YARD NEWS

Craftsmanship

Yard News

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

GERMANY

Starling Burgess 8-M from history

A new 8-M yacht designed by W Starling Burgess but never built at the time, has just been launched on the shores of Lake Constance, at the Josef Martin boatyard. The design, from 1937, was discovered and published by Burgess biographer Llewllyn Howland back in 2014, and was just waiting for the right person to come along and have it built, plugging another gap in the unbuilt history of yacht design.

Starling Burgess was an extraordinary polymath, as Llewellyn Howland points out in his 2015 biography No Ordinary Being. He was a pivotal figure in early aviation, a published poet and designer or co-designer of every J-Class ever to win an America’s Cup. It seems the owner of the new yacht is aware of the size of her designer’s legend, as he has named the new yacht after him: Starling Burgess. John Lammerts van Bueren, who has been intimately involved with the project, thinks this build represents a new high-water mark in terms of precision in traditional build. The yacht was built as she would have been in 1937, but with a new level of detailing, which started when Juliane Hempel lofted the boat, marking the position of every fastening hole and plank bevel. The result, says John is a yacht that is symmetrical to a 1.5mm tolerance. “The planks fit as if grown together. She went in the water and was so tight that the dust in the bilge stayed dry.”

ST OSYTH’S, ESSEX

Oldest wooden barge to be restored

On 22 July, sailing barge May, the oldest wooden barge afloat, swept past Gas House Creek in Harwich, home of the famous Cann’s boatyard where she was built, 130 years to the day after she was launched. A quick stop on the posts at Brightlingsea for a scrub and a fresh coat of tar and she was on her way up the narrow creek to her new berth at St Osyth’s Boatyard, where she will spend the next year while funds are secured for her restoration.

May was built to carry grain to the mills at Cranfield’s in Ipswich and flour to London, so her new life as a floating bakery will be particularly appropriate. The female trio of Connie Gadd (aspiring artist and potter, and whose late husband Gerald was May’s last owner), Jane Harman (first female chair of the Sailing Barge Association and who with husband Andy runs the St Osyth boatyard and multiple barge champion SB Edme) and Helen Swift (who formerly ran her own catering company and now runs Essex Heritage Workboats with traditional boatbuilder husband Gerard), plan to work with groups and institutions aiming to improve the lives of women who have suffered trauma. May will visit communities along the Essex coast as a safe haven for regaining confidence and trust, selling bread and running sourdough bread workshops and sailing trips. Why roses? The trio explain that there have always been capable women in the shadows of a male-dominated barging world. This is a chance to blossom and come to the fore. You can donate to the project at thebreadandrosesbarge.com

SANDY MILLER