, built to the designs of William Daniels’ 60in, 1912 schooner Prospero, which is documented in Percival Marshall’s Model Sailing Yachts. Daniels was Britain’s most well-regarded miniature yacht designer. Between 1910 and 1950 he participated in the biggest races and was crowned world champion several times. $8,500 (c£5,700)

Tel: +1 (212) 772 2664. nicholasbrawer.com

ORDING BLOCK

ZHIK KIAMA JACKET

The name Ording is synonymous with

Regatta-goers may have spotted the

practical yet handsome wooden blocks.

Classic Boat logo on the back of our new

The Dutch company can supply blocks in

Zhik jackets last summer. We can report

different woods, using stainless steel or

that after much abuse, on deck, below

aluminium bronze. Owners can also

decks and on the pontoons, the Zhik

personalise a block with a boat name or

Kiama is as smart as ever and shows no

logo. This is one of the family company’s

signs of wear. From Med downpours to

double blocks with stainless steel

wind-over-tide lumpiness in the Solent,

sheaves. From €65 (£50) for 100mm

the Kiama scored top marks. The jacket’s

block with 14mm rope diameter.

ash colour blended well with classic regatta proceedings. £155

Tel: +31-36-5364931 info@ording-blokken.nl ording.nl

zhik.com

LIGHTHOUSE BOOK Scottish and Manx Lighthouses, a photographic journey in the footsteps

NAVAL MODELS BOOK

of the Stevensons

The Rogers Collection of Dockyard Models

This 192-page collection of aerial and

At the US Naval Academy Museum: First and Second Rates, Vol 1

land-based photographs by Ian Cowe

There’s plenty for model boat enthusiasts in the shape of this 226-page, hardback book,

shows all the Stevenson lighthouses and

full of detailed colour photos and text written by retired US army major Grant H Walker

boasts a foreword by Her Royal Highness

about seven models of First and Second Rates from the collection. The collection of

The Princess Royal, patron of the

significant 17th, 18th and 19th century models has its own floor in the museum and is one

Northern Lighthouse Board. £20

of the biggest of its kind in the world. Vol 2 is on its way. $85 (c£60) plus shipping.

Tel: 01593 731 333. whittlespublishing.

Tel: 541 997 4439. seawatchbooks.com

For more Objects of Desire, go to classicboat.co.uk/objects 30

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

VOTE FOR US IN THE CLASSIC BOAT AWARDS | T/T MALAHNE | COCKWELLS 25FT MOTOR LAUNCH

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31

“This is a Boat.”

Oliver Berking

YA C H T S They do still exist – wooden jewels. We create traditional yachts using traditional craftsmanship methods and nothing but wood.

Replicas of classic yachts, restorations and individual new builds. The most famous projects from our shipyard are the 12-metre yachts Sphinx and Johan Anker’s final draft No. 434, which remains unnamed, various classic 6-metre craft, and the Robbe & Berking Commuter, a tribute to the legendary motor yachts from New York in the 1920s.

W W W. C L A S S I C S . R O B B E B E R K I N G . C O M

Adrian Morgan

CRAFTSMANSHIP

On a long-ago voyage in paradise, the portable generator broke down. The starting cord and recoil system had shattered. Several tubes of Araldite and some wire later it was humming away. When we hit Barbados, the Portuguese vine poles with which we had boomed out the twins had been spliced and fished too many times to count. The rubber boat we carried had, by the time it was stolen in Tortola, more patches than rubber.

These days it is only the owners of old wooden boats who retain the skills my grandmother would have classed as ‘make do or mend’. The joy of owning a boat like mine, 1937 and still going strong, is the scope she affords for making incremental ‘improvements’. A coat hook here, or a length of bungee there, my only rule for Sally being the minimum of damage to the structure: i.e. no unnecessary screws. There is enough evidence of gadgets bought, screwed on and ripped off again already.

Look, there on the cockpit bulkhead, I bet those stopped holes once held an old Walker log repeater. Old glassfibre boats will be peppered with gelled-over shot holes, attesting to decades of experiments with gadgets promoted at London boat shows.

Des Sleightholme, the editor of Yachting Monthly, had a boat called Tinker Liz for more years than he should have, given his reputation as one of the foremost yachting writers of his generation.

He should have been sailing something befitting his status, but no: Des loved tinkering, and Tinker Liz was a tribute to his tinkering skills. Not so much a cabinet of curiosities, Tinker Liz seemed to me when I first went aboard more like a devilish series of gins and spring traps, designed to catch not vermin but nervous young yachting writers.

Single bunks shot out under the force of powerful elastic to make doubles. Flaps dropped down to make tables. Echo sounder and log sprang on hinges at you from behind cupboards. It was the result of years of Sleightholme sleight of hand; magical in some ways, but woe betide if you pressed the wrong button. Like the unfortunate Kenneth Williams in the Tony Hancock sketch ‘The Test Pilot’, press the wrong one and you’d find yourself ejected, and sitting on the tail, so to speak.

Tinker Liz was an extreme case of Heath Robinsonism. But every classic boat, or old boat owner worth his salt will have the (defective) gene that makes him itch to improve. Not for him the trashy novel in the corner of the cabin; at anchor you will find him, yet again, rearranging the lockers or finding what is euphemistically called ‘a better solution’ to this or that. And what joy, at the end of hours of fiddling when his companion (traditionally described as ‘long suffering’) hears the cheery cry: “Darling, come and see this. I may have found the perfect solution to how we stow the wok.”

She knows from past experience that there will never be a final solution to the wok problem.

The art of tinkering Bodging, my foot! It’s all about improving the breed

W

e get our character traits from our parents, and in this case it must be my grandmother’s influence that impels me to try and mend, glue together, fix and sometimes employ inspired bodgery to get inanimate objects animated once more.

Grandma’s Rockingham china service had never been animate unless moved by a poltergeist, which I am pretty sure never happened. No, the damage was all down to the removals men and the house shifting that comes with being the wife of a Naval lieutenant commander. There might have been some bomb damage too, when they lived overlooking Portsmouth harbour during the war.

Later, living alone in a retirement flat in a seaside town, the valuer was called to assess her effects (or defects that should have been). His eyes must have lit up as he espied the pristine golden china set, complete to the last cup and saucer, dinner plate and soup bowl, illuminated in the Victorian corner cabinet.

Nose against the glass, the truth was shattering, literally. Every piece bar two (dinner plates that are now on the wall of the family home) had hairline cracks, many showing the orangey traces of that old fashioned fish glue with the great smell they used to mend crockery with back then, and which gave me my first intoxicating experience of substance abuse.

Aside from the two plates, the Rockingham was worthless. But the compulsion to mend stuff is ingrained.

“These days only owners of wooden boats make do or mend”

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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RE-MAKING A RAKET This 96-year-old Pettersson motor yacht, Raket, is twice as fast now as she was at launch. Can she handle it?

WORDS AND PHOTOS STEFAN IWANOWSKI

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

I

saw Raket (rocket) for the first time in the early 1990s. She stood on a solid, old, obviously homebuilt trailer with massive truck wheels. One of the tyres had a puncture and that was probably the reason that she had been left standing there.

The rig had been parked at a crossroad on a small village road. The sight was both striking and sad.

This beautiful, sleek hull that promised so much pleasure, stood there abandoned and open to the elements, with a tragic future most likely ahead. On that occasion, I didn’t follow the heart’s voice (the one that makes you get into so much fun and trouble) because reason told me I should first take care of my other boats.

A while later, though, someone else did. Raket had left the crossroads and continued her uncertain route to a quay in Ormingelandet, on the Stokholm archipelago, when Ellen Ridderstolpe sailed past in her 40 Square Metre Skerry Cruiser, Fjäril IV (Butterfly).

When she saw Raket in the distance along the shore,

she would have slammed on the brakes if Skerry Cruisers had them, but she instead tacked and headed straight towards the quay. Hopping ashore, she decided that she couldn’t leave this amazing boat to stand there abandoned. She wrote a note and attached it to the boat with her name, number and a short but clear message: “Do you want to sell this boat?”

The next step she took was to try to find out how to handle such lost property if the owner wasn’t located.

Happily, though, and just a few days later, the owner called. Before she knew it, Ellen was the proud new owner of a wreck parked in the middle of nowhere.

From her farm in Södertälje, Ellen fetched a tractor and together with a group of friends, loaded Raket onto a better trailer and headed homewards. With the speed limit set at 30kmh for a transport like this, the winding backroads was the only option. The journey took nine hours, a mere blink of an eye in the life of a 96-year-old. Raket had a new home, but things weren’t

Above: Owner Mats Arrhénborg enjoys Raket’s 20-plus knot cruising speed

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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RAKET

ideal. Ellen was attending a boatbuilding school on Skeppsholmen in Stockholm at the time and also had five other boats to maintain. So Raket was left standing in Ellen’s backyard waiting for her time to come, while Ellen’s conscience gnawed.

Through friends, Ellen knew about the boat Loris, one of Sweden’s most famous motor yachts, and calculated that the owners, Mats Arrhénborg and Joakim Irebjer, seemed to have an interest in antique wooden yachts. “Do you want another one?” she asked them. Still standing there with the dust in their hair and holes in their wallets after the extensive renovation of the just completed Loris, they looked at Ellen with a crooked smile and said: “Sure”.

In their minds, too, the age-old struggle began between reason, which told them not to take on such a big project so soon after the last one, and the feeling that they would never forgive themselves if they did not. Reason, however, was swept aside when they visited Ellen’s backyard and lifted up a corner of the tarpaulin covering Raket. The boat changed hands again, but this time things would be different.

At the bottom of the original lines drawing for Raket (drawing number 561), designer Carl Gustaf Pettersson’s wrote: “9.75m x 1.50m high speed boat for client C Wikström.” In those days, at the very start of the 20th century, high speed meant that with a 30hp Buffalo engine she could hit 12 knots. The boat was open and had two cockpits, with rounded coamings up front and in the stern. The client, a young man called Carl Wikström, who studied at the Stockholm Faculty of Philosophy, contracted the Tysslinge Yard just outside Södertälje with the commission.

Philosophy may have been his degree, but after a few years he became a wholesaler and timber factory owner. Possibly he now led a more comfortable life financially and so he ordered a new cabin top for Raket. Once more this was to a design by Pettersson and built by the Tysslinge yard. The result is what we see today as the boat’s semi-open saloon, a little more practical for summer journeys to the island of Maderö, near Ingarö in the Stockholm archipelago, where he had a summer house. Until 1931 Raket is listed in the annual yearbooks of the Royal Swedish Yacht Club 36

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Top, left to right: A joy to drive but no tight corners please; the later addition of the semi-saloon Above: a modern flip-out drinks holder

Below: As well as work up top, she has a new keel and 40m of fresh planking

with Wikström as her owner, before she disappears from both the records as well as history. Two generations later she emerges again, somewhat faded but just as beautiful, on a trailer on a small country road near Värmdö.

Their new find gave Mats and Joakim renewed energy and they began working in their workshop in Gustavsberg, where Loris had also received her facelift.

Boat builder Greger Andersson was responsible for the overall work and planning and worked along with Kasper Enge. A new keel, 40m of planking, a number of deck beams and beam stringers and a few metres gunwale and deck later, everyone was surprised and overjoyed at the result. “Varnishing and painting her was like a reward for the hard work,” Mats said.

I join Mats on a trip aboard on a chilly but sunny autumn day. Mats acknowledges that not everything is original. The chart light, for instance, did not exist, but a period lantern, a rare find, does good service and blends nicely into the environment on board.

A boat like this must have her luxury touches and Mats opens a little wooden door on the port side of the cabin. Voilà – out pops a convenient glass holder, modern, but well hidden behind the old mahogany when not in use.

The steady rumbling from beneath the foredeck is a pointer to the biggest change. Where once Raket housed a 30hp petrol engine, there now sits a Chevrolet V8. This gives her a maximum speed of about 25 knots, which is double what she would have reached when she was young. Top speed is reached at just over 3,000 revolutions per minute, which

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Solent Sunbeam Racing

From Itchenor in beautiful Chichester Harbour Sheltered moorings with Club ferry service Weekend and Thursday evening racing/suppers and in Cowes Week Take lunch or tea on the Club lawn overlooking Chichester Harbour

. k e ay As t th en d M 25, uk o. ou p 2n 82 .c ab C O y 2 76 ub IS da 36 l gcl n 78 ai in Su 0 m il y ne E rsa Da o no Ph he itc e@ fic of

Sail and race a Sunbeam at Itchenor

Informal suppers and formal dinners in the Club buttery/restaurant.

Overnight accommodation is available by reservation

Photo Beken Portsmouth

Chichester

Itchenor

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Easy access from A3, M27, A27 Come for a trial sail. Enjoy the Sunbeam Experience. www.solentsunbeam.co.uk Tel: 07836 768225 Ask about crewing vacancies and opportunities to join the Solent Sunbeams.

RAKET sonically gets a little tiring in the long run, even for those who like the sound of engines. The plan is to switch to another engine as soon as possible so she can run at lower revolutions with a larger propeller – for the same top speed.

It is possible to sit and drive, but it feels much better to stand and look over the windshield. Hard to say if it is the wind in my hair or the feeling in my stomach that makes the corners of my mouth begin to flutter near my ears. Rather 25 knots in a rocket than 50 in a plastic tub! But this is not a boat to cut through tight bends with. The slender dimensions Pettersson gave Raket make tight turns at high speed risky and require the person steering to really hold on to the steering wheel. And beware, she really heels over a long way in a turn, which is a little scary. If, however, you lean into the bend with her, your body weight helps bring her back over into a distinctly more comfortable and gentlemanly poise.

After giving myself a new rather windswept hairstyle and getting my fill of the thrill of driving a classic boat at such speed, I sink back into saloon cushions that are upholstered with elk leather and stuffed with horsehair, recycled from old matresses. Elk leather is stronger and more durable than other leather in the harsh northern European climate, while horsehair was used simply as it is historically correct.

Surrounded by warm mahogany, the smell of fresh leather and with the stern wave and the oversized Swedish ensign shooting out behind us, I get a sense of the satisfaction Mats and Joakim must feel at having brought this handsome boat back to life.

At this point Raket still lacked about 60 years of her history, but as we all know, suddenly from somewhere unexpected, a piece of information often comes tumbling in. To Mats and Joakim’s delight, after a magazine article about Raket had been published in a Swedish magazine, they were contacted by none other than Carl Wikström’s grandson Eugen. He had many memories and stories about the boat and also shared a little treasure trove of old photographs. And the Wikström family even decided to support Raket’s upkeep financially. That, as they say, is boats.

Carl Gustaf Pettersson (1876-1953) Pettersson is one of the key names in Swedish yachting history. His breakthrough as a boatbuilder came in 1904, when he participated in the international powerboat races during the Kiel regatta in Class B, “harbour working boats”, i.e. boats with engines of less than 8hp. The boat he raced he had designed himself and built with his older brother at the shipyard where they worked. It was 8m (26.24ft) long with a 1.27m (4.16m) beam and given the pugnacious name of Viking. He soon became one of the most sought-after designers in Sweden and is regarded as the one person who “got the Swedish people out on the water”. With around 1,200 yachts built, he is also considered to be one of the most productive designers, with craft ranging from speedboats a few meters long to big motoryachts.

Summer days in the Stockholm archipelago

RAKET LOA

32ft 8in (9.95m) BEAM

5ft 3in (1.6m) BUILT

1919, Tysslinge Yard ENGINE

300hp Chevrolet V8 (original 30hp Buffalo) DESIGNER

Carl Gustaf Pettersson CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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THE HISTORY OF HOLLOW SPARS

I

n the history of yachting the impact of hollow masts and spars is rarely mentioned, which is peculiar because they are central to the story. Reducing the rig weight of any yacht increases her stability, so making it safer and usually easier to sail; this is especially true in smaller boats, and the arrival of reliable hollow masts and spars from about 1890 onwards was in no small part responsible for the popularisation and spread of the sport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It is impossible to fix when hollow spars were first used, because it is certain to have been in antiquity.

Bamboo was recognised as a good material for spars wherever it was available, and continues to be employed to good effect even now. But bamboo has limitations; it is fairly readily available up to about 20ft long and six inches in diameter, but larger sizes are rare. As yachting developed away from bamboo’s natural habitats, it seems to have only ever been used in relatively small craft. It seems, too, that in the 19th century there were no imports of bamboo to the USA, which prompted the boatbuilders there to develop hollow spars somewhat in advance of their counterparts in Europe.

Hollow iron masts (for ships) had been tried from c1820 but even by the 1850s they were still rare; Great Eastern (1859) had three huge iron masts (3ft 6in diameter at deck, and over 100ft long) that were, like many aspects of that ship, much remarked upon. Dixon Kemp mentioned that hollow steel yacht spars were tried c1863, which is about the same time they started to appear on ships, but that after “two or three masts were carried away rather suddenly” the experiment was abandoned, for yachts anyway. Towards the end of the 19th century a few yachts had steel (lower) masts

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(Columbia’s snapped in 1899 during the America’s Cup defender races) and booms (Rainbow, GL Watson’s fine schooner of 1898, had a 91ft long main boom “of special steel”), but in general steel spars were seen only on the largest yachts. From the very start of yachting until after the Second World War nearly all yacht masts and spars were made from wood, and from the outset they were usually solid.

The benefits of hollow spars were clearly understood long before their construction was practical. The science of struts and columns bending and buckling was convincingly defined in mathematical terms by Euler in the 1750s, but an instinctive grasp of the benefits is clear from the example of hollow timber lances written about as early as the 9th century. The advantage of a hollow mast over a solid one was clearly demonstrated by Skene in his Elements of Yacht Design where he produced a diagram illustrating the point nicely; a 10ft long hollow round mast 4in diameter with a ½in wall would have equal strength to a solid one that was 3ft 5/8in diameter (i.e. only 9 per cent less), and the hollow one would weigh about 53 per cent of the solid one. Alternatively, if the weight were equal, the solid mast would have to be only 25/8in diameter and would be 74 per cent weaker (in buckling). If the outside diameter of both were 4in, the solid spar would actually be 50 per cent stronger than the hollow one, but at the cost of being 128 per cent heavier. Masts in particular are designed to be stiff enough to resist bending and buckling, but also as small and light as possible. On the basis of weight or stiffness the hollow spar wins (nearly) every time.

Hollow spars could also offer other possibilities.

According to the Aberdeen Journal of 15 January 1840,

FACING PAGE: BRASKER MASTEN

From bamboo to the early America’s Cup, Theo Rye tells a story central to yachting’s development, but one curiously overlooked

Mast built of Oregon pine by Brasker Masten in Holland41 CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

YACHTS ON CANVAS/JAMES EDWARD BUTTERSWORTH

HISTORY OF HOLLOW SPARS

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Above: The sloop Maria with America by Butterworth Right: The broken top mast of Columbia Below: Robert

CAPT CHARLES BARR ARCHIVE/PPL

there was a regular trade in liquor smuggled in the hollow masts of various Folkestone luggers. As those unknown reprobates filled their masts with brandy they probably never got to appreciate the performance benefits that could have resulted, but they were evidently small spars as they were said to carry them up the beach under the noses of the customs officers.

Robert L Stevens, the brother of the first commodore of the NYYC, was the designer of the sloop Maria (1845, known as Black Maria in the UK) and is widely credited with making the first hollow wooden yacht spars; but that may be more justly attributed to the spar builders, if they could be positively identified. Maria was originally built as a sloop by William Capes in Hoboken, and was 92ft on deck. In 1850 she was lengthened 18ft, and Vanderdecken, quoting a date of 1852, said the hollow spars were made by Fish & Morton of New York, who built an iron-strapped “barrel stave” boom and bored her mast. He was writing within 25 years or so of the events, so the best explanation seems to be that Fish & Morton made new spars for Maria, possibly on more than one occasion. Robert L Stevens though was widely recognised as a freethinking man willing to pursue new ideas, and it is likely that the impetus to try hollow spars was his. WP Stephens describes the mast as 92ft from deck to hounds, 32in in diameter at deck and 23in at the hounds, bored out 12in diameter for the lower 20ft, then 10in for 20ft then 7in to the hounds. He describes the boom as 92ft long, 31in in diameter in the middle and 26in at the slings “built like a barrel” of white pine staves 2½in x 2½in that were dowelled to prevent slipping, the whole bound outside with iron

L Stevens

bands, supported with iron trusses inside and outside “over whiskers 3ft long”; plus a hollow gaff (50 or 60ft long) and a 70ft hollow jib-boom. Captain Coffin described Maria as being prone to dismasting; “a bad habit which she contracted in her youth” but she was a “racing machine” and a remarkable yacht, featuring several innovative ideas. Her mainsail was hoisted on a track (the use of which Stevens pioneered in 1840), she had external lead ballast fitted as strips along her hull, and she had cross-cut sails. Said to have cost $100,000, she distinguished herself by beating America in several trial races; but she was considered unsuitable for crossing the Atlantic. She was eventually re-rigged as a schooner and, renamed Maud, worked as a fruit-carrying cargo vessel until she was lost with all hands in 1870.

HISTORY OF HOLLOW SPARS Left: Cambria in mid-Atlantic 1870 with a reinforced hollow top mast.

She had lost her previous topmast on a crossing the

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year before

Vanderdecken said that Fish & Morton also built a 75ft long hollow boom (in halves, hollowed and then banded together) for the sloop Ultra (1848), and then bored the bowsprit on America (1851) “end to end”.

Boring solid wooden spars with augurs was difficult; the cutters could easily deviate from the centre. Cowes boat-builder Michael Ratsey successfully bored the masts and bowsprit of the schooner and America’s Cup challenger Cambria in 1868. He used augurs of about 4in diameter from both ends; and another yacht (Egeria) had the same treatment. Cambria carried away her topmast crossing the Atlantic in 1869. Not dismayed Ratsey made another hollow one, this time reinforced with iron bands, with which she successfully sailed for many years, including re-crossing the Atlantic twice.

The owner of the iron yacht Vindex, in build at Chester in Pennsylvania in 1871, enlisted a pump maker from nearby Wilmington. Despite taking care to align things, the “spoon-shaped” augurs disappointingly emerged some time later out of the side of the mast “near the hounds”. JM Soper described a very similar situation when boring out a hollow boom for the giant cutter Satanita some 22 years later in 1893, the attempt made possibly because her rival Valkyrie II, in build at the same time, was to have a hollow boom. Auguring was a technique employed with some success for smaller craft, such as the 20ft 6in LOA Lulu built by Frank Bates in Brooklyn, New York in 1873. Lulu’s mast was said to be 39ft long, so it was no mean feat.

It wasn’t long before the most innovative British designer of the period, John Harvey of Wivenhoe, took up the challenge of producing hollow spars. His

Hollow versus solid No1 Weight 11.5lb

Strength 8,500lb

Comparisons with No1:

No2

Weight 21.6lb

Strength 8,500lb

9 per cent smaller diameter, same strength but 88 per cent heavier than No1

No3

Weight 11.5lb

Strength 2,250lb

34 per cent smaller diameter, same weight but 74 per cent less strong than No1

No1

Weight 26.2lb

Strength 12,700lb

Same diameter and 50 per cent stronger but 128 per cent heavier than No1

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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C/O AMERICAN YACHTS AND YACHCTING

HISTORY OF HOLLOW SPARS

schooner Miranda of 1877 had a hollow boom and bowsprit, a fact remarked upon when her boom broke (due to a defective fitting, it was said) in her first season.

Dixon Kemp reported that Harvey made his spars by cutting them in half and hollowing them out, thus keeping a parallel wall thickness (boring produced a tapering wall if the spar tapered). The halves were joined back together with tongues and secured with iron bands.

Making reliable hollow spars was obviously a major challenge. Construction relied to some extent on the uncertain animal glues of the period, which had to be applied hot and had a short working time; and when dry they were often brittle and not resistant to moisture.

The added weight of the necessary metal reinforcement bands to support the unreliable glue joints also reduced the benefits. Boring a solid spar was an option but was limited to relatively small holes or short spars, or relied too heavily on great skill and some luck. Despite the occasional success, hollow spars were still rare enough to be commented upon well into the 1890s.

Better glues meant that hollowed-out spars built in halves, shaped inside and out, started to become more viable in the 1880s. In America John F Mumm built a hollow boom for the sloop Shamrock in 1888, using Jeffery’s marine glue. Albert Jeffery had introduced his various types of marine glue in the early 1840s, and ‘No.3’ was listed as being specifically suited for “uniting large timbers in general as masts, yards, spars, beams”.

In 1887 a complex and ingenious mast was made by James W Mansfield of the yacht builders W K Prior & Co, of Boston. He built a mast in two halves, hollowed 44

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Miranda of 1877 had a hollow boom and bowspirit

John Harvey of Wivenhoe

& shaped; glued them together, then spiral wrapped the whole with 4in-wide strips of burlap (jute or sisal hessian) laid in two opposing directions along the spar and set in glue. Once the burlap layers had set and been sanded, he then applied two staggered layers of “strong manila paper” over the whole, which was then varnished. The result was a “very light” spar, that was “fairly durable if kept varnished”; a mast built on this system for the sandbagger Em-El-Eye weighed 90lb and replaced one that weighed 260lb, and the boom reduced from 40lb to 15lb.

A Danish ship’s carpenter called Henry Piepgrass working as a yacht builder in the 1870s in New York, built a hollow boom for the 70ft sloop Titania; his glue was described as a mixture of “pot-cheese” half-and-half with quick lime. This was an ancient recipe which can be traced to the 11th century, used by iconographers, and was also used by Captain John Crawford on spars for two racing yachts in 1888-9; Liris (40ft class) and Kathleen (30ft class), both designed by William Gardner.

The larger spars on Liris were not a notable success; within three hours of her first outing the mast carried away (due to the failure of a tubular spreader). The other spars all “went in succession, the last on an August cruise” and she topped it all off by losing a “heavy solid mast of Oregon pine” at the end of the season; then as now, some yachts just seem to shed spars. Her little sister Kathleen fared slightly better; although the mast opened up early in the season until the mastman could “sight through it, using the forestay like the hairlines in a telescope”, it and the other spars at least stood, after a

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fashion. Katrina, a 70ft waterline length sparring partner for the America’s Cup challenger Valkyrie I in 1889 was reported to have a hollow boom. An unknown Gosport UK builder constructed a “very sound spar”, dug out and dowelled, which Ewing McGruer saw in the early 20th century and thought dated from the 1880s.

An Irish boatbuilder called John J Driscoll, the yacht chargehand at the C&R Poillon shipyard of New York, was credited with a remarkable boom for the America’s Cup defence candidate Colonia in 1893. It was 97ft 6in long and 22 inches in diameter. He constructed it with round bulkheads of wood about apart, to which he screwed a layer of 1¼in thick spruce battens. He then rounded that layer off, screwed another layer over, rounded inside and out, staggering the joints and seams.

He secured the whole with a series of wire-rope seizings.

By the 1890s, the enthusiasm for sailing canoes and very light raters in the USA had proved a further impetus to develop lightweight spars. The British half-rater Microbe by Sibbick was imported to the USA in 1895, and described there as “no racing machine…and her spars! They are solid sticks, all except the bamboo yard, and their weight alone would throw her out of any competition with any first class American boat”.

The American sailing canoe spars of Paul Butler of Lowell, Mass, that he developed between 1885-90 were particularly notable; his method involved wrapping and glueing three spiral spruce plies over a mandrel. Butler was also noted for using aluminium deck fittings in his effort to save weight.

Meanwhile, a now-forgotten joiner and stairmaker in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who raced sandbaggers in his spare time, was about to make a crucial breakthrough and in so doing help found the industry as we still know it today.

COLLIERS

HISTORY OF HOLLOW SPARS

Mast options today CARBON At the top of the cost pile is usually carbon; most are based on standard sections, although fully custom spars laid up to specific designs are possible if the budget will run to it.

Serious racing yachts are almost entirely using carbon now, but the benefits can apply to other types of boat too.

ALUMINIUM Aluminium alloy is still a choice (and in some classes mandatory); but the number of manufacturers and the stock of sections held has diminished significantly as carbon has begun to infiltrate the market. Aluminium still often offers a cost-effective and tough option with few maintenance issues, but some older masts fitted in the 1960s and 1970s are now starting to show signs of age. Nearly all alloy spars are based on standard extrusions; spars constructed from rolled plate are now vanishingly rare.

There are several manufacturers who can supply either carbon or alloy; Selden are now one of the biggest names and do both. Others have specialised – Hall Spars & Southern Spars are now carbon only.

Below: The Sibbick half rater Microbe

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Next month: the story continues to the modern day.

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WOOD Wood is still a very viable option for many yachts. With classes like the 8-Metres encouraging innovation, stiff sections coupled to rod rigging have appeared in the past few years and have been successful. Many of the old fears of tying timber masts with high-tech laminate sails have also been allayed. On the other hand when competing on the classic scene in the Med under the CIM rule, originality is prized and there is a thriving industry creating a new generation of fine timber spars authentic in every detail.

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Harry Poulson joined the 38 week course in 2014. As part of his training Harry helped build eight boats from loft to launch in a range of construction types, gained a Level 3 City & Guilds Diploma and a Boat Building Academy certificate with Distinction.

In his spare time Harry made a surf board and was selected to row and sail for Great Britain in the Atlantic Challenge International Contest of Seamanship.

Harry is our sort of student.

www.boatbuildingacademy.com e e n ad id ai M pr Brit th t wi rea G in CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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PETER LUCAS

LET TWIST BE YOUR FRIEND Making an old boat go is often a case of letting her do her own thing STORY ADRIAN MORGAN

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

FACING PAGE: SANDY OSBORNE

advantage, although occasionally I would bowse the boom down on a broad reach to the rail with a handy billy, if it wasn’t too windy.

And that is the key. The heavy boom alone is enough to keep the mainsail drawing, but if the breeze pipes up the absence of a kicker allows the boom to rise and fall naturally, spilling wind from the top of the sail, while still allowing it to fill the lower portion. It serves as a natural depowering process, while reducing the strain on the rig.

And that is exactly the scenario that we faced as we charged past Rhubh Reidh lighthouse on a broad reach, after a weekend jaunt to Gairloch last September. Vicious bursts of heavy air fell from the clifftop. With far too much sail up (that is, a full main and staysail), and little inclination to reef, we simply let the natural rise and fall of the boom regulate our sail area. The top of the sail was aligned almost dead into the wind, pressed flat against the top spreaders, but the lower half meanwhile was pulling like a train.

Truth be told, when we did get around to rolling up a good portion of the mainsail, the speed remained in the high 7s, and occasionally low 8s, apart from that tremendous burst which had the GPS peaking at 8.7 knots, unheard of in all the time I have owned Sally.

When I ran all this past a vastly experienced old friend, John Simpson, former skipper of Jolie Brise, he told me that his old Dutch boat Blauwe behaved in exactly the same way with her mainsail. However he pointed out that sails on older boats don’t want to be sheeted in too flat, particularly in light to moderate winds. “If they are cut full; let em’ work full to develop the power necessary to drive older heavier boats.”

Being a cautious kind of sailor, he was glad that we reefed and just let the mainsail spill for only a shortish amount of time. A mainsail flat against the spreaders might have caused chafe on a long passage.

If the gust that drove us to that heady speed had encountered a full mainsail, kickered down to the rail, I suspect something would have given. Instead, the boom rose, the sail flattened against the spreaders, the gust spilled and the power in the lower half was quite enough to have Sally break a record that will probably stand until we next storm down to Gairloch. As my friend Craig Nutter once told me (he owns the Harrison Butler, Sabrina, a Round the Island Race winner): “Adrian, you must let twist be your friend.”

EMILLY HARRIS

T

here was a time when, possibly as a legacy of dinghy sailing and some youthful offshore racing, I would strap Sally’s long, heavy wooden boom down and attempt to get it as close to parallel with her waterline as I could, without ripping the toerail from its fastenings. It was a legacy of “Vang on!”, a call we used to hear all too often on those interminable triangles to nowhere which comprised RORC racing in the 1980s. On a flighty racing boat the vang is used, among other things, to control twist and keep the forces acting on the fin keel in balance.

Long-keeled Sally, or Sally II, is an altogether different creature, the second of what later became the Vertue class, Jack Laurent Giles’s best known design.

She is 25ft and a bit long, 78 years old, and last summer managed to clock 8.7 knots on the chartplotter she had for a 75th birthday present three years before.

Let no one tell you that old long-keeled yachts are slow, or don’t point worth a damn. Sally knows her limits, for sure; try “The heavy and push her upwind closer than she wants, or her sails permit, and she sulks. boom alone is Sally’s sails – Simon Richardson on the enough to keep Hamble knew his stuff after cutting his teeth, and sails, on 12-Ms in Newport the mainsail Rhode Island in the old America’s Cup drawing, but days – are cut to suit her hull’s ability upwind. That is, not too flat. Crucially, if the breeze they’re powerful enough to drive her hull pipes up, the (just shy of 5 tons) at the angle it prefers to assume to the wind. absence of a Simon once told me that it is largely kicker allows the hull that defines how close to the wind a boat can sail, so there’s no point in the boom to cutting sails that do not match that angle. rise and fall” Get Sally in the groove – an easy matter, as she’s better at steering herself than the helmsman; just peg her tiller and put the kettle on – and she will set her perky nose to the horizon and go. But try and make her do what she was not designed to do, viz knife-edge to windward at 30 degrees off, and forget it.

Above: A kicker Like most old boats of her era, she has this longish, on Jour de Fête heavy boom, prevented from taking out the backstay prevents the (or preventer as Giles called it) in a Chinese gybe by boom from lifting the addition of a boomkin, a jaunty little appendage and keeps the that can be forgotten when paying harbour dues, but mainsail flat and which adds character (and carries the backstay well controlled. out of reach of any sky-ing boom).

Opposite: Adrian Thank goodness then for a boomkin, for Sally does Morgan’s Vertue not have a kicking strap. But I soon realised that for a Sally II in Scottish quite separate reason its lack was a positive waters

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

49

TRISTAN STONE

CHIP OFF AN OLD BLOCK How a small Devon boatyard became timber supplier to the biggest classics afloat STORY CLARE MCCOMB

modern times [See Salcombe Yawl profile on p72].

Overwintering there, too, are all sorts of other craft including clinker rowing dinghies and motor launches.

One motorboat arrived at the yard as a rescue case, given for free after sitting in the mud under Hammersmith Bridge for 20 years. Now she’s re-decked and seaworthy again. Stones’ refit, repair and maintenance work remains a core part of the business.

But things took an unexpected turn 12 years ago when Tristan’s father Jim emigrated to Vancouver Island.

Jim knew, as a lifelong boatbuilder, how hard it was to source good quality Sitka spruce. Now, in British Columbia, he found himself surrounded by it.

“He sent over a little bit of spruce to help make a mast,” Tristan recalls. “Then the Cornish Gig Association wanted some for some oars. One of the oar makers was a mast-builder and he wanted some. Then one of the big mast builders heard about it and they wanted some too. Suddenly without us knowing about it we turned into a timber supplier!”

As word spread that Stones could source premiumquality, custom-cut, slow-grown vertical-grain Red and Yellow Cedar, Sitka spruce and Douglas Fir, the requests came from further afield and as we speak Tristan is supplying wood for projects in New Zealand and Chile, among many others around Europe.

“The timber is the biggest part of the business now,” he says. “We could have grown a lot quicker but we wanted to make sure the supply chain was there and that we could always guarantee the quality. Everytime we get a new customer we stop and rethink and ensure we can really give them what they want. It’s still a pretty niche business, but what sets us apart is the good people we have at source, selecting the highest quality timber and putting it aside for us. There is a lot more to us than what you see in the yard.” (This, by the way, is as close to immodest as Tristan ever gets.)

Father and son speak daily. Shipments from Vancouver are checked personally by Jim, are air or kiln dried, before containers are filled, half for stock and half pre-ordered. In recent years things have expanded to import teak from Myanmar and Khaya mahogany from Africa. There, too, personal visits have created a network of direct contacts in the sawmills who will set aside the best timber for Stones and make specific cuts to order.

Stones offers something else over many volume timber suppliers – a deep knowledge of boats and boatbuilding.

“We understand what people want in a boat and can say to them: ‘We’ll need to cut the log this way, we’ll keep it

STONE FAMILY; CLARE MCCOMB

V

isiting Stones Boatyard in East Portlemouth, South Devon, I find myself in a great warehouse of a place, at least half full of Salcombe Yawls. Tristan, fourth generation of the Stone boatbuilding family, is showing me round and it’s clear, behind an unfailingly laid-back demeanour, that there’s a strong sense of pride. The custom-built shed has an insulated roof to protect against the woodcracking heat of a Devon summer, while wooden-clad sides allow ventilation to counteract humidity in the damp winters. Underfloor heating in the workshop means temperatures can be set to an exact 18 degrees for varnishing, 21 for gloss. The boats are acclimatised for a couple of days to ensure perfect conditions before products are applied, and ‘daylight’ lighting minimises shadows. It is not your average boatyard shed.

Tristan admits with a rueful smile that the science underpinning the yard’s methods can create a rod for his back – “imperfections have no place to hide”.

But imperfections are few at Stones. The order books are full and customer relationships go back decades, even generations.

Quality over quantity – it’s a philosophy that has stood the family company in good stead since the late 1800s, when Edwin Stone made willow baskets and crab pots for local fishermen. Three members of the family served apprenticeships with Salcombe boatbuilder Edgar Coves, before Tristan’s great great uncle James Stone started his own yard in 1938. A year later his 11-year-old son, Alec, started beating all the adults racing the famous Y14, Blackbird, in the restricted class we know as the Salcombe Yawl. Alec Stone went on to become a legend in small boat racing and the Stone family has been central to the Salcombe Yawl story since.

Tristan grew up in family yards, run first by his uncle and then by his father, Jim. (He reckons he was 17 before he was trusted with a paintbrush.) When Tristan took over the business, something was needed other than the boat refit work to make things pay and he put in a planning application for a boat storage facility. Devon County Council gave it the green light after being inundated by letters of support for Stones from local residents. Tristan recalls: “Then I had to work out what I was going to fill it up with!”

Today ‘the barn’ is the biggest storage facility of wooden boats in the country, housing around 50 boats including 35 Salcombe Yawls. Walking around the custom-made racks is akin to visiting an exhibition of the development of the class from its beginnings to

Left: Tristan chooses teak in Myanmar.

Right: Yawls and others stored inside the barn

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

51

STONE FAMILY

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

STONE FAMILY

with this particular moisture content and so on,’” Tristan says. Stones has supplied some of the most admired names on the classic circuit, including Eleonora’s top mast, Mariquita’s Oregon pine top mast and sprit, the teak used in the refit of Pelham Olive’s 1903 Kelpie and also for Kelpie of Falmouth.

“I’d never have envisaged supplying some of the bigger classic yachts and yards and it’s lovely to see the boats out there sailing with parts of our timber in them,” says Tristan, “But I enjoy working with the smallest rowing boats as well. Our aim is to keep everyone happy! Long-term we would like to maintain it as a manageable business where we can keep the quality high.

Businesses can easily get too big and they lose the charm of what it was all about.”

Sourcing sustainable teak has become an ethical and legal minefield in recent years. Like all suppliers, the Stones’ environmental credentials are checked regularly and as recently as last summer they came out with flying colours. Perhaps more than the official checks, it’s their direct contacts in the source countries that gives them a clear conscience. “We are not dealing with middlemen, there’s no supply chain. So it’s easy for us to find out where a particular log has come from in the forest and ensure things are done right. I would never buy from a non-sustainable forest because it’s not good long-term.”

Away from the yard, given any spare moment allowed by his young daughter, Tristan is out sailing, rowing, surfing, or fishing for sea bass in Tempest, the family motor launch that was built at the yard.

“Everything I love is around the water,” he says. It’s no suprise that when his Salcombe Yawl customers are racing in August’s Regatta Week, and no paint jobs or general repairs are needed (unless there’s an accident), he can be found racing with them. So many friends who shared his childhood of swimming, sailing and rowing up the creeks to net sand eels for bait, have had to move away for work. Tristan feels fortunate to be raising his family in the place he has lived all his life, where knowledge passed down through generations – the rocks where the best sea bass lurk, or the twist of tides against the shore – makes sense.

I ask Tristan what is he proudest of and his answer is unexpected, but shows how close the family is to

GABI STONE

TRISTAN STONE

Top: Black Tern racing in the competitive Salcombe Yawl fleet Above: Tristan and Jim as the barn starts to go up Below: The Stone family c1900, with Tristan’s great grandmother looking out of the top

the heart of the Salcombe community. Some years ago he saw how hard it was for his grandfather to travel to Plymouth for chemotherapy, so with the help of a close friend, he set about fundraising for a local cancer clinic. They threw a huge party in the boatyard and raised more than £48,000 in one evening. This kick-started community fundraising efforts all over the Southwest, the final tally enabling the creation of a triangle of three chemotherapy clinics serving local areas.

One charity auction bid was £1,100 for a day’s sea bass fishing with Tristan. He was worried in case they didn’t catch anything, but after a lifetime of exploring the local waters, it was no surprise they came home with 12 bass in the locker.

A separate fundraising effort, raising money for a new lifeboat, was by father Jim and friends, rowing from the Channel Islands to Salcombe in a four-oared, clinkerbuilt regatta dinghy. They got to within two miles of home before a storm intervened, but the sponsors paid up willingly nonetheless.

Both Tristan and Jim travel widely now, their itineraries taking in the biggest yards and the smallest, their enjoyment as strong as ever in being able to supply a fragment of yellow cedar for a flute, a length of Sitka spruce for a Water Wag in Ireland or a full teak deck for a J-Class. Tristan speaks with passion about his visits to the lesser known yards and says there are many great shipwrights and characters out there building lovely boats who don’t have websites and don’t usually get a mention, but whose skills are no less than others. He says it’s great to meet likeminded people who “love wood, love boats and value quality and tradition”.

As I leave I am shown the Salcombe yawl Black Tern (Y183), which Jim co-owns with his friend Will Henderson, and races when he is over from Canada.

She was designed by the innovative Ian Howlett, of America’s Cup fame. Black Tern has come a long way from her predecessors, those little Salcombe fishing yawls with their mizzens gallantly steadying them against the tide, so nets could be cast and strings of pots laid in exactly the right place. I think of these craft, heavy with sweet crab and lobster, sea bass and expensive flatfish, heading up creek towards the railway which would transport their catch to the Edwardian dining rooms of London. Today London and indeed the world comes to Salcombe, to sail and now to buy timber to maintain and build some of the biggest classic yachts afloat. Through it all one family’s name has remained constant, a heritage that appears to be in very good hands.

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ES TTRHADAITM I O NA L

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E Y- O N -T H A M E S

The Thames Traditional Boat Festival returns in 2016 with an even bigger display of vintage & classic boats, cars and aeroplanes!

Highlights include: the exclusive Bluebird K3 returning to try again for her first ever Thames run, WWII Dunkirk Little Ships, WWII fast patrol boats, WWI dog fights, amphibians, military vehicles and over 180 traditional boats that makes this the largest event of its type in Europe plus all the quintessentially English eccentricity that makes it so utterly unique!

FREE PARKING

Supported by

Following the great success of 2015, with over 10,000 visitors, the “Trad” will run for 3 days from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th July. Please see website for details.

15 • 16 • 17 July 2016

Fawley Meadows • Henley-on-Thames www.tradboatfestival.com CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

53

CLASSIC DESIGNS

LIVELY LADY FREDERICK SHEPHERD Who really designed her and would they have wanted the credit anyway?

THEO RYE

W

hen Alec Rose bought Lively Lady in 1964, her entries in Lloyd’s Register of Yachts started to give her designer as Frederick Shepherd. Before then, under the ownership of her original builder, no designer was listed, and when you examine the yacht and compare it to the original design, it’s fairly clear why. This raises an interesting question: how far do modifications to a design have to go to render it an orphan?

She was designed by Shepherd before the war for T Teasdale, but failing sight prompted Teasdale to give the design to his friend, Sydney JP Cambridge.

Cambridge studied yacht design and construction while on active service, and eventually built her in Calcutta in 1948. He modified the design in several significant respects; Shepherd’s drawings indicate a lead keel with a drag aft (so the heel was the deepest section) and Cambridge redesigned it so the keel was level, and of iron instead (as that was what was available). The Burmese teak hull planking was supplied over thickness at 13/8in instead of 1in, and doubled grown frames (of the Paduak timber from the Andaman Islands) were substituted for bent timbers.

Some changes were also made to the deck layout, making her flush decked rather than with a long coachroof. The topsides were also raised about 6in; it was said to get the headroom back in the absence of the coachroof, but it is at least feasible that it was also in part because she was going to come in overweight.

Analysis of Shepherd’s original lines plan gives her design displacement as 7.9 tons, a design waterline length of 26ft 6in and LOA of 36ft, beam 9ft and draught 5ft 6in. By the time she was launched it would probably have taken a long hard look to recognise her as Shepherd’s work at all (which may be why Cambridge never registered her as such); she was obviously much heavier, with a draught (from Lloyd’s) of 6.2ft (1.87m) and a waterline length of 27.2ft (8.28m). Some of the extra weight of her scantlings was offset by the thicker planking adding to her displacement; but even so she was at least a ton overweight at launch – probably a lot more.

As designed her displacement/length ratio was 425, well into the ‘heavy’ department, but typical for Shepherd who specialised in cruising designs. With 550sq ft

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Alec Rose: Lively Lady’s weight and sail area suggest his achievement was all the greater

(51.1m2) of sail area, her sail area/displacement ratio as designed was a fairly conservative but respectable 139.

Rose bought her in 1964 with a view to doing the Transatlantic Race that year, and immediately had Illingworth & Primrose redesign the rig, but curiously her sail area remained the same. In a windy race she did very creditably, finishing fourth, but she was still evidently under-canvassed. Back again to Illingworth & Primrose, this time they added a mizzen mast and 4ft to the main mast. The mizzen was a curious object; there was no room to set a mizzen sail aft of the mast (because of the large Hasler self-steering vane); it was intended to allow Rose to set a mizzen staysail forwards.

The mainsail (285sq ft) set with a working jib (182sq ft) and genoa staysail (122sq ft) still gave only 589sq ft, with the option to set larger (400sq ft) genoas off the wind. If the plan developed for that rig is reliable as to how she was floating, by that stage Lively Lady was something like 13in down on her original lines, representing about 5.2 tons. This remarkable amount of added weight agrees with Phillips-Birt’s draught (6.6ft) and estimate of displacement (13.75 tons) on a waterline length of 31ft given in My Lively Lady; she was barely recognisable as the boat Shepherd had designed. If those figures are accurate, her displacement/length had slipped to 462, and her sail/area displacement was a pitiful 103.

Had those facts been more fully appreciated at the time, Rose’s achievement in circumnavigating in a perfectly creditable time would have been even more fêted than it was; she must have been gruesomely hard work to keep moving in light conditions, especially upwind. More recently her unusual motion at sea has been commented on by many of her crew (not least by the CB editor in CB241); Rose made no comment in his book, but then he had little to compare it to, his only previous yachting being on an ex-lifeboat that he converted himself. Lively Lady’s quirky behaviour is certainly no reflection on the original design, so far removed was the end result. Shepherd’s reaction to Rose’s accomplishment is not known; Shepherd was a very old man when the voyage finished in 1968 and died, aged 100, the following year. My guess is he would have applauded the seamanship, but I am not sure he would have wanted any credit for the yacht design.

LOA 36ft (10.97m) DESIGN WL 26ft 6in (8.07m) LOAD WL 31ft (9.44m) BEAM 9ft (2.74m) DRAUGHT 5ft 6in (1.67m) UPWIND SAIL AREA (SEE TEXT) 589sq ft (54.7m2) DISPLACEMENT (APPROX) 7.94 tons (13.75 tons around world) BALLAST KEEL 1.5 tons

TOM CUNLIFFE

HACKING FOR OUR LIVES You know things are serious when the mate hands you a pick-axe ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT

I

don’t know who was more concerned about finding knee-deep water sloshing around in the hold in a mid-Biscay gale, me or the ship’s dog.

It all began with the question of how to ballast a 90-ton ex-trading ketch. Concrete seemed the best answer, beefed up with iron pigs, fire bars and any other kentledge we could lay our cold hands on for free. I say, ‘cold’, because these events took place in the dead of winter 1969/70, which anyone who lived through it will tell you was a shocker. The cargo hold still had an intact lining, or ceiling. Its planking ran fore and aft; it was fastened to the inside of the frames and caulked, leaving the iron-clad keelson poking up along the centreline.

The ballast was duly installed, the old ketch settled onto her new marks and away we went into the early February night, bound for Madeira. Johanne had been purchased straight out of trading in the Baltic and was, to all intents and purposes, unconverted. The management had a vague idea of chartering her in the West Indies, but she was a long way short of any luxuries at that time.

Me and the crew had spent the last few months re-rigging her from the deck up with spars adzed on the dockside, plough-steel standing rigging and running gear spliced from a huge coil of dodgy manila which showed its true colours by parting whenever we needed it most.

February turned out to be a breezy sort of month and the passage down into Biscay was not without incident, but it was only when Finisterre lay 200 miles to the southwest that things really livened up. It had been blowing like the crack of doom for 24 hours, the seas were houses-high and the night was as black as the inside of a butler’s bowler. Halfway through the middle watch we were slugging along, full and by, under staysail and a main reefed almost to the gaff jaws. The mizzen had been stowed after shredding its sheet to the four winds. Spray was driving aft like

hailstones and every so often a wave flooded the deck and washed across the tarps battened down over the hatch boards.

The storm had long since snuffed out our oil navigation lamps and a democratic decision had been reached that struggling forward to retrieve them from the shrouds would be more dangerous than running unlit. The logic held until a pair of steaming lights and a red suddenly loomed up out of the scud from behind a giant swell. From the helm I tried sighting them on what I could make out of a mizzen shroud to judge whether the ship was coming our way. The motion was so extreme that this proved hopeless, so my watchmate groped inside the binnacle, wound up the wick on the lamp and we tried our luck with the wildly swinging compass card. Another waste of time. The steamer’s lights were close enough to show how deeply she was pitching and a faint hint of green to the left of the red added a sinister note. Bearing away didn’t appeal because we’d have to ease sheets and hauling them in again after it was over would mean rousing out all hands. Tacking would also have earned us a round of abuse from the watch below, so we waited, irresolute, for the aspect to start altering. It didn’t, but just then the mate appeared out of the companionway. He gave the impression of having a different agenda to us, but whatever had been bothering him, he took one look at the lights and prioritised.

‘Helm up!’ he ordered calmly, surging out the mainsheet as we peeled off to starboard slowly. He waited less than a second to make sure we did as we were told, then he dived below.

‘Nice’, observed my oppo, peering up at the steamer’s red light in the howling gloom. ‘I suppose he’s gone to pack his suitcase.’

But he hadn’t. In no time he was back on deck firing the white flare our financially prudent skipper had kept hidden from the

rest of us. As each succeeding wave knocked Johanne’s head further off the solid wall of the wind, he waded forward until he stood by the windlass with the flare at arm’s length, framed in white flame and smoke. The effect was startling. After only the briefest hesitation the ship began to swing round our stern. As we swept under her lee, the wind suddenly shut down and we breathed the homely smell of ship. Up on the bridge wing, our private Pains Wessex benefit lit up an incredulous face like a ghoul in a fairground ghost train, then the storm came back and the face and the vessel were gone, the stern light dipping into the turmoil of the waves. The mate tossed the remains of his flare to leeward and the three of us hove in the mainsheet.

‘While we’re at it,’ he grunted, ‘we may as well heave her to so you guys can give us a hand to save ourselves in the hold.’

We weathered the staysail, lashed the helm hard a’lee and clambered into the gloom wondering what we might find. Down there out of the wind, conditions were far from ideal. Having avoided a terminal running-down by a mere boat’s length, we were now confronted with a one-way ticket to Davey Jones’ Locker. It was hard to be specific about the mean water level because Johanne was rolling her rails under while standing alternately on her bow and her shapely transom, but many tons of the saltiest were slopping around with enough force to knock you off your feet. The scene was illuminated by two crazily swinging hurricane lamps and, as I clung to the ladder, the dog came swimming by, its little black eyes glowing miserably in the lamplight. The hold was filling steadily with bilge water slopping around between planking and ceiling, hitting the deckhead hard and washing through where the

top ceiling board would have been if we hadn’t removed it to help the ship breathe. This was proving a bad idea and, since water was clearly arriving from somewhere else unspecified, our second mistake had been not to provide some sort of drain-hole in the ballast. The water that was rising inside the hold was being kept from the bilge and its powerful pumps by the cement we had laid so efficiently.

As the rest of the crew came wading aft from their bunks in the focsle, the mate handed me a pick-axe and grabbed a sledge hammer. ‘We’ll have to smash through the cement,’ he shouted above the roar of the storm and the surge of the water. ‘The rest of you keep pumping even if nothing comes out.’

Attacking the bottom of a boat with a pickaxe in a mid-Biscay howler seemed extreme. ‘That’s all fine,’ I retorted, ‘but what if the pick smashes through the garboard as well?’

‘If we just sit here and watch, we’re going to drown.’ he pointed out reasonably. ‘If we give it our best shot, we’ve got two chances – small chance and no chance. What’s your choice?’

I grabbed the pick and laid into the job as if I meant it, which I did. The surging, oily, scummy water didn’t help, it was freezing cold and it kept rising, but we bashed on with a will, grateful we’d used plenty of sand in the mix. Just when all seemed lost, we broke through. The planking survived and the big pumps on the main engine slowly sucked us dry.

As a footnote to this account, readers might be relieved to learn that the dog William made it to the West Indies, which is more than I did. The boat limped into Corunna with a fair bit of damage and finally arrived in Madeira, where, for reasons amorous, financial and highly personal, I slung my hook. And thereby hangs another tale.

ONBOARD

LONDON CALLING If a visit to the London Boat Show last month prompted you to think about sailing up the Thames, here’s how one crew did it in a 1904 gaff cutter STORY PAUL EEDLE

W

orking a 1904 gaff cutter to windward up the narrowing, winding River Thames to Tower Bridge took a day of total concentration. Tack too soon, and we would have to tack again before the next bend. Too late, and we risked driving 15 tonnes of wood and lead into the timbers of a quay or the mud of the river bottom.

“When we have all the sails up, we have to operate 27 ropes,” skipper and owner of Aeolus, Anthony Wheaton, said afterwards. “Tacking up the Thames, there wasn’t much time to do anything else. I don’t remember eating or drinking because there was so much going on.”

Our rewards were a thrilling sail and the chance to see London, as few of us ever do, from its tradesman’s entrance: the wide, flat Thames estuary and the low marshlands along the river’s eastern reaches where container ships, tankers, bulk carriers and barges unload to feed and power a city of 10 million people. And we found out how to open Tower Bridge.

Anthony had been wanting to make the trip from the Hamble to London for a long time. He bought Aeolus in 2008, but she was impossible to sail. Built in California as a gentleman’s day-sailing yacht, 41ft (12.5m) on deck but only 9ft (2.7m) in the beam, she had a vast mainsail on a boom that stuck out 10ft (3.1m) behind the transom and would not balance. But the late Ed Burnett revised the sailplan with a shorter boom and produced a boat which sails beautifully: as soon as she feels the breeze on her bow, she heels over 30 degrees and the helm can keep her in the groove with fingertips. Anthony renewed the rigging in keeping with an Edwardian boat: tan running rigging, belaying pins, deadeyes and blocks and tackles.

Aeolus was sailing again, but was not equipped for even a one-night passage. Anthony spent evenings and weekends for seven years building an interior, piece by piece, at home in London. He mocked up each item of furniture in plywood to test for size and placement, then created the finished article in varnished mahogany.

By the spring of 2015, Aeolus had eight berths, a heads, a galley with a brass hand pump, and a chart table with a cabinet of individual flag lockers.

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Even then, the trip almost faltered. In early summer, beating into a choppy sea, the bowsprit broke. A single, deafening crack stunned all of us on board. The jib poured out to leeward and 8ft (2.4m) of shattered bowsprit dragged in the sea, tied to the boat by a tangle of cables.

The next day, Anthony left Hamble town quay in his battered estate car with several large tins of epoxy and a roll of glassfibre matting in the boot, a broken bowsprit lashed to the roof and a determined look in his eye, and vanished into the London-bound traffic. Two weeks later, Aeolus completed the Round the Island race with the bowsprit looking nearly as good as new.

On the last day of July, we set out for London with a crew of seven. The full moon hung huge behind the boat as we sailed out of the Solent in a westerly breeze. The next day we made the white cliffs of Beachy Head in sparkling sunshine, and by midnight we were spotting the lights marking the channel inside the Goodwin Sands.

Our ancestors knew the sheltered waters off Deal as an anchorage called the Downs. Before the invention of steam engines made tides less relevant, this was where ships waited for the right wind and tide to make the turn around the tip of Kent into the Thames estuary. The confluence of tides creates a gate of little more than two hours when the stream is running north through the Strait of Dover and west up the estuary.

“A hundred years ago, they came up on the flood and went out on the ebb,” Anthony said. “On a modern boat, nobody uses ‘flood’ and ‘ebb’. My boat has incredible water resistance because it is a barn door under the water, so it is critical that we sail with the tide.”

The old sailing ships would have anchored in the Downs and picked up a pilot, if they had not already taken one on board off Dungeness. However, we took the chance of a few hours’ rest and a 21st-century shower inside the harbour walls at Ramsgate.

We set off at mid-morning to catch the tidal gate, pausing only to practise our MOB procedure when the skipper dropped his bowler hat in the outer harbour.

Heading north in a light easterly, we reached into the

Anthony in trademark bowler

AEOLUS

wide expanse of the Thames estuary and headed for the white ranks of wind turbines in the London Array, the world’s largest offshore wind farm.

In medieval times, the shifting sandbanks of the estuary made an experienced pilot essential. The first buoy was not placed in the Thames estuary until 1629.

Today, though, the safe channels are clearly marked by buoys and we piloted ourselves.

We sailed closer to the wind farm than strictly necessary, because as Anthony remarked, “We couldn’t possibly gybe, because we were having lunch.” Then, headed southwest to join the Prince’s Channel up the estuary, we found an intriguing cluster of two-storey steel platforms on tripod legs. They looked like science-fiction invaders from another planet. These were the Shivering Sands Army forts, one of three sets of anti-aircraft platforms built in 1942 to defend London against German air raids.

In the shipping channel now, we had to watch for container ships. These big vessels move deceptively fast.

Darkness fell and as we left the neon of Southendon-Sea casino to starboard, the estuary narrowed into a river. Around the first big bend in the river, we made for Gravesend, the traditional first stopping place for international shipping bound for London. Vessels would anchor here, drop off their Channel pilot and pick up a ‘mud’ pilot for the last stretch to the heart of London. We moored to a buoy for the six hours of the ebb tide and caught some sleep.

We set out the next day into a light southwesterly breeze with working sails up – main, staysail, jib, main topsail and flying jib – working our way past London’s container port at Tilbury and later beating under the Queen Elizabeth II (Dartford) Bridge, ancient marshland on both banks.

Rainham marshes on the north side is a wildlife sanctuary but developers want to turn Broadness Saltings and Swanscombe marshes on the south bank into a theme park attracting 15 million visitors a year.

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Above, left to right: Approaching the Thames Barrier; safely past the bascules of Tower Bridge; entering St Katharine Docks

Our one non-Edwardian navigation aid was a charting app on a smartphone, which came into its own now that the river was narrowing and we needed to know the depth on every bend. In 1904 we would have had a sailor standing outside the shrouds swinging a 14lb (6.4kg) lead weight into the water to measure the depth. Two more tacks and all of a sudden we had arrived in London. Now there was other traffic to contend with: tugs pulling barges, small freighters and the Woolwich ferry.

We tacked to the southern side of the river and tacked again to make the Thames Barrier. The barrier has four 200ft (61m) and two 100ft (30m) openings to sail through, but its stainless steel domes look very solid from a small sailing boat.

We strained to see the dot matrix displays which show which side to pass. Beyond, we caught our first sight of London’s skyline: the pyramid top of One Canada Square at Canary Wharf, the upturned curve of the Gherkin and the blunt arrow of the Shard.

We rounded the white dish of the Millennium Dome on Greenwich Peninsula and scanned the horizon for the turret of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park to work out when we would cross the Greenwich Meridian, 0 degrees longitude. We spotted the building but missed the Meridian, partly because we were busy tacking seven times in little more than a mile, and partly, we discovered later, because the line now runs 102.5m (336ft) east of the Observatory, as scientists have rebased navigational charts on a more sophisticated model of the earth.

On this stretch of the Thames, every vista tells a story. On Greenwich Reach, the classical colonnades of the 18th-century Royal Naval Hospital, later used as the Royal Naval College, mark an era when British Naval power built a worldwide empire on the inhuman Atlantic trade in slaves and sugar and scarcely less brutal trades in cloth to India and opium to China.

In dry dock beside the Naval College, the restored clipper Cutty Sark embodies the late 19th

rockportmarine.com Photo by Peter Ralston.

AR ABESQUE

Awards NOMINATED

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05/10/2015 15:06

NASHUA

rockport, maine, usa

Photo by Billy Black.

AEOLUS century peak of sailing merchant ships. When she was launched to ply the tea trade in 1869, steam-driven ships were already making sail redundant, and by 1895 she had been sold off.

Across the river, in what used to be the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs, rise the slab-sided towers of Canary Wharf, where bankers from the world’s biggest financial institutions look down on quaysides which from 1802 to the Second World War formed the heart of the busiest docks in the world. We followed a sharp bend in the river to the southwest and tacked five more times in less than a mile. We rounded the next bend and there, half a mile ahead, stood Tower Bridge.

Tower Bridge is not just a national icon carrying a major road through central London; it’s a very large piece of equipment – each of the two lifting bascules is 100ft (30m) long and weighs 1,000 tonnes. However, if you want the bridge to open to sail through, all that’s needed is a polite email 24 hours in advance.

You say what time you’d like to sail through, and they send a confirmation on headed stationery. It’s completely free, a service provided by the Corporation of the City of London for any vessel with a mast or superstructure of 30ft (9m) or more.

We had booked for 3pm and worried all morning that we would arrive late. Now, we worried that the bridge wouldn’t open at all. Two minutes to go, and traffic still jammed the roadway. A minute to go, and still nothing.

Then we heard a faint klaxon and the traffic stopped. The two sides of the roadway lifted, and Anthony steered Aeolus, all sails up but engine running for safety, straight at the centre of what looked like a dangerously narrow gap. Looking straight up the mast, the tip of the topmast looked within scraping distance of the metal girders on either side. We shouted detailed guidance: “Port a bit, Anthony! Starboard now!” and held our breath. Moments later we were through into the Pool of London and Anthony doffed his bowler to the bridge master. When we looked later at photographs taken from the shore, we could see Aeolus was so small that she had several metres of clearance on both sides. It didn’t feel like that at the time, but as Anthony’s friend Chris remarked at the time: “We just made 10,000 tourists’ day!”

AEOLUS GAFF TOPSAIL CUTTER

En route past flat estuarial marshlands for London

Aeolus is a 42ft (12.8m) gaff topsail cutter: slim, deep with a long keel, all-internal lead ballast of six tonnes and a huge sailplan. She was built in California in 1904, designer unknown, but possibly influenced by Charles Kunhardt’s popular book of the time – Small Yachts; their Design & Construction.

She was raced locally (with some success) and later chartered. She was rebuilt in 1982/3 as an exact replica with the keelson the only original timber.

She is double-planked in cedar up to the waterline with fir planks above, light oak frames, mahogany beams and triple-layered cedar decking. The sailplan was replicated; in the prevailing style at the turn of the last century, it was overcanvassed with a 10ft (3.1m) boom overhang and light spars. This may have been suitable for inshore racing but produced excessive weather helm and an unseaworthy boat.

In 2003, Aeolus was imported to Britain but not sailed until Anthony bought her in 2008. The lead ingots were moved, revealing a sound hull, but could she be made to sail well and so be worth restoring? Anthony did some experimental sailing with Tom Richardson (Elephant Boatyard) and took the lines of the hull for Ed Burnett to produce a new sailplan. The new mainsail has a much shorter foot and bigger headsails have achieved balance, helped by the new sails from SKB cut very flat to reduce heeling.

Aeolus now sails beautifully! In Homer’s Odyssey, Aeolus was the Keeper of the Winds who gave Odysseus a bag trapping all the unfavourable winds which would stop him sailing home. His crew opened the bag and unleashed a hurricane, the start of a long journey (replicated in the restoration). The large symbol on Aeolus’s mainsail represents the winds escaping. Anthony Wheaton, owner.

LOD 42ft (12.8m) LWL 38ft 3in (11.7m) LOA 60ft (18m) DRAUGHT 8ft (2.4m) BEAM 9ft (2.7m) SAIL AREA 1,450sq ft (135m2) FB facebook.com/Aeolus1904

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HITLER’S TENDER How one 1930s pinnace went from the Third Reich to a field in Kent STORY CLARE MCCOMB

I

t’s not the boat’s fault – everyone agrees with that. Yet the thought of this streamlined motor launch regularly ferrying Nazi leaders Göring, Goebbels, von Ribbentrop, Himmler and Hitler himself is still shocking. Apparently she was intended to carry the victorious Führer upriver to his new headquarters at Windsor Castle, if the projected invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Lion, had been successful. She really is one of those historic boats where you only wish she could talk.

According to her previous owner, journalist Revel Barker, Blohm & Voss laid down the keel of her massive mothership, the Aviso Grille, at their Hamburg shipyard in 1934. Grille was launched in December that year as the largest yacht afloat at 443ft (135m) overall. For the new German president, Herr Hitler, this was a prestigious, almost ‘royal’ vessel, but she was also equipped with cannon, guns and could carry 280 mines – an iron fist in a velvet glove.

At the same time, below decks, they were testing new engine technology for German destroyers of the future.

One of the crew, Helmut Krämer, wrote in his diary “we live in a constant state of stress”, presumably in case something in the “untried power design” blew up.

Above decks her smart pinnaces were busy, ferrying VIPs to and from high powered military policy meetings and sumptuous diplomatic events. Hitler himself frequently spent three or four nights aboard, but preferably when she was in port. He was a rotten sailor and often seasick.

Not everything ran smoothly. Hitler regularly lectured his sailors about drink and when he entered a room unexpectedly to find a bottle of Champagne being enjoyed by the crew, apparently he strode forward and kicked it over, before storming out.

Aviso Grille came equipped with three motor launches. The twin pinnaces, MB1 and MB2, were carried on deck and lowered by a boom to the water.

Plus there was a ‘liberty boat’ for transporting the crew.

Motorboot 1 is the only vessel to have survived those years. Now named Grillet, she is in England and about to undergo a full restoration. She is long and narrow, 36ft (10.97m) LOA, 10ft (3.05m) beam, and although in

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need of sensitive repair, her lines display a fine pedigree.

She was built by Lürssen in Bremen in 1934, designed for harbour work, not the open sea.

What stories she could tell! She was there when Hitler’s state yacht came in peace to the UK, bringing Field Marshal von Blomberg to attend the coronation of George VI in 1937. She was there when Grille returned to British waters in 1939, to lay mines at the mouth of the Thames. She was lowered to rescue survivors when the heavily armed Grille rammed a merchant steamer, carrying a cargo of 600 live pigs, off the Danish coast during the war; this collision left the German flagship holed and unable to lead the invasion of Norway as planned. And she was there in 1945 when GrandAdmiral Dönitz announced the death of Hitler from the deck of the Aviso Grille, having assumed leadership of the German nation and supreme command of the fighting forces. She paid the price of defeat when, before their surrender, the crew sabotaged Grillet’s engines by pouring in seawater to corrode them and hurling the cylinder heads into the bilges.

With peace came notoriety. Now the crippled Aviso Grille was brought from Norway as a prize of war, first to crowded Rosyth, and then to Hartlepool, where curious locals queued in their thousands, paying to peer at Hitler’s staterooms and his giant yacht’s conquered glory. Meanwhile BBC wartime newsreader Alvar Liddell had been given the demob task of selling off Grille’s equipment to the highest bidder and news of this reached the sharp ears of local Hartlepool businessman ‘Tot’ Richardson, owner of a fleet of coaches and also a lifelong motorboat enthusiast. His pre-war Garwood runabout was long gone and Grillet was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, her sleek lines and narrow hull far above anything he could have hoped for.

He motored over to see if a decent bargain could be struck and after a short discussion left minus his new car (worth £300) as the proud owner of Motorboot 1.

A new chapter in Grillet’s life had begun.

Back at the coach workshops, Richardson tackled the corroded 9.5 litre Mercedes Benz diesel engine, re-machining its salt-damaged bores and shaping pistons

MARTIN BARRON AND TOMMY RICHARDSON

Clockwise from top left: Hitler on board; Hitler visits the Aviso Grille off Kiel in 1938; day-tripping off Hartlepool in very different times; alongside Grille having embarked another high level dignitary

from a double decker bus into a perfect fit. Make do and mend had been the wartime mantra – spare parts were not to be had – and Richardson was an experienced mechanic and engineer. Within a month he had the engine running and soon Grillet was buzzing up and down the Hartlepool coastline, her 10mph top speed and her elegance drawing the admiration of all. It was obvious before long that she rolled hopelessly in rough seas – after all she’d been designed as a harbour vessel – but Richardson fitted stabilising chocks and adjusted the internal iron ballast until she settled down.

Although he had worried what people might think, there was no need. Hartlepool took the motorboat to its heart. From the start she was the fastest thing in the port (the harbour tug could manage only 7mph and the pilot boat less than that) and of course she looked superb.

Soon she was in demand for all sorts of community events, ferrying the Carnival King and Queen every year, and taking visitors out to see the light battleship HMS Diadem when it lay three miles offshore. On that occasion Richardson had a licence for 12 passengers, but in the end managed to take 30, reckoning correctly Grillet could do two fast trips to everyone else’s one.

With Grillet’s speed, looks and her reputation, Richardson charged good money for such trips. As well as being a family boat, she could earn her keep.

Meanwhile Tot’s son, Tommy, was enjoying the benefits of Grillet’s slippery hull as a keen waterskier.

He’d become fascinated by the idea after watching Esther Williams in the Busby Berkeley blockbuster Easy to Love in the early 1950s. Like father, like son, he made his own skis, out of two glued sheets of ¼in ply bent over a brick, guessing that “if they were wide enough they would work”. So it proved. Tommy went on to be national senior champion three times, thanks, at least in part, to his early experiences with Grillet.

All the family joined in for her twice-yearly antifouling scrape and she was a familiar sight being towed back and forth to the workshops on an old gun trolley: it was make do and mend, as ever. The boat was Tot’s pride and joy from 1945 until 1966, when arthritis left him unable climb down the boarding ladder. With a heavy heart, he sold her on.

There followed several owners, Grillet enjoying life as a family pleasure cruiser and canal boat in Yorkshire, until she was bought and restored by the journalist Revel Barker, who lives on the island of Gozo, off Malta. After her sojourn in the Mediterranean, she was

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MARTIN BARRON AND TOMMY RICHARDSON

HITLER’S TENDER

Top: Tot Richardson at Grillet’s wheel in 1957. Above: alongside the Aviso Grille.

Below: Revel Barker (left) and Tommy Richardson with Grillet, in Gozo

acquired by an airline pilot, Rod Cadman, who had fallen for and spent years searching for her after seeing a tiny picture in a travel article. She has now been shipped back to his home in Kent and is about to have a full refit to restore her to her former glory.

Cadman is very clear about what he wants: where possible, this will be a conservation. He is seeking an original engine, for many motor launches of that period had similar versions, and hopes to rebuild her original cockpit and mechanics, using the best expert advice he can find. His father was fascinated by motor yachts and Cadman lived for a year on a steel 100-footer when he was 16. He loves the 1930s ‘Shimara’ style and says: “Lürssen are one of the top yacht designers – always have been – and a 1930s pinnace from that yard is a lovely thing in her own right and well worth preserving. She is fine now, but once we are done, she will be magnificent.”

Symbolic grandiosity was the central tenet of the Nazi propaganda machine, so when Hitler was voted president as well as chancellor of Germany in 1934, it served his purpose perfectly to own the largest state yacht afloat. For her to be named after Grille, which had been the Kaiser’s imperial yacht from the 19th century, was even better. Everything about her – design, fit-out, technology and yes also her tenders – was of the highest quality and this is perhaps what has saved Motorboot I, aka Grillet as re-named by Tot Richardson in 1945. In the years since 1945, she has been purchased and preserved largely because of her own period beauty and motorboat enthusiasts have admired her for what she is, not for who she has belonged to.

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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COCKLESHELL HERO Jonty Sherwill tells the story of a unique 1926 dayboat designed by his grandfather WORDS JONTY SHERWILL

Dedicated crew Vicki Weston with the author on the helm as Cockleshell powers to windward

JOE MCCARTHY

W

PHOTO ON FACING PAGE: JOE MCCARTHY

“

hat is she?” It is a frequent question from other boats as they pass by but there’s seldom time to explain before they are out of earshot.

The story starts in Guernsey, which is where my late father, John Sherwill, wrote an article about Cockleshell for Classic Boat, published in the August 1990 issue. “Above the harbour of St Peter Port,” he wrote, “stands Beauregard.” Now a hotel, this was once the home of local dentist Arthur ‘AJ’ Barber, also a skilled amateur boat designer and builder. Folklore has it that his daughter Pat was born on the very day that AJ completed Cockleshell in April 1926. In 1949 Pat would marry my father John Sherwill, and this happy union ensured that Cockleshell has remained within the same family for at least another 65 years.

Family heirlooms are seldom boats, but to remain cherished a boat has to be useful, fun to sail and affordable. While Cockleshell ticks each of these boxes, seaworthiness and performance are other factors in her survival. Cockleshell was launched in 1926 and a year later was given a short bowsprit to improve the balance of her rig, the first of numerous updates to improve her performance over following decades. Built lighter than expected, her ballast was increased by 100kg, 60kg in the deadwood behind the iron keel and 40kg in the bilge.

AJ now had a slippery racer and the perfect dayboat for fun sailing with family and friends. But in 1940 the German Occupation put all that on hold and Cockleshell was laid up. Despite shrapnel wounds from a British bombing raid and the loss of mast, teak gratings and other gear, she came through the five years unscathed and was in commission by the time the yacht Dyarchy visited St Peter Port in 1946. Owner Roger Pinckney had a broken tooth that AJ extracted for him and later was taken for some ‘rock hopping’ aboard Cockleshell. The story is told in the 1946 Royal Cruising Club Journal.

After AJ’s unexpected death in 1952, John Sherwill raced the boat through the mid 1950s, “sometimes asking an awful lot of her” as he commented in the Classic Boat article. The first Guernsey Round the Island Race of 1955 was typical. With only six entries it turned into a nine-hour epic of wind, overfalls and foul tide.

AJ Barber: designer, builder and first owner of Cockleshell

COCKLESHELL COLLECTION

“Conditions were bad at times,” reported the Guernsey press but Cockleshell pressed on, finishing third behind Arthur Vaudin’s bermudan cutter Kittiwake and Bill Davis’ 5-tonner Kenetha. The Round Jersey Race the same year proved less welcoming. Cockleshell won on handicap but was disqualified after a protest for not being ‘of cabin cruiser class’, a controversial outcome in view of the fact that their entry had been accepted.

So for 1956 John built a cabin top to fit over the cockpit coaming and the extra spray protection may have saved the boat and skipper on Guernsey’s Liberation Day. Caught in a rising south-westerly blow homeward bound on a singlehanded trip round Sark, he reached the shelter of Herm’s eastern shore. Cold and wet, he dropped anchor and pumped out, oblivious that a search was already underway in the failing light, before setting off again through the Percee Passage for home.

In 1957 John and Pat (with their two-year-son) moved to England and AJ’s widow Winnie offered them the boat. The response was a predictable ‘yes’, the only issue being how to get her to her new East Coast home.

The solution was obvious – sail her over in the one week of vacation that John still had available. His crew was a 20-year-old RAF cadet, Ben Johnston.

On 1 August 1959 Cockleshell sailed for East Anglia.

It was to be a 325-mile journey, port-hopping initially up the French coast with six overnight stops.

In a week of high pressure and with no engine, it was a notable achievement, underlining the boat’s light airs ability. She was on her own with no ship’s radio, no echo-sounder, no log, no RDF, probably lifejackets and flares, a torch, certainly charts for navigation, plus food, drink and a primus stove. Navigation was by DR and to check the heading an old naval compass in a box was brought on deck! Attitudes to safety and responsibility have changed a lot in the half-century since, but for John Sherwill it was just another challenge to be enjoyed.

The trip culminated in a 24-hour passage from Dover to Orford across the Thames Estuary on a moonless night. Without engine or navigation lights they shone a torch onto the sails to warn oncoming ships and at one point foul tide and no wind saw them perilously close to sandbanks. Rescued by a light breeze they arrived at the Orford River entrance early on 8 August and hove-to for CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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COCKLESHELL

breakfast while they waited for the flood tide. They had averaged 45 miles each day. Cockleshell had seasons on the Rivers Orwell and Deben, then in the Wash and at Wroxham Broad, before returning to the Deben to spend 25 years racing at Waldringfield SC. Then in 1983 John and Pat retired to Guernsey and handed Cockleshell over to me. My first sail aboard had been at the age of six weeks in my mother’s arms. From the age of eight I had regularly sailed her with my father. Now a refit was overdue and when Cockleshell was re-launched from Larkman’s Boatyard near Woodbridge she was in top condition, complete with a new aluminium mast, a lighter replacement for the old pine mast made in 1947.

She came south to the River Hamble in 1989, where she was tied up alongside an X One Design, the Westmacott design that together with the Sunbeam will have influenced AJ. His pencil-drawn lines still exist, as does the original half model.

From the Hamble, Cockleshell races regularly, but not until 2013 did she grab her moment of glory by winning six races from six starts at Cowes Classics Week. To make the point, she won again the next year.

Back in 1926, AJ Barber walked into Beauregard and said to his wife: “My job’s finished, what about yours?”

Hours later baby Pat was born and since then, 29 April has been a double family celebration. It’s Cockleshell’s 90th birthday this year. It just remains to be seen who will take the helm to steer her into a second century.

Cockleshell’s non-class status has allowed unfettered rig development

COCKLESHELL LOA 21ft 6in (6.54m) LWL 16ft 10in (5.12m) BEAM 5ft 7ins (1.71m) DRAUGHT 3ft 9ins (1.15m) WEIGHT 1425kg Cockleshell is often confused for the X One Design.

In fact, Cockleshell is longer on deck by 10 inches (250mm) but both have a similar waterline length of around 17 feet (5.2m). The XOD has 9 inches (225mm) less draft, weighs 120kg less and has a lower displacement/length ratio of 258 against 295.

With her deeper keel, 200kg more ballast and 30sq feet (3m²) extra upwind sail area, Cockleshell is the more powerful boat, but this shows as a speed advantage in light to moderate conditions, while in 15 knots plus of breeze it’s closer.

Sailing Cockleshell Sailing Cockleshell in any conditions is a joy and while some boats feel dead in light airs she comes alive with virtually no visible wake and with the ability to slip away from fleets of much bigger boats. In her first season AJ found too much weather helm so he added a short bowsprit and pushed the jib forward. To this day and despite a more modern sail plan, Cockleshell still has a healthy amount of ‘feel’ but when laid down by a big gust remains perfectly under control. Back when boats had cotton sails, ‘full and by’ was sound advice, but modern sails allow one to rethink how to sail a classic boat. Even so, pinching and over-sheeting has to be avoided and as soon as it gets lumpy the main traveller and sheets are eased to maintain boat speed. AJ Barber would have loved lightweight alloy spars and for this reason I had no qualms about replacing the heavy pine mast in 1984. It had already been re-rigged in 1975 with swept-back spreaders, chainplates further aft and a taller fore-triangle allowing a large non-overlapping jib. With this set-up we tend to play the angles downwind for best VMG, only running deep in more breeze. In over 20 knots the 23m² spinnaker becomes quite a handful with dramatic quarter waves as the boat is pushed beyond hull speed! The cockpit and deck layout remain almost unchanged from 1926.

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RE FOAL S

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L.O. A. 45’ Beam 14’6” Draft 5’.

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She awaits enthusiastic Adventurer to complete her to expedition-level.

Stored under cover in secure dry boathouse for 15 years, she cost over £225,000. Offers invited. For further details and photographs contact: info@dovemarineltd.co.uk Scale model of proposed design

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Classnotes Salcombe Yawl

BY VANESSA BIRD

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© EXPLOSURES

T

development class. This means that although there are rules regarding the design and construction specifications, their designers are allowed reasonable flexibility, which has allowed the class to develop significantly. It has also led to the introduction of several top designers to the class, including Ian Howlett and Phil Morrison. Hull shape and construction has, however, remained broadly the same, with a straight stem, transom stern, clinker hull and yawl rig, with the jib set on a short bowsprit. Only wood – usually mahogany planking, although spruce has also been used – is allowed for hull and spars construction, but modern materials have crept in in the form of rigging, sails and deck gear.

Perhaps one of the most controversial periods of the class was in 1988 when Nuffin (Y141) was built by Dave Gibbens to a Phil Morrison design. Although the underwater shape from amidships to stern was very similar to existing designs, she proved revolutionary.

She also proved unbeatable during her first season, which caused concern among the class that previous designs would be outclassed.

Subsequently, the fleet has been divided into two – classic and modern – which has helped to maintain the older boats’ competitiveness. Sail numbers currently stand at 189, of which around 160 are still sailing.

SPECIFICATIONS LOA 16ft (4.9m) LWL 16ft (4.9m) BEAM 7ft (2.1m) DRAUGHT 10in (25.4cm) 4ft (1.2m) SAIL AREA 175sq ft (16.3m2) DISPLACEMENT c950lb (430kg)

DEVON YAWL Wood is the only material allowed for the construction of Salcombe Yawls, but in 1965, following concern over the escalating costs of building new boats, some members of the class mooted the idea of building a simulated clinker GRP version.

In 1968 the first GRP yawl was built from a plug built by Jack Damerell of Powercraft and a separate class, the one design Devon Yawl class, was created.

The plug later became Hobby (Y81), and over 300 Devon Yawls have since been built.

STONE’S BOATYARD Stone’s Boatyard is still heavily involved with the class. Now under the helm of Tristan Stone, Jim’s great-great nephew, the yard looks after around 40 of the fleet (see full interview p50).

Next month BULLSEYE

ORIGINAL YAWLS

Vanessa’s book,

Classic Classes, is a must-buy. Please bear in mind that this book provides only a snapshot of the myriad classes in existence.

© EXPLOSURES

his year marks the 50th anniversary of the Salcombe Yawl Association. However, this class’s roots go back further than that – in fact, its origins can be traced to the early 1800s when fishermen worked the Salcombe Estuary and surrounding coastline in small, open, clinker-built yawls of between 14ft-18ft (4.3m-5.5m).

By the 1850s, several of the yawls, known as the Licensed Watermen’s Boats, had begun to race at the Salcombe Regatta, and in 1906 the first yawl to be used wholly for pleasure sailing, the 15ft 6in (4.7m) Busy Bee, was launched.

However, it was the launch of the 14ft (4.3m) three-quarters-decked yawl Blackbird around 1917 that marked a new era in yawl design and sowed the seed for what was to become the current class.

Built for harbour sailing by 16-year-old shipwright Jim Stone, the yawl was similar to the working boats, but proved so fast that by 1921 she was regularly beating the existing fleet. Then, in 1936, Morgan Giles modified his design of a 16ft (4.9m) Teign Corinthian One Design, and built two boats, Edra and Auburn, which took yawl racing to a whole new level. Jim Stone responded by building Blackbird II in 1939, and in 1947 built the first of a new generation of 16ft yawls, Kingfisher (Y15).

By 1962, Stone had built 24 out of 26 racing yawls since the Second World War, but interestingly his original Blackbird and Morgan Giles’ Choice (ex-Edra) remained at the top of the fleet. By 1967, however, Peter Taylor’s Taylormaid, a development of Choice, proved the most successful, and more yards became involved in the class. In total, 20 yards have built Salcombe Yawls, although of these, Stone’s Boatyard remains the most prolific, having built nearly half the entire fleet.

Unlike many of its contemporaries, the Salcombe Yawl is not a one design, but is a

Around 160 Salcombe Yawls are currently in existence. Of these, some of the earliest include Kingfisher (mentioned above, built in 1947), and Heron (Y19), built by Stone in 1952.

Both were rebuilt in recent years by Stone’s Boatyard.

THE PRICE When Jim Stone started building Salcombe Yawls, a new boat cost £250. Now, new boats, which can be built to order by several local yards, cost over £40,000. One of the newer yawls built will be exhibited at the RYA Dinghy Show at Alexandra Palace in March. Secondhand Salcombe Yawls go for £5,000-£6,000.

syoa.co.uk

New Classics Traditional style at the London Boat Show There was, unsurprisingly, something of a shortage of traditional boats at the recent London Boat Show, although we did spot a few, like the 17ft 6in (5.3m) Coastal Weekender from Character Boats, (c£20,00) looking the part in simulated clinker build. We’ve always admired these stout-looking craft with their sprayhoods and split cockpits when we’ve seen them at shows. See characterboats.co.uk. Swallow Yachts brought its new, fairly radical 25ft 9in (7.8m) BayCruiser 26 (£75,900) and their bestseller, the 20ft (6.1m) BayRaider Expedition (£19,995). See swallowyachts.com. They were next door to Cornish Crabbers, who had the 10ft (3.1m) Limpet (£3,695) and the new Shrimper 21 (£36,300) on show. See cornishcrabbers.co.uk. Churchouse Boats had a modified 21ft 9in (6.6m) Longboat (£16,720) on its stand, and we are really looking forward to seeing the re-emergence of the very first lugger soon, being restored by Churchouse.

See drascombe.co.uk. In terms of power, we were pleased to see that the Slipper Launch that Tom Neale of Fine Wooden Boats in Cambridgeshire has been building for the last three “and a bit” years, is finally finished. She was drawing admiring glances from a small crowd who came to um and ah over her 25 layers of varnish and perhaps over her price tag (around £300,000 +VAT). Everything on the boat seems to be of the highest quality, from the real gold leaf, to the internally-lit engine compartment to the handmade, fixed Italian leather seats, which Tom chose over the more traditional wicker chairs that are left unfixed to the sole. See finewoodenboats.co.uk.

Clockwise from top: The shiny splendour of Fine Wooden Boats’ slipper launch; Cornish Crabbers’ little 10ft Limpet; Swallow Yachts’ BayCruiser 26 with its more affordable Bayraider Expedition beyond it

More at classicboat.co.uk/new-classics CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

73

Getting afloat

EDITH GRAY (2011) Pilot cutter builder John Raymond Barker built this one for himself, and we loved the concept of a ‘mini’ pilot cutter – a bit more manageable and affordable, but still beautiful and still solid and husky. We didn’t necessarily expect her to win every race in sight first thing out of the box, but that’s just what she did. LOD 38ft 6in (11.7m), Asking £220,000, Lying UK

✷ RACE WINNER

Buy a pilot cutter?

Not so long ago, we were writing about the glut of S&S inboard yawls on the used market.

ALEXANDER T (1998)

MARIAN (1889)

In the same ‘mid-sized to large’ bracket, we

This is a larger version of the original

She graced our cover in August 2005

are now noticing a similar preponderance of

Westernman design conceived by Tom

after her big rebuild by David Walkey.

pilot cutters – original ones and those built as

Cunliffe after years of sailing Cornubia

She’s the second oldest of the 18 original

yachts in a prolific boom over the last two

(below). She was designed by Nigel Irens

pilot cutters known still to survive, and her

decades. That boom continues unabated

and Ed Burnett and built in strip-planking

restoration has left her wonderfully clean,

– John Raymond Barker is approaching the

by Covey Island Boatworks in Canada to

making her deck plan a beautiful thing to

end of his restoration of Gleam, as well as a

MCA zero-coding spec. She’s been owned

behold (the deck plans are an aesthetic

new build he has in progress, and Cockwells

by a couple all her life so must be handy.

feature of these boats). LOD 44ft (13.4m),

has a new one in build too. The upshot is a

LOD 51ft 4in (15.6m), £295,000, Lying UK

Asking £385,000, Lying UK

more mature and competitive used market

✷ HANDY BURNETT DESIGN

✷ SUPERB RESTORATION

with a number of boats in varying conditions, old and new, to consider. It’s a buyers’ market now, with prices coming down to more sensible

CORNUBIA (EX HIRTA)

levels; if the price still seems high, it’s

Cornubia is one of the better-known of the

‘reasonable offer’ time (as always).

original pilot cutters out there, partly

We asked Richard Gregson of Wooden

because of her popularisation under the

Ships and Barney Sandeman of Sandeman

ownership of sailing writer Tom Cunliffe

Yacht Company to talk us through the boats

and partly due to a recent (2009) and

on their books. There are some differences,

almost total rebuild by Tommi Nielsen and

but the constants are charm, great looks,

Company in Gloucester. At nearly 52ft

unparalleled seaworthiness and stable, solid,

she’s also one of the bigger boats here.

wood-bound comfort below decks. If you

LOD 51ft 9in (15.8m), £450,000. Lying UK

want one, either for charter or as a yacht,

✷ RECENT TOTAL REBUILD

you have a great choice now. And you might even be in time for the big annual Pilot Cutter Review this 26-29 May in Cornwall.

74

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Boats on this page from sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk, Tel: +44 (0)1202 330077

MARY WINIFRED (2012) Mary Winifred was inspired by Hilda and built over a decade by a Hillyards-trained boatbuilder. Like Hesper, she was built as a yacht rather than charter boat, and features a non-authentic doghouse that is arguably her best feature.

LOD: 45ft 7in (13.9m), Asking £310,000, Lying Sussex

✷ DOGHOUSE

KOCHI (2009) Kochi was built for surveyor Richard Ayers to an Ed Burnettt design in India, to circumvent export restrictions on teak: she’s entirely of Indian teak, from deck to keelson, including all frames and planks. Tommi Nielsen (Gloucester Docks) did the fit-out and rig. “She’ll last forever,” says Richard. She’s having a cosmetic refit and will be back on the market soon with a substantial reduction on the listed price.

LOD 49ft (14.9m), Asking £395,000, Lying Devon

✷ ALL TEAK

CHLOE MAY (1980)

BAROQUE (1902)

HESPER (2004)

Built by the highly-regarded Peter Nash in

The recent rebuild of this, Bill Tilmam’s

Richard’s pick of the bunch. She’s a

1980, she is “very fast” and has proved it

last pilot cutter, results in a good hull

Luke Powell (Working Sail) boat –

with an extraordinary 11-day transat, one

with existing rig ready to be reinstated.

“probably his nicest”. She was built

of several over the years. “Unlike most

“There have been some oddities in the

as a yacht for a couple, with niceties

pilot cutters, she has a proper cockpit,”

rebuild but nothing irreversible,” says

such as powered winches and a

adds Richard.

Richard. She’s still a big project.

water-maker. LOD 44ft (13m), Asking

LOD 42ft 4in (13m), £105,000, Lying Devon

LOD 50ft (15m), £75,000, Lying Sweden

£245,000, Lying Cornwall

✷ BEST PRICE

✷ HISTORIC PROJECT

✷ TWO-HANDER

Boats on this page from woodenships.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)1803 833899

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

75

BOATS FOR SALE

Boats for sale Looking to sell your boat?

Reach over 50,000 readers each month

ROMILLY ‘CORRIEMHOR”

Beautiful boat. Fitted out for coastal cruising so she enjoys a high level of equipment - Cockpit tent, Sprayhood, Instruments, self steering, etc. £17,500. East coast of Scotland but can deliver.

Contact Stephen.booth@crondall-energy.com

To advertise call Edward Mannering +44 (0) 20 7349 3747 Edward.Mannering@chelseamagazines.com Copy Deadline for next issue is 17/02/2016

Norfolk Gypsy -”Gypsy Mistress”

WOODPECKER

1926 LOOE LUGGER

Asking £45,000.

See website www.whiteheather.org.uk for full details.

Nordic Folkboat by Borresen, pitch pine on oak. Fine racing record, photographed by Beken. Just overhauled by Pete Nash & others, new floors, all-new wrought iron keelbolts, fine varnish.

New Collars mast, good sails, engine and inventory. £12 000. Full details: John Polley 01803 833608 pjpolley@warfleet.co.uk Also available: mint aluminium Harbeck trailer.

SWISS CRAFT

Cruising in Style!

Scheherazade is a true classic and has great potential as a business for weddings, birthday or NORFOLK GYPSY -”GYPSY hull -Yanmar 1GM10 dieselMISTRESS” holiday parties, or simplyBoat 48 - green Boat 48 - greenwith hull -Yanmar 1GM10 diesel. High initial gear extensive additional cruising a private cruise in style. High initial specification specification with extensive additional cruising gear. Full boat Built 1960 / 15.00 x 3.80 Full boat cover, cockpit cover, cockpit tent, sail covers cockpit cover, cockpit tent, sail covers. Instruments, Sensibel offers are Instruments,cover, autopilot, GPS, VHF-DSC andradios. multi-band radios autopilot, GPS, VHF-DSC and multi-band Twin batteries, welcome.

Twin batteries, charger and shore electrics charger and shore electrics.

Custom galvanised heavy duty Bächli Internationl Boat break-back heavy trailer. All carefully maintained & wintered in boat Custom galvanised duty break-back trailer Sales AG. Excellent wintered insurvey. boat shed Tel: +41 41 620 37 00 All carefully maintained &shed. £24,000. www.boat-trade.com Excellent survey Tel: 07733 108922

07733108922

£24,000

INBOARD SHRIMPER NO. 960 MRS. BEAR 2006.

“NUTMEG” – LOCH BROOM POST BOAT

Very pretty classic gentleman’s sailing boat, 14’6” gaff rigged with tan sails built by Character Boats in 2005. Hardwood and stainless steel fittings with rope fender. Complete with Yamaha 2.5hp outboard, combination road/launch trailer and cover, £4950. Mark Wilson 07968 983777 wilsonmarkt@gmail.com

INTERNATIONAL DRAGON ‘DAYBOAT’.

Petticrows 2009. As new condition. Measurement certificate for racing. Beautiful wood deck on blue fibreglass hull with white waterline and antifoul. Retractable electric engine operates from cockpit. Log, speed, depth and wind. GPS map. DFS radio. Jib, main, genoa and spinnaker. Ultrasonic antifoul supplement to Nautix antifoul applied by Petticrows. Covers. Fenders. Aluminium trailer with 3 boxes.

Galvanised trolley. Many extras. Burnham-on-Crouch. £45,000 ono. 07973253111 or dragnet2009@gmail.com

76

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

ON MARINA BERTH AT ROYAL MOTOR YACHT CLUB, POOLE. Pastel blue hull – a practical colour that does not “bloom” and coppercoat from new (renewed this year) therefore low maintenance. One lady owner and little used.

Classic interior with blue Dunlopillow cushions, brass bracket cabin lights, gas cooker, barometer and clock. Professionally fitted galley with shelves, plate holders, etc. Masthead aerial linked to fitted VHF radio. New tricolour fitted 2015. Sails and running rigging in good condition. Yanmar engine professionally maintained annually. New battery. Extras include table for cabin or cockpit, Shrimper boarding ladder, navy sprayhood, sail cover, boom crutch depth sounder and log. Plastimo compass.

Adjustable special tiller extension.

Very good Alton road trailer, new keel rollers. Easily viewed.

Price £23,000 Contact: marigold.clevely@btinternet.com Tel: 01258 452914

S&S DEB 33 1974

Centre board, Tylers hull, number 22, Part 1 registered. Many recent renewals. Vessel lying ashore South West Wales. £12,000.

For full details kindly contact owner marshap3@hotmail.co.uk

BOATS FOR SALE

FOR SALE

NOMAD

A BURNETT DESIGN A GEM

For further details email:

HEARD 28

Vessel sleeps four in two cabins, s/s standing rigging and spruce 36ft. mast [both replaced 2012]. Columbian pine bowsprit, full suit of sails. Faversham coal stove, Gas cooker and toilet.

Two anchors, electronics, beaching legs and two new covers. £39,950 O.N.O. trw2611@btinternet.com

32.5FT BUCHANAN SLOOP 1970

bbinkhorst@gmail.com

Long lead keel, bronze floors. Full length planking, copper fastened. Teak superstructure. Sabb diesel. New sails. Well maintained and equipped. Fast, sound and beautiful £29,500.

Full details 07783356875.

Looking to sell your boat?

Reach over 50,000 readers each month There are two styles of Boats for Sales ad to choose from and with our special offer, if you buy two months, your third month will be free. Pick the style which suits your requirements and email: Edward.Mannering@chelseamagazines.com with your text and image or call +44 (0) 20 7349 3747.

The deadline for the next issue is 17/02/2016

SAMPLE STYLE A

SAMPLE STYLE B GOLANT GAFFER

No. 8. Excellent 2 berth coastal cruiser, built 1999. Length 18’ 9” Beam 7’ Draft 2’ 9” long keel, designed by Roger Dongray. Yanmar GM 10 regularly serviced. Very attractive boat lovingly maintained, Lying Fowey. £12,000 ono.

Email: name@classicboat.co.uk 0000 11111111

STYLE A. 5cm x 2 columns. Either 160 words or 80 words plus colour photograph. £275 inc VAT and Internet

CUTTER

Built 1991, mahogany & epoxy hull similar to GRP, 1930’s spars & fittings, beautifully maintained. Visit www.idclark.force9.co.uk for photos and specification. £25,750 Contact 00000 111111

STYLE B. 5cm x 1 colums. Either 55 words or 30 words plus colour photograph. £155 inc VAT and Internet CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

77

BROKERAGE

Brokerage

To advertise call Edward Mannering +44 (0) 20 7349 3747 Edward.Mannering@chelseamagazines.com Copy Deadline for next issue is 17/02/2016

2 Southford Road, Dartmouth, South Devon TQ6 9QS Tel/Fax: (01803) 833899 – info@woodenships.co.uk – www.woodenships.co.uk

44’ Luke Powell Isles of Scilly Pilot Cutter built in 2004 and possibly one of the best yachts Luke has built. All bronze fastened throughout. Recent thorough interior and exterior cosmetic refit, all new sails 2015. Very well equipped, easily handled and extensively cruised by present owners. Magnificent in every way, priced recently reduced.

Cornwall £245,000

44’ Dickies of Tarbert Motor Sailer built in 1936. All teak varnished hull with solid teak deck. Major thorough refit in present professional ownership, this is a breath taking yacht in every way. Gardner 3cyl diesel plus all new systems. Fore and aft sleeping cabins with central saloon. A very unusual and stunning yacht ready for the season.

Devon £84,000

46’ steel gaff ketch built in South Africa in 1997 to Norske Veritas Class. A spacious and comfortable yacht with 8 berths and full headroom throughout. Ford 80hp diesel. A very capable yacht which has been used as a blue water family cruiser since built. Immaculate condition with a full inventory.

Liverpool £135,000

49’ Danish gaff ketch built as a fishing vessel in 1918. Worked in the Baltic Sea until 1995 when she was converted to a yacht.

Oak on oak hull with very sweet lines. 155hp Volvo diesel, 9 berth accommodation with separate aft cabin. A very nice example of her type in tidy condition.

Germany £75,000

Colin Archer Type gaff cutter built in Norway in 1932.

Trennel fastened oak hull with solid laid deck. Major rebuild in present ownership, she has been cruising around northern Europe for many years. 4 cyl Lister Blackstone engine, 6 berths in 2 sleeping cabins. A fine looking yacht with a detailed history in solid and sound condition.

Portugal 90,000Euro

16’ Varnished launch designed and built by Nick Smith of Christchurch in 2010. Still virtually as new, this immaculate launch is a complete package in perfect order. Vetus 11hp diesel, custom made road trailer and all over cover. Serviced, antifouled and ready to go.

Chichester £19,500

32’ Centreboard bermudan cutter designed as a collaboration

by Harrison Butler and Maurice Griffiths. Double diagonal hull construction with laid teak deck and raised top sides, completely rebuilt in ‘97. 4 berths with full standing headroom and separate heads. An interesting yacht in very smart condition.

IOW £23,500

35’ Buchanan Saxon Class built by Priors in 1961. Honduras mahogany all copper fastened. Complete new rig in 2014, Beta 25hp diesel. 5 berths in newly rebuilt interior, a comfortable and safe yacht with several trans-Atlantic passages under her keel.

Dorset £33,000

Another fascinating selection of traditional and classic yachts only from Wooden Ships. Call for true descriptions, genuine honest values and a service from people who know their boats.

78

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

BROKERAGE

33 High Street, Poole BH15 1AB, England. Tel: + 44 (0)1202 330077

76 ft Philip Rhodes Yawl 1962 GAEL is an extremely well bred yacht; Phillip Rhodes considering her one of his most beautiful creations - and a build by Abeking & Rasmussen among the most famous yacht builders of that era. The budget moreover enabled her construction to a unique level of craftsmanship. The accommodation and layout offered by GAEL make her a superb family boat with enough space for charter to be an option. She is in short a very special yacht. €690,000

Lying France

56 ft William McBryde Gaff Ketch 1952 Designed by W.G McBryde, YVES CHRISTIAN is a proper little ship drawn at a time when this was appreciated. Sea kindly and comfortable she has plenty of beam, which with her firm sections and snug ketch rig make her very stiff - and she was originally designed for long sea trips and Mediterranean cruising. Her current owners have attended with great attention and dedication to the period and detail of the boat’s structure, meaning that her systems and interior are impressive. This is a vessel with little left to do but perhaps prepare a passage plan for somewhere you have always wanted to go to, very confident she will look after you.

£280,000

Lying UK

32 ft Berthon 8 Ton Gauntlet 1939/2014 H G May’s design concept was for a sea kindly craft with modest overhangs and draft, quite heavy displacement and easily handled sail plan – these small yachts have proved both tough and versatile. Her current owner has masterminded an extensive refit with a view to making this vessel, not just a pretty vintage yacht but one in which a family could enjoy their time aboard in comparative luxury – rare on even a modern boat of this size – NAUSIKAA beat the entire fleet of the BCYC on corrected time in their 2014 Round the Isle of Wight race ! £140,000 Lying UK

59 ft William Fife III Gaff Cutter 1897/2001 SAYONARA was almost unbeatable in the early years of Australian yachting and was to become the founding yacht of the Sayonara Cup, having won the first three challenges. A million dollar restoration in 2000 brought her back to life again; leaving her not only in impressive condition but demonstrably able to prove herself fast in both light airs and heavy weather - a very exciting opportunity to compete in the prestigious vintage gaff class in an early William Fife III design, that if sailed well is surely destined to win silverware again. €590,000 VAT Unpaid Lying Australia

30 ft Fife III Cork Harbour One Design 1897/2002 Superbly restored by Fairlie Restorations in 2002. Her simple, pure lines, generous freeboard and powerful rig, carrying no less than 600 square feet of sail - JAP has successfully taken on the might of vintage gaff class yachts in the Mediterranean and won - with her current owner a 1st, 2nd and 3rd so 2nd overall in Class at the Voiles de St Tropez in October 2014.

Storage in her own custom fitted 40 ft container has helped to keep this vessel in 1st class condition and enables easy shipping between venues. £195,000

Lying UK

36 ft GL Watson Gaff Cutter 1894 PEGGY BAWN’s two year restoration, widely regarded as exceptionally authentic, is recognised in the almost unrivalled “Coefficient of Authenticity” in her CIM rating. Cruised and raced in the seven years following, she is noted for her perfect balance and good manners. Moreover easily rigged and sailed by two, this perfect Victorian cruiser racer offers a competent owner the opportunity to step back in time, into the shoes of her illustrious designer, who created her at the very peak of his career. The sale includes a custom made Harbeck trailer providing great versatility for regattas and storage. €300,000 Lying UK

47 ft Stow & Sons Gaff Yawl 1895/2014 VALERIE has been beautifully and sympathetically rebuilt, commensurate with her vintage, which at nigh on 120 years makes her a genuine historical artefact. Thus an object of such rarity, beauty and desirability can be experienced and enjoyed as was intended by her maker so many tides ago.

The simplicity of her finish and fit-out with the re-introduction of her original yawl rig makes her a handy craft capable of being easily sailed by a small crew. Partial completion of her interior enables a new owner to specify his own accommodation arrangements, for which an outline option exists.

£195,000

Lying UK

48 ft Dickies of Tarbert Gaff Ketch 1920 It is no wonder that MORNA with her canoe stern and fine drawn out ends has found over the years owners who adore her - with more volume below and expansive deck space, she has always proved the perfect cruising boat. Dickie’s yard knew how to build strong and supremely seaworthy boats and in MORNA Peter Dickie’s passion for beautiful yachts is also very evident - along with a little influence from Albert Strange and William Fife II perhaps?

28 ft Harley Mead Gaff Cutter 1909 A pretty boat and a pretty name! LADY BELLE is as charming in the flesh as her name and the pictures of her suggest. Her current owner has kept this boat simple, honest and true to her origins and she seems very happy that way – We cannot take our eyes off this one!

£135,000

£25,000

email: info@sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

Lying Ireland

Lying UK

www.sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

79

BROKERAGE David Jones Yacht Brokerage David Jones Yacht Brokerage

David Yacht Brokerage Classic Wooden Boats Classic Jones Wooden Boats Classic Wooden Boats

898, Rockport, ME 04856 P.O. Box 898, Rockport,P.O. MEBox 04856 T: 207-236-7048 F: 207-230-0177 E: classics@midcoast.com T: 207-236-7048 F: 207-230-0177 E: classics@midcoast.com

P.O. Box www.davidjonesclassics.com 898, Rockport, ME 04856 www.davidjonesclassics.com T: 207-236-7048 F: 207-230-0177 E: classics@midcoast.com

www.davidjonesclassics.com

INTEGRITY

INTEGRITY LYRA

LYRA

1903 Wilbur Friendship 27'. 1985 1903 Wilbur Morse Friendship 27'. Morse 1985 Joel White designed sloopJoel 34'.White designed sloop 34'.

Professionally keptplanked & original as Seaworthy Strip planked in cedar. Seaworthy Professionally kept & original as Strip in cedar. $50,000 they come. $50,000 they come. & Comfortable. $42,000& Comfortable. $42,000

DJAKARTA

DJAKARTA VENTURE

VENTURE

WEATHERBIRD

Restored

by Rockport 1910 &gaff rebuilt in 1982 Lawley gaff Concordia 39'. Restored byConcordia Rockport39'.1910 & rebuilt in 1982 Lawley Marine No to excellent condition.

No recommended rigged sloop 36'. Highly recommended Marine to excellent condition. rigged sloop 36'. Highly $160,000 punch list left. $160,000punch list left. & rare classic. $50,000 & rare classic. $50,000

1931 Schooner 100’.Handsome and well cared for. 4 separate cabins sleep 8 comfortably. Rich history of famous artists and writers on board. Now chartering in the Med. 1,800,000 Euros. Lying Turkey.

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Camperdown - ÂŁ30,000

Camperdown was built in 1964 by Groves & Gutteridge in East Cowes and was their last wooden build. She is 12.26 metres LOA 3.35 metres Beam and draws 1 metre. Built to MOD specification Honduras Mahogany & teak decks. She has a registered tonnage of 12.75 tons. I acquired the boat in 2009 and had her completely refitted and restored at huge expense with all invoices and history available. She has 2 X Ford Sabre 212HP 158KW & intercooled installed 1994 less than 600 hours. Engines fully rebuilt and reconditioned, all new wiring and electronics full Raymarine GPS and Radar Autohelm VHF Log/Speedo & Depth sounder new windlass and anchor Eberspacher heater. Galvanic isolators and core plug engine heaters. She has two 3 berth cabins and two heads and a cruising speed of 15kts with a maximum of 21kts.

Includes a cold molded dinghy & outboard.

Michael Till

07880738319 email miketill@me.com

BROKERAGE

www.mjlewisboatsales.com A Specialist Brokerage service for Classic Vessels, Traditional Yachts & Work Boats.

Restorations and Rebuilds, GRP & Wooden Dinghies.

Downs Road Boatyard,TSRigging Ltd, Maldon, Essex. CM9 5HG

11m Miller Fifer m/s 1961 £35k

Sail & Motor Barges from £89k

Sailing Smacks from 20k

Nelson 34 1978 22.5k

11m ADLS 1937 £25k

East Coast OD 1913 12.5k

12.5m Silver’s m/v 1935 £50k

10m Gaff Cutter 1914 £30k

11m West Solent OD 1927 £45k

8.5m East Anglian mk1 1961 £6.9k

10.5m Gaff Yawl 1903 £19.9k

7m Johnson & Jago Sloop 1954 £6.9k

Suppliers to the Trade of HEMPELS PAINT PRODUCTS

East Coast Distributors

Tel: 01621 859373 - Email: info@mjlewisboatsales.com

For more information about any of these boats call 01491 578870 mobile 07813 917730 email gillian@hscboats.co.uk www.hscboats.co.uk

Nerissa - a rare thirties 55ft Taylor Bates recently emerged from a 2 year refurbishment programme and ready for extensive cruising. Fantastic history and charming interior.

Fedalma II - a 47ft Fox of Ipswich motoryacht with flying bridge, original thirties interior. An historic Dunkirk Little Ship. Asking price £55,000

Luxury tender - a superb example of Henwood and Dean workmanship on a Wolstenholme hull, diesel engine, wine cooler, air conditioned cabin, as new.

Amoreena is a 45ft Bates Starcraft with a stunning interior and large flying bridge suitable for sea or river work. Lying Chichester ashore.

Verity II - an Otter 26 with GRP hull and wooden fit out, loo, galley, suitable as a day boat or a weekender. Verity II is electric and available for sale with a bespoke trailer.

New for 2016, the 17ft Mallard as featured in Classic Boat issue 331, a British made contemporary classic to order for spring delivery.

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

81

Craftsmanship Yard News

Edited by Steffan Meyric Hughes: +44 (0)207 349 3758 Email: steffan@classicboat.co.uk

MAINE, USA

Fish Class rebuild Observe the dishy shape of NG

SOUTHWEST

New lid for Halcyon

(6.3m) Fish Class gaff sloop. This one, Sculpin, is hull number 816, which gives a clue to the class's popularity. Sculpin was built in 1916 which makes her a century

JANE KURKO, C/O ARTISAN BOATWORKS

C/O COCKWELLS

Herreshoff's popular 20ft 9in

old this year; what better way to celebrate than a deep restoration?

A centennial re-launch is planned

Cockwells in Cornwall has continued with wooden boat

for this spring at Bristol RI. This

restoration, despite its more recent activity in the luxury

makes Artisan Boatworks a yard

motor yacht and superyacht tender market. This is the

in a hurry. “The Fish is a husky

28ft (6m) gaff cutter Halcyon built in St Ives in 1905, one

boat – like a larger 121/2," says

of three the same. She's seen here ready to receive a

Artisan’s Alec Brainerd. Her

new deck. A new keel will follow.

eventual destination is Nantucket.

YARMOUTH, IOW

A new, timber XOD yacht is already lofted out and will start taking shape this spring. When launched, she will be the first professionally built, class-approved X boat built since Princess Jalina, launched from Lallows (IoW) in 1989. In fact, Princess Jalina, undergoing some remedial work, is sitting next to the pencilled lines of the new X. At the centre of it all is Nick Whittle (Whittle Marine) who, with his team of three, has been looking after the X fleet for a decade, carrying out all jobs from bottom scrubbing to serious rebuilds.

These days, Whittle Marine looks after around 30 of the boats, and a new one has been Nick’s dream for some time. She would be (give or take – it’s a long story!) hull number 200, and Nick’s hope is that she could be taken to boat shows to act as a class ambassador, reinvigorating it for the next century.

C/O WHITTLE MARINE

New XOD to start build

Despite the class’s popularity (the XODs are not only a symbol of the Solent but the most enduringly popular class at Cowes Week) and

Man with a plan: Nick Whittle

More like this at classicboat.co.uk/category/yard-news 82

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

the strong secondhand market, Nick has received serious interest in the new boat already – despite its inevitably high price tag in the £50,000-£60,000 region. Nick is holding off any pre-completion purchase, however, to retain complete control of the build process – the boat will, after all, act as his calling card.

Nick is hoping not only for new-build orders, but orders for hulls (at about half the price of the complete boat) from owners with tired hulls but good rigs.

The new boat will be carvel mahogany on steamed oak timbers, with an iroko keelson and deadwood (the originals were elm), and copper riveted.

The X One Design, drawn by Alfred Westmacott more than a century ago, is a 20ft 8in (6.3m) three-man racing keelboat, originally gaff, but these days with a bermudan sloop rig.

CRAFTSMANSHIP

FALMOUTH, CORNWALL

Ayesha set for restoration Richard Bond is a serial restorer of classic boats – five 6-Ms, the S&S yawl Tomahawk and the Fowey Troy Solitaire are among those he has owned to date – and, to use his own words, he is now “doing it again”.

He has recently purchased Ayesha, a 46ft (14m) LOA gaff cutter built in 1922 by Aldous Ltd of Brightlingsea and possibly the only yacht ever designed by the company’s managing director Arthur Boyes.

She is at Penpol Boatyard, near Falmouth in Cornwall. Her deck was originally pine on oak beams and at some point in her life this was overlaid with plywood and glass cloth. By Christmas this had mostly been removed – although the deckhouse was carefully taken off so that it can be restored and re-fitted – and this will now be replaced with a ply sub-deck overlaid with swept teak.

Richard hopes to restrict the initial work to this, and the replacement of the 20hp diesel engine with an electric equivalent, as he is eager to get Ayesha sailing again in spring. After that he may consider rig modifications to reinstate a sail plan closer to the larger original one. – Nigel Sharp NIGEL SHARP

DEVON

The 72ft (22m) Silvers motor yacht that has been on the slipway at Stirling and Son for some time now, has now been structurally re-built and is awaiting the last flourishes before re-launch. Life Aquatic (ex Thelma VI) has become, according to the yard “a compact and stylish superyacht with all modern comforts including a bath and ice maker [not be used together!]”.

Dubois Naval Architecture has worked with Parisian interior designers India Mahdavi Design on the superstructure and interior.

A more recent, but even bigger project, is the rebuild of the Norwegian search-and-rescue ice-class vessel JM Johansen. She was built just before the war as Rednigsselskapet 53 to support fishing fleets of Greenland, and saved 100 lives.

At 160 tons she is the largest vessel recovered by Stirling and Son at the No 1 Covered Slip to date. Her construction, says Stirling and Son, is enormous “with more framing than room and space; she

C/O STIRLING AND SON

A busy slipway at Stirling and Son

has all the attributes of a little ship”. She is being rebuilt to MCA Category 0 for cruising in Greenland and Svalbard.

At the other end of the scale, four new dinghies are following each other in build, one for India, one for Chile and two for the domestic market, bringing the Stirling dinghy tally to a pretty

JM Johansen (left) and Life Aquatic on the historic slip

impressive 33 new builds. Smaller still is a new 16ft (4.9m) cedar strip Canadian canoe for a client in the northwest of England. The yard itself recently benefited from new railway wheels for additional slipway cradles from the Devonbased company which rebuilt the Flying Scotsman; it is important to have good rolling stock after all.

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

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Ketch stars on the Tube The 1962 ketch Windweaver is being restored at Galmpton Creek Boatyard by owners Martyn Cocks and Phil Henton. It looks like a big job, and has been thoroughly documented in an 83-minute YouTube video – just search for ‘Windweaver restoration’.

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How modern yacht design owes a debt to Captain Cook

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Not much information is as yet forthcoming, but we wonder if they’ll find service on the 0720 to London Paddington as well as on boats!

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Jan Rautawaara contacted us with the news that his ongoing restoration of Alfred Nobel’s yacht, the 1914-built R Class Svea, has ground to a halt. Sad news, but a great opportunity as he’s willing to give her away free to the right applicant. Her mahogany hull is apparently sound, and she has a new keelson and some new SS frames. Contact Jan on +358 40 5345455 or email untrelbe@gmail.com

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There were four options for Glendhu, the 1950-built, 25ft (7.6m) Mylne-designed Glen Class sloop being restored by Tim Loftus at Underfall. She proved irreparable by conventional means, leaving four options: eke out another season with a few repairs, do a total rebuild, start the chainsaw, or reskin in three layers of utile using her tired hull as an armature, the method they settled on. Re-launch is expected in spring.

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Seawind, a gaff cutter of 27ft (8.2m) built in 1908, is something of a mystery, even to her owner, surveyor John Gillies, who has just started a “year-long” restoration. John, who also owns a Rampart motor yacht, bought Seawind in 1999, after having sailed the 50 SqM windfall yacht Sea Scamp, to which she bears some similarity. No doubt a slim, fast, deep, wet ride then.

Everything about Seawind is unusual: she’s thought to be a French-built ‘railway racer’ built to go from regatta to regatta by train. Built in rebated teak clinker, to give a carvel appearance, it’s finally time to strip the boat back and sort her out, due to an 1980s refit (plywood deck and cockpit) giving up the ghost and rotting out. John has appointed the services of local cabinetmaker and musical instrument maker Tony Wates (inset), who successfully turned his hand to boatbuilding a few years ago.

The strip out is complete and the planks and steamed oak timbers underneath look generally reassuring. The first job will be to replace those that need it: about five planks and 10 ribs.

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PHONING

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CRAFTSMANSHIP

PARK LIFE A cow barn in the South Downs National Park is the bucolic setting for Ryan Kearley’s specialist small craft repair and restoration yard STORY STEFFAN MEYRIC-HUGHES

T

YARD VISIT he large, draughty cattleshed RYAN near the village of Barcombe EARLEY K in the Sussex Downs where Ryan Kearley has worked for five years must be among the most scenic of all places to build boats, particularly on the cat-ice clear January day CB visited. The shed, off a narrow lane, is near the Bevern Stream and overlooks the Ouse flood plain, living up to its name after the wettest December on record. The Sussex streams look brutally cold at this time of year. Locals say they are polluted and dangerous with their steep, fast gradients – but it does not stop Ryan exploring them by canoe in summer and swimming in them, even as late as November. Around us lie at least a dozen dinghies, rowing boats, canoes and Thames skiffs – think Three Men in a Boat. The only other tenant is a barn owl, who works the night shift coverting mice into pellets for Ryan to collect in the mornings.

Ryan’s father was a carpenter, so woodworking is in his blood. His degree might have been in fine art, but it was to “making things” that Ryan immediately returned, first at the theatre, then under no less a figure than Mark Edwards of Richmond Bridge Boat Houses: think Gloriana, although that’s more for the tabloids. Mark’s other work has included a wooden clinker submarine for the BBC’s Building the Impossible series, to reprise the first ever submarine built in 1620. Ryan saw that episode and asked Mark for a job – “amazingly, he said yes”.

Ryan’s new boats – you may have seen his beautifully crafted ‘calling card’ skiff at Southampton Boat Show – bear some hallmarks from this early training, both in material (sweet chestnut for the planking) and framing, a distinctive, alternating pattern of part timbers that allow a boat to flex, eliminating what Mark calls “strong points”. After tutelage from Mark there was a long stint at Hillyards in Littlehampton, doing repair and restoration work to seagoing yachts, something that Ryan is still happy to do although these days his heart belongs more to the smaller craft – particularly antique riparian vessels like the open canoes and Thames Skiffs.

This year, Ryan’s work on restoring and repairing historic Thames skiffs has increased quite dramatically, since receiving an award from the Thames Traditional Boat Society for his ongoing restoration work to the early 1900s-built Thomasina, built by ET Ashley of

86

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

“

The only other tenant is a barn owl who works the night shift converting mice into pellets

”

Pangbourne. So far, this has involved a new stem and sternpost and some reframing and refastening. She’s back in the shed, 26ft (8m) of elegant mahogany clinker, along with four others. The current job, which sees Ryan hunched over his old Singer sewing machine, is making her a camping cover in poly-cotton canvas. “It’s heavy, breathable, and lasts,” Ryan explains. “The fully manmade ones do not have enough weight and so tend to wear out after a year.”

There were four canoes in for repairs when we visited and the difference in their construction, given that open canoes vary so little in form, is remarkable. Baby Otter dates from around 1870/1880 and was built using the Stephenson patent for cedar vertical planking held by the builder, the Ontario Canoe Company. This was during an intensely competitive period of canoe building in which builders tried various build methods to replicate the beautiful, native birch bark canoes for the European market. Ryan has been restoring Baby Otter slowly, as the owner’s funds dictate. Work so far has included a section of new keel, a new stem and new cane seat. Next up is new gunwales in either sycamore or ash.

A fire put the original builder out of business, but the Peterborough Canoe Company continued to build in the same method and Running Waters, in for a new bow seat, is a nice later example of this method of building.

A few paces away is a third canoe, fore-and-aft planked with each plank rebated to give a tongue-and-groove effect. She is a 14ft (4.3m) long ‘Lake Queen’ built by Peterborough Canoe Company around the mid-1940s after they absorbed the Lakefield Canoe Works, which built to this method. After some deliberation, as well as consultation with Rollin Thurlow in the US, the authority on these matters, Ryan has put on a new keel; there is some debate in these circles about whether canoes should have keels or not. A Rob Roy skiff-built canoe/kayak hybrid named after Rob Roy MacGregor of the famous 1,000-mile voyage through the European waterways in 1865, is also in for some work. This one was built in mahogany by the famous Turks yard on the Thames and probably dates from the late 1800s.

If there’s one common thread to Ryan’s work, it’s the meticulous, light touch required on craft of such delicate scantlings. If you have an antique small craft needing attention, put Ryan on a very short list.

CRAFTSMANSHIP

Clockwise from above: The large barn feels the weather; Thames Skiff Thomasina, recently restored; a mystery beach boat probably from the Sussex coast; vertical planking on this pre-war canoe; a new Auk

in build

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

87

MORWENNA 1914 LINTON HOPE SCHOONER

THE RESTORATION PART FOUR (CONCLUSION)

ENGINE AND SPARS

I

88

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

1

Tegwen and Fred

1

drilling the propeller shaft using a custom drill and jig set up 2

Yannick works on the interior, trying to squeeze engines, tanks, batteries, control panel, chart table and galley into a tight space

2

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHEL LE COZ

n 1914, Linton Hope drew Morwenna with twin 8-cyl paraffin motors that used all the space between mainmast and aft companion. By the 1927 Fastnet race she had a single-engine lay-out. Owner Stéphane Monnier decided to return to a twin-engine configuration, but with small, modern diesels packed beneath chart table and counter top. The area is now a nav station and galley with two quarter berths, an alteration that gives lots of extra volume and obviates the need to cook in the bows.

The main mast and boom (Douglas fir) and foremast and boom (Sitka spruce) were in good condition and were reused. An early experiment with hemp rigging proved near lethal but Morwenna still has her worm-drive, roller-reefing mechanism liked by skipper Robin Kenyon.

In 2013, after the end of a decade-long restoration at Chantier du Guip, she sailed for the first time in 18 years.

In 2014 she flew a jackyard topsail and balloon jib for the first time since the 1930s, and won the Concours d’Elegance at that year’s Voiles de Saint-Tropez.

CRAFTSMANSHIP 3

The low engine instalment (on a steel cradle) took a lot of studying to optimise space and performance. The result was a good, straight shaft angle 4

3

The new Volvo

4

D2-40s going in 5

Old spars were stripped and restored. Fittings were galvanised and painted 6

Jean-Marc installs new standing rigging; new 5

spreaders are ash

6

8

97

7

Main mast with original hardware 8

Rigger Patrick Moreau often works with Guip on “fancy” projects 9

Stepping the main mast 10

Yann, director of Chantier du Guip (left) with owner Stéphane, shortly 9

after launch

10

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

89

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Boatbuilder’s Notes WD-40 The best just got better STORY STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES

There can’t be many who don’t have a can of WD-40 knocking around, its red plastic straw long ago lost. The introduction of the ‘spray or squirt’ flip head Smart Straw can in 2005 was not before time; WD-40 was invented in 1953. Now we have the EZ reach can with a flexible memory hose to reach awkward spaces, also with a flip head for the spray function.

There are a few myths about WD-40, firstly that it’s British (it’s Californian) and secondly that WD stands for War Department. It actually stands for ‘water displacement’. Uses for WD-40 are so varied that it appeals to almost everyone. Its uses as a stain remover, penetrating low-viscosity oil, and water displacer (remember it is petrol-based and you’ll not go far wrong) are so various – the manufacturers list 2,000 – that it must rank alongside duct tape and the claw hammer in general utility. If you haven’t already, try using it to remove sticker residue from labels on timber; as a bath to remove rust from tools and fixing; as an under-eaves spray to prevent wasps from nesting in your work shed; as tinder when you soak cotton wool buds with it; as a scratch remover if you scrape your car; as a rust inhibitor in your tool box; to remove pitch pine residue from saw blades; to drive moisture from electrical wiring in an engine; and to remove almost any stain from any surface.

The digital age

BY ROBIN GATES

It is sometimes said that the cabinet maker works to the nearest 1/64th

Nicely handled In the hands of an artisan the look and feel of a tool are inseparable from its function, resulting in an infinity of designs. There are as many different handles for a chisel,

inch, the carpenter to the nearest 1/16th and the boatbuilder to the

for example, as there are sails for a square-rigger. The

nearest boat, although obviously not when there are boatbuilders

London pattern handle shown here is the cabinet maker’s

listening. But if there is a kindly truth behind this dubious saying it may

favourite and the most expensive, being made from dense,

be a reflection on the adage that ‘if it looks right it probably is right’ –

fine-grained and slow-growing boxwood. While thumb and

itself based on the tradition of building ‘by eye’ rather than to the

forefinger fall naturally into the shapely turned cove behind

arbitrary divisions of a scale rule.

the brass ferrule, its facets nestle securely in the palm – and

Or, indeed, ‘by thumb’ if we return to 18th century France where it was customary to buy timber from the merchant in widths and thicknesses

also prevent it from rolling off the bench when rested. By contrast the split-proof red and yellow resin handle is

measured in thumbs. Curiously the French use pouce to mean both

cheap and utilitarian, designed to soak up hammer blows

‘thumb’ and ‘inch’ but since discovering the width of my own thumb is

when roughing out a shape. Yet it too is beautiful, glowing

almost exactly 1 inch across at its widest point, the logic of this ‘digital’

like fossil amber in the workshop light.

system of measurement becomes clear. Not only were those sometricated chantiers across la Manche working in equivalents of Imperial inches 250 years ago, but their rule was always to hand.

92

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Above: Boxwood London pattern and moulded resin handles

CRAFTSMANSHIP

Boatbuilder’s Notes

Traditional Tool MICROMETER STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS

Sheffield. By 1952 the M&W catalogue

Clockwise from

readings. In the pearl chrome No 961Y

ROBIN GATES

ran to 48 pages of models tailored to

above: The M&W

the ratchet stop is integral with the

everything from gear teeth to

No 965 (reading

thimble, and the cut-away frame

The micrometer screw gauge is an

bearings. Frame capacity ranged up

0.215 inches);

makes tight situations accessible.

iconic hand tool of the machinist and

to 36 inch and for blind technicians

zeroing the

marine engineer. For those of us

the thimble could be machined with

sleeve with a ‘C’

touching the object, the reading of an

wedded to our carpenter’s rule and

Braille markings readable by touch.

With anvil and spindle lightly

spanner; using

Imperial tool is based on its screw

the axiom ‘if it looks right it probably

The micrometer with the girder-

the No 961Y

having 40 threads per inch, so one

is right’ this precision instrument may

section frame in black crackle enamel

one-handed

revolution of the spindle makes 1/40 or

also carry an air of mystery. When my

is the popular No 965 with 1 inch

0.025 inch. With a division on the

father was preparing high

capacity. It has a lock nut to immobilise

sleeve indicating a full spindle turn, and

performance boat engines in the

the spindle and a ratchet stop to

the edge of the thimble having 25

1960s I’d watch in awe as he slid the

ensure consistent tightening. Note how

divisions, the tool measures to 0.001

‘mike’ around some freshly machined

the reading edge of the thimble tapers

inch. Here we see eight divisions on the

component, scrutinise its minute

to meet the datum line on the sleeve, a

sleeve (0.200 inch) plus 15 on the

scales and pencil a note of mere

feature inherited from Palmer’s

thimble (0.015 inch) totalling 0.215 inch.

thousandths of an inch.

micrometer of 1848, and the clip-on

The screw thread was used for fine

black pointer to facilitate repeat

NEXT MONTH: The dado plane

adjustment of optical instruments long before the machine tool inventor Henry Maudslay applied it to measurement in the workshop.

Maudslay’s micrometer was a large benchtop device. The familiar pocket-sized micrometer, typically stored in a spectacle case, was developed by Jean Laurent Palmer working in France and tool makers Brown & Sharpe in the USA. In the UK the micrometer became synonymous with Moore & Wright of CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

93

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Looking ahead Things to do in the next few weeks Sailing

12-14 MARCH Geelong Wooden Boat Festival

NEXT MONTH

woodenboatfestival. yachting.org.au, stuart.dickson47@ gmail.com.au regatta is expecting no fewer than 150 entries this year, including the Couta boats, for round-the cans racing, passage racing, a concours

New Zealand celebrates heritage

d’elegance, grand

4 MARCH CYNZ Classic Yacht Regatta

parade, and more including children’s activities shoreside

Auckland, New Zealand, classicyacht.org.nz

and lessons in

Famous celebration of NZ’s classic yachts

JAMES ROBINSON TAYLOR

This growing biennial

MARGA

A fine 10-M yacht built in 1910 and designed by Carl Liljegren, relaunched last season

boatbuilding.

Talks

16 FEBRUARY Around London in a Dinghy NIC COMPTON

Papercourt SC, Surrey, 8.30-10pm Talk by CB’s Steffan Meyric Hughes on sailing and rowing

10 FEBRUARY Dunkirk Little Ships and Sailing Through the War

a dinghy around the capital and the book that recounts the adventure – Circle Line.

9 MARCH Traditional Boatbuilding Around the World

Gerrards Cross Sailing

Gerrards Cross Sailing

Association, Buckinghamshire

Association, Buckinghamshire

Tel: +44 (0)1753 883 759,

Tel: +44 (0)1753 883 759,

gxsa.org.uk

gxsa.org.uk

Regular CB contributor,

Colin Palmer, author of Boats

ex-boatbuilder and maritime

of South East Asia, on the

historian Nigel Sharp will talk

evolution of different

about Operation Dynamo and

boatbuilding methods

yachting in WW2 Britain.

throughout the world.

ON BOARD ROMILLY Nic Compton goes sailing with his boat’s designer Nigel Irens RICHARD JOHNSTONE_BRYDEN

NIGEL SHARP

guildfordsailing.org

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High Atlantic tales from three decades of rallyers

Punchy winter cruising in the Xc-42

Viko 30 on test INTERVIEW

Harrier down

PRACTICAL

Circumnavigator Mustoe on sinking in the North Sea

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The pros explain how to get a shiny new hull SEAWEED

Sargassum blooms threat to Atlantic sailors

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Exploring a landscape of islands and lochs

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We take the fear out of crossing shipping lanes

IN THE LATEST ISSUE

IN THE LATEST ISSUE l 30th ARC: three decades

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£4.30 Issue #1694 February 2016 yachtsandyachting.co.uk

TOP KIT, BOATS, SAILORS: Y&Y AWARD WINNERS REVEALED INTERVIEWS

K8 Sport

Wingsail sportsboat

ANALYSIS

T2 uncovered PLUS Martin Whitmarsh: from F1 to BAR

Predicting the future Offshore races in the Olympics?

INSIGHT

Giles Scott

EXPERT ADVICE

Nav tips

With fellow Brits on the road to Rio

two boats

l Ainslie’s new ride: T2 uncovered

PLUS...

patterns and get ahead

Regatta and event guide 2016, Maine lobster boats, and more…

l Giles Scott with fellow Brits on the road to Rio

APRIL ON SALE

l Nav tips: anticipate

Anticipate patterns and get ahead

l Julian Mustoe on losing

YACHTS YACHTING

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DOUBLING UP

SUMMER 2016

KEELBOAT A-Z

RACING RE-THINK

Dinghy technique with Team GBR 49er pros

Holiday inspiration – from foiling cats to shark flotillas

Our comprehensive listing of the top racing yachts

Spice up your club or class programme with fresh ideas

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ON TEST: EXCLUSIVE

Ainslie’s new ride

The Rebel OD, a Broadland class that is thriving today, bolstered by new GRP models

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

95

Letters LETTER OF THE MONTH SUPPORTED

BY OLD PULTENEY WHISKY

Who is the Huffest?

As an Irish yachtsman I greatly enjoyed the articles about Tern and Huff of Arklow, indeed the January issue had a strong Irish flavour. The four Douglas Heard International 14s designed and, I believe, also built, by Uffa Fox were named Huff, Huffer, Huffest and Huffinis.

Huff was sold to a Dr Porteous and both Huff and Huffinis competed in the 1938 Prince of Wales Cup, which was won by Peter Scott’s Thunder and Lightning.

Also designed and built by Uffa, she was helmed by Peter and crewed by John Winter. I crewed on Huff of Arklow with Douglas Heard, racing in Dublin Bay, and cruising with her subsequent owner Jack McKeown.

Rory O’Hanlon never owned Huff of Arklow but Jack

TAKING A FLYER

McKeown, like Rory, also became Commodore of the Royal St George YC. At the time Jack owned Huff of

The only Flying 30 ever built and a milestone in yacht design, Uffa Fox’s Huff of Arklow is in better shape than ever

Arklow, Rory was racing and cruising the Peter Brett designed Tjaldur, a close sister ship of the Tomlinson-

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS NIGEL SHARP

owned Dee Class yacht Pellegrina, and I crewed aboard

Memories of Uffa’s Huff I enjoyed your article on Huff of Arklow (Jan issue). During the winter of 1960/61 I lived on my 40ft catamaran Rongo in Dun Laoghaire harbour and

Tjaldur in the 1965 Fastnet Race. Nigel Sharp is to be congratulated on this interesting article.

David Whitehead, Glebe, Kinvara, Co. Galway

Flying Pegasus

became friends with her owner Douglas Heard and spent time with him

As an Uffa Fox fan and Flying Fifteen owner, I greatly

yarning aboard the Huff. Around that time I also first visited John

enjoyed your article on Huff of Arklow and it is

Tyrrell’s yard, which built Huff.

great to see her in such fine form.

My vague memory is that he was not too happy with the

In your review of Uffa’s ‘Flying’ series of

design; he had wanted it to plane like the Uffa Fox dinghies he

boats, you mentioned the Flying 20s and that

had previously owned and sailed. It was probably too much to

one was around a few years ago. This is true, as

expect with the design options available at that time. The

I met John Negus, the owner of F20 No 1

high-tech complex rigs and double rudders of present day

Pegasus who had restored her and kept her at

planing designs were far into the future. One of his other

Walton-on-the-Naze. This was in 2009. I’m not sure

complaints was that when sailing there was always someone sitting/

what happened to Pegasus or John, but he sent me

standing in the hatch blocking his forward vision. However, from your

many photos of her under restoration and also sailing, of

article, he did love his vessel and made some fine voyages aboard her.

which I have included one here. I have no idea when she

Douglas Heard’s own company made some of the first small portable ‘suitcase’ valve radios and he gave me one for my third Atlantic crossing. I

was built, but you can see up close that she is plank on rib with copper fastenings, so I would guess in the 1950s.

remember my visits to Huff with affection.

After reading about Huff of Arklow, reading further in the same issue I found to my great surprise I was nominated in your Classic Boat Awards for Yachtsman of the Year! Thanks. Whatever the outcome I do appreciate it.

James Wharram, James Wharram Designs, Cornwall

My Flying Fifteens are from the 1960s and both are cold moulded. John confirmed that the boat was very fast and also very wet, with her speed tending to drive her through waves rather than over them!

Graham Lamond, North Yorkshire, via email

Stepped planks coble

Expert guidance

On a recent holiday in Northumberland, we saw an old fishing

I had to read the sentence twice

boat laid up for the winter in Beadnell and two things struck

that named Dr William Collier, able

me about her construction. Firstly, she’s double ended, so not

though he is no doubt, as the “one

a local coble, with the typical transom stern and twin keels for

man” to go to in order to learn

beaching. Secondly, I have not seen before the step in her

about the history of yachting at

clinker planks at the stem and stern. Was it just a way of

the turn of the last century. Neither

getting thicker planks to bend nearer the ends?

is William Colllier the only person

I would like to know if Classic Boat readers could provide

96

CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

with a doctorate in this field – far

the reason for this technique.

from it. He’d surely concur!

Graham Lamond, Thirsk, North Yorkshire

Ian Menzies, via email

Classic Boat, Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London SW3 3TQ email: cb@classicboat.co.uk

Info sought: Brightlingsea 1922 cutter

Thanks for Tom

I’ve just bought a 1922

congratulate you on

cutter called Ayesha,

the inspired decision

designed by and for

to get Tom Cunliffe on

A Boyes, who was one

board. Having read

of the directors of the

most of his books, he

builders Aldous of

never fails to amuse

I would like to

There seems to be very little information

In vain I have researched boat designer Peter Milne in an attempt to find any reference to the

if Classic Boat readers

‘skimmer’ type of dinghy called the Piccolo. My

I am especially

dad purchased one in about 1961 (sail number

Tackle tickle I laughed so hard

in an advertisement in

dinghy, just to help fill in the gaps of my

must have wondered

Yachting World in 1920

memory. It was the first dinghy I sailed single

for my health. Thank

or 1921, but I have not

handed when I was about seven. I suspect the

you Tom and CB for

been able to trace it.

lessons learned designing this boat helped in the

Richard Bond, via email

Adrian Simons, via email

enlivening an otherwise tedious winter morning. via email

One good Tern I thoroughly enjoyed your article last month about Tern. a number of others deserve a mention – and our gratitude.

Much valuable information was provided by Iain McAllister, from early photographs which proved essential the works of Tern’s builder, John Hilditch.

William “Winkie” Nixon contributed enormously with his

We owned Wapipi I was excited about the article on

vast knowledge of the various Belfast Lough OD classes, as

Whooper in the November edition of

well as a detailed knowledge of Tern’s whereabouts over

your magazine. We owned Wapipi,

the last 50 years.

her Jack Laurent Giles-designed sister

Gordon Finlay, archivist at the Royal Ulster YC, was

ship, from 1976 to 1980. We bought

generous with his time and effort, to the extent of ordering

her in Ft Lauderdale and immediately

that the optic drinks stand behind the yacht club bar be

got rid of the petrol engine and sailed

dismantled on our behalf to access some original

her engineless for the next four years.

photographs of the Belfast Lough OD fleet!

Francois Chevalier proved a most valuable consultant and checked the fairing of Tern’s lines.

We cruised the southern United States then the Bahamas and she was ideal for the latter, being shoal draft.

Sourcing high quality custom-made bronze hardware

Her doghouse had been extended,

was made possible by Gregory Ryan, Christian Terr’eaux,

reducing the cockpit size. She was

Colin Frake and Ashley Butler.

wonderful off the wind and with a

Finally Tern’s owner deserves special thanks for his

More gloss, less fuss Varnish, sealants, epoxies

ROYAL SOCIETY EXHIBITION

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Andrew Wolstenholme His key designs

Robert Clark’s Mystery The ideal family cruiser

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The cruising 8-M McGruer design turns 50

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10

25/08/2015 16:50

Beautiful boats

Stunning traditional boats, showcased through beautiful photography and expert editorial coverage

Expert advice

You named some of the key contributors to the project but

for historical accuracy, to Iain’s considerable knowledge of

round Ireland’

fellow commuters

Christopher Stanley,

sailing dinghy?

Power dressing in Thirties style

seth

up my fading memories of this characterful

would be very grateful.

a A trip onp Tall Shi two lugger our for 18ft

losing his anchor, my

would like to see the plans of that lateen-rigged

information on her, I

s starts this month

IN W ‘How we sailed

Tom Cunliffe

last column, about

design of the Fireball. Can anyone help me back

Restored once again TOM CUNLIFFE to perfection New serie

A CLOSE CALL IN NORWAY

been told she features

If anyone had any

T H E W O R L D’ S M O S T B E A U T I F U L B O A T S

WHITE LADY

Somerset, via email

believe it was given a Viking-type burial in Sandown Bay on the Isle of Wight. Oh how I

£4.75 US$13.75

T H E W O R L D’ S M O S T B E A U T I F U L B O A T S

Mark Postma,

over Tom Cunliffe’s

drawings and have

DECEMBER 2015

£4.75 US$13.75

and inspire.

23). It was sailed locally until about 1977, when I

looking for line

Classic Boat GLORIOUS Classicc B Boat CAMBRIA FEBRUARY 2016

seth setthh

could help.

TO CLASSIC BOAT

seth

about her and I wonder

REASONS TO

i

Milne Skimmer

Brightlingsea.

3 SUBSCRIBE

GREAT i

Send your letters (and also any replies, please) to:

i

LETTERS

good swell would surf at the drop of

vision and understanding of what a remarkable yacht he

a hat. Friends purchased her and kept

had acquired, along with his desire to see her returned to

her in Florida for 12 years before

former glory, as do his representatives, captains Iain Cook,

selling her. I have searched for news

Brendon Haye and Nick Svolis. Restoring Tern was a

of her since then in vain. I hope she is

thoroughly captivating project.

still being looked after.

Robert Eldridge, Ocean Refit, via email

Bruce Polkinghorne, via email

In-depth examination at a practical level with credible advice above deck and below: hulls, paint and varnish, rigging, sails, and traditional tools

Stunning features

Featuring classics of all types, from J-Class yachts to traditional work boats and everything in between

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L-R: GEORGINA GUBBINS; THE AUTHOR; CLARE MCCOMB

Sternpost

Looking back on 100 years Sylvia Spice recalls two famous uncles and the golden days of yachting

M

y earliest memories are of living in Son, Norway, on the Oslo fjord, where my father was Jac M Iversen’s boatbuilding partner before the first war, and married his sister Kate. There was a dinghy tethered to the mooring below our house and the children were allowed to row in it. I must have been about two or three and I was so excited. Mind you, there were no lifejackets in those days.

Later we came back to England to spend our holidays at Berry Head House, Brixham, which is now a hotel.

When the J-Class came sailing round the head we were allowed to get down from our very formal and silent dinner table to run and perch on a high window-sill to watch the magnificent yachts sweeping past in front of the house – I remember Shamrock and Westward, and of course King George V’s yacht Britannia, and Astra and Candida. They are still in my mind’s eye – the great expanses of canvas, tremendous triangular topsails, flying jibs and huge balloon foresails. We loved it.

I had two famous sailing uncles. The first was George Martin, founder of the RORC, who was incredibly tall.

He always had to duck going through a door, and once at a family dinner he sat on a chair and it collapsed under him. We all roared with laughter. I remember him picking us up from the rocks under Berry Head House in a tender, and rowing three of us to see his new yacht Jolie Brise, moored in Brixham’s outer harbour. He filled the dinghy, which was only a little cockleshell, and I was scared we would tip over; but Jolie Brise was lovely.

I remember asking how her wooden ribs had got bent, which he thought was very funny. I must have been about eight. Years later he showed me over his sailing barge Memory. Uncle George was a bit of a legend by then, because he had criss-crossed the Atlantic in his little pilot cutter and won the Blue Water Medal. Once I was invited by Royal Naval College friends to a dinner where he was presiding as RORC Admiral. I thought nothing of it but when my group discovered I was his niece they were hugely impressed!

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CLASSIC BOAT MARCH 2016

Above, from left: On the helm with Uncle Jac in his yacht Ha-Ja in the 1950s; beneath Berry Head House in Brixham; Uncle George in his tender in the 1920s

“I had two famous uncles, George Martin and Jac Iversen”

My other sailing uncle, Jac Iversen, was a boat designer, builder and racer. When I visited him in Sweden I remember going into his office and seeing all the designs and everything very neatly ordered. He always sailed us to an island which he owned and often let me take the helm, but when we passed one particular place we weren’t allowed to talk in English because there was “something secret” going on! He was clearly a very natural sailor, after a lifetime on the water.

After the war I was newlywed in Egypt and learned to sail properly in a Snipe. The instructor was an exGerman POW. At last I had the freedom to sail. One time in Port Said I hired a small boat and we sailed out between huge merchant vessels to see the statue of De Lesseps. Heading back we had to tack into the wind and I thought I was going to break the bowsprit hitting the sides of those great black ships.

In the 1950s I had my own dinghy on the Cheshire meres but I had to sell her when work and child-rearing responsibilities became too great. Our family summers were spent at my parents’ house in Brixham where I crewed for my father in his little yacht Pixie.

In the 60 years since then I have watched our Brixham heritage fleet come back into its own, especially Vigilance, in which three members of my family have a share. I remember very clearly racing in the last Brixham Trawler Challenge Cup before the war. We didn’t win!

My strongest sailing-linked memory took place on land in 2013 when I unveiled a Blue Plaque to Uncle George and Jolie Brise at the Berry Head Hotel, where we had watched the J-Class so many decades ago. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

Now I am bedbound but love to watch the constant comings and goings of Brixham harbour from my window, especially the Heritage Festival boats and the old smacks which I have known all my life. It is wonderful to think that the traditions and some of the original vessels are still surviving, just as I am, after 100 sea-going and sea-loving years.

© Nigel Pert nigelpert.wordpress.com

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