Classic Boat July 2021

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JULY 2021

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A CL A SSIC E N V I RON M E N T FOR T R A DI T ION A L BOATS Birdham Pool is the oldest marina in the UK and our haven for classic and traditional boats. Even its location, just four miles from the historic county town of Chichester, nestled in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, reflects the pace and elegance of a bygone age.

S T O R A G E , R E PA I R A N D M A I N T E N A N C E Looking after traditional boats is what we’re exceptionally good at. Our 30 tonne hoist and transport, dry storage ashore and a boat yard of modern

and traditional skills offered by our tenant artisans means we’re geared for storage, repair and maintenance of all watercraft.

To complete the experience, we have five-star customer facilities, café and great transport links complementing the enviable one-hour access to the Solent and sheltered inland location.

Birdham is owned by Castle Marinas, a group of 11 coastal and inland marinas each with its own unique character. We are, and always will be large enough to cope, small enough to care.

Boatyard services by

STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES, EDITOR

THE REAL GOLD MEDAL IS SURVIVAL

OLYMPIC BOATS

Whatever happens at this year’s deferred 2020 Olympic Games, scheduled to kick off on 23 July as we went to PAGE 36 press, they will be significantly more competitive than the games that took place in 1920, where every yacht that entered won a medal, bar one, as the small fleet was split into so many classes. The real gold medal for these boats was surviving another century to be restored and sailing today – as a few of them are. Another survivor of that era is the schooner Mary Rose, designed by Nat Herreshoff (she was his last yacht to that rig) and built in 1926. To survive this long, a yacht usually suffers a succession of ‘improvements’, a decade or more abandoned on dry land, a world war or two, often a hurricane if the yacht is American, and either a fire or a sinking, or both. Most of all, they must attract owners in the modern world. As for actually using the things, some of the adventures people have on their wooden yachts are almost other-worldly. Be sure to read Ellen Massey-Leonard’s account of cruising the lagoons of French Polynesia, anchoring in old nuclear test sites, and diving with hammerhead sharks.

COVER PHOTO: LUCY TULLOCH

ISSUE No 397

classicboat.co.uk Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TQ EDITORIAL Editor Steffan Meyric Hughes +44 (0)203 943 9256 steffan@classicboat.co.uk Senior Art Editor Peter Smith +44 (0)203 943 9246 peter.smith@classicboat.co.uk Group Editor Rob Peake Publisher Simon Temlett Publishing Consultant Martin Nott ADVERTISING Andrew Mackenzie +44 (0)207 349 3779 andrew.mackenzie@chelseamagazines.com 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 PUBLISHING Managing Director Paul Dobson Director of Media James Dobson Chief Financial Officer Vicki Gavin Group Sales Director Catherine Chapman Head of Sales Operations Jodie Green Publishing Consultant Martin Nott

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CONTENTS COVER STORY

4 . SHARPIE YACHT A 30ft sharpie yacht to an Iain Oughtred design was just the thing for a furniture maker’s first ever build COVER STORY

20 . MARY ROSE She was the last schonner from Nat Herreshoff and survived fire, hurricane and Hugh Heffner to thrive today COVER STORY

36 . SHAMBOLIC OLYMPICS The sailing Olympics of 1920 had great elements of farce

4

HOME-BUILT IAIN OUGHTRED DESIGN

42

COVER STORY

42 . POWER GRAB Spirit of tradition motorboats are on teh rise. We take a look at what’s out there 48 . SWIMMING WITH SHARKS The Tuamotu atolls of French Polynesia are home to abandoned nuclear test sites, and world-class sailing and diving 56 . GUIDE TO SPARS Wooden and carbon fibre spar building has evolved a lot lately. Ex-boatbuilder Nigel Sharp gives the lowdown 62 . TOM CUNLIFFE What do you do when a malicious jobsworth in the boatyard is trying to ruin your plans?

64 . CYNARA PART TWO We look at some of the challenges involved in Japan’s first big-yacht restoration

HERRESHOFF M AR Y R O S E

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ROUND THE ISLAND RACE Tips for competitors

JOHN GOODE 1950-2021 Tribute to our founder ST+Y&Y July Cover A and B.indd 2

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TELL TALES SALEROOM OBJECTS OF DESIRE ADRIAN MORGAN

A LOOK AT MOTOR BOATS

34 . CLOSE QUARTERS 54 . AFFORDABLE CLASSICS 78 . LETTERS 80 . STERNPOST

CRAFTSMANSHIP

70 . YARD NEWS 74 . YARD VISIT 76 . BOATBUILDER’S NOTES

WE TAKE A LOOK AT SPARS

Tom Cunliffe

MAST STEPPIN G PA GE 62

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

3

SHALLOW APPEAL Cut by CNC, built by a furniture maker... this Iain Oughtred sharpie yacht can float in a puddle but take on the sea WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS NIC COMPTON

LUELY

I

f there was a formula to measure the performance of a boat relative to its ease of construction, then the American sharpie would have to be one of the highest scoring designs. Originating as a workboat on the south coast of Connecticut, USA, its single-chine construction made it quick to build, while its shallow draught meant it could negotiate mud banks and its unstayed cat ketch or yawl rig made it incredibly easy to handle. What’s more it was fast and seaworthy, and there are countless stories of sharpies sailing through storms which by rights should have swallowed them up.

Little wonder, then, that when the up-and-coming British designer Iain Oughtred stumbled across an archive relating to Ralph M ‘Commodore’ Munroe and his sharpie Egret while on sabbatical in the USA, he immediately became hooked on the type. The pertinent question for the aspiring designer was: how could such a rudimentary (and cheap) boat be so seaworthy?

“I’ve often been intrigued by the idea of a 30ft cruiser which can float in 13in of water,” he says. “The advantage is that in a storm the hull will gently slide away from the waves, rather than getting hammered by them – or, the opposite, you can escape over a reef or into shallow water to get away from the waves.”

It would be another 16 years before that seed of an idea came to fruition with his design No87: the 30ft Haiku.

Launched in 2006, the first Haiku (and, to date, only other one built) wasn’t built strictly in accordance with Iain’s plans, which meant she ended up heavier than he intended, and with a stayed rig rather than the freestanding rig he had envisaged. The result, while an undeniably beautiful boat, wasn’t the lightweight, simple boat he had imagined, and he had to wait another 14 years for someone to build a more pared-down Haiku strictly to his design.

The builder of the new boat was not an obvious candidate for such an ambitious project. Barnaby Scott is a designer maker of exquisite wooden furniture – leaning more towards art than craft. A relative late-comer to boating, he started sailing on flotilla boats in Greece before converting first to gaff rig and then to wooden boats. He hasn’t looked back, having owned a string of gaffers and luggers, starting with a West Wight Potter E-Type, followed by a 17ft Shilling built by Willow Bay Boats, and his first Oughtred design, a 14ft 6in Whilly Boat. Barnaby explains his dilemma in the introduction to his blog (boat. waywood.co.uk):

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above left to right: Ball-bearing blocks next to a traditional pin rail; Neat herringbone stitching on the gaff jaw; the Vulcan anchor stows almost flat on the foredeck

Below: The heart of the energy system is the Mass Combi Ultra ‘intelligent’ inverter/charger

“As for sailing, I should admit that my enthusiasm far outstrips my ability – only my woodworking friends think I’m a good sailor (and my sailing friends think I’m a good woodworker). I currently sail a lovely little boat called a Shilling, made by Willow Bay Boats. Though I love the Shilling, we can’t all fit in her as a family, even for day sailing, and as for overnight – let’s just say it would suit a young couple, preferably very much in love.

Perhaps the best way to replicate the experience of spending the night aboard is to try sleeping in the cupboard under your kitchen sink. I might have enjoyed such an adventure at one time, but I’m afraid that era has passed. The sailing is fun and the boat is adorable, but I feel it’s time to move on.”

His criteria for the new boat were that it should be: trailable, shallow-draughted, happy to dry out, comfortable, preferably yawl-rigged and, of course, pretty. He eventually homed in on Iain Oughtred’s designs because: “There is something simultaneously honest and exciting, traditional and forward-looking, and altogether just plain right about them. Once I realised I could build a sharpie designed by Iain, all the other competition fell away.”

Although Barnaby was (and is) clearly a very skilled woodworker, taking on a 30ft boat as his first boatbuilding project was clearly going to be a challenging task, but he had a very 21st century solution up his sleeve.

“Having never built a boat before, many people would say you should build a small boat first to learn the skills before you tackle a big one,” he says. “But I was too impatient and didn’t want to waste time building a boat I didn’t actually want. So I decided to draw it using the Rhino CAD program I use to design furniture. I thought that if I built the boat digitally on the computer, it would almost be like a dry run.”

Another reason for making the digital model was that Barnaby planned to cut most of the components using his company’s CNC cutter. If he was going to input the data to do that, he figured, he may as well input all the other data and ‘build’ the whole boat. The process also allowed him to check the hull was fair – although he soon realised he didn’t need to work to the programme’s default tolerance setting of 1 micron (0.001mm) and that even 1mm would be far beyond what he hoped to achieve. He also discovered that the designer’s original table of

Above: Ghosting down the Beaulieu River Inset: Owner Barnaby Scott at the helm after launching the boat for the first time

LUELY

offsets was remarkably accurate, even though Iain hadn’t actually built the boat and was working without the benefits of a modern computer programme.

It took Barnaby six weeks to finish the model, in between attending to his other, paid work. “By the time I finished, I really did understand the boat’s construction in every detail in a way you couldn’t possibly hold in your head just by looking at 2D plans. It was as if I had already built the boat – albeit on screen.”

Finally, in March 2014, two years after buying the plans, Barnaby started to build the boat for real. He cleared a corner of the workshop to work in and, confident that every last piece of the boat had already been crafted on the computer and was just waiting for a button to be pressed to be turned into actual components, told his colleagues he would finish the boat in six months. But of course, as tends to happen with boats, things didn’t quite turn out that way.

In common with most boats designed on CAD, construction of Luely started from the inside going out, rather than the traditional way of building the shell first and then fitting it out. All the bulkheads and most of the inside furnishings were cut and assembled, complete with floors and frames and limber holes, and slotted on the “toast rack”, as Barnaby calls the building gig. Even the bevels were pre-cut by the CNC cutter, keeping the amount of hand work required to the minimum.

Barnaby came up with an ingenious solution for scarfing the sheets of plywood. Rather than cut a conventionally angled scarf he devised a ‘lobed finger’, whereby two lines of rounded finger joints are cut in the edge of the plywood, one shallower than the other, with matching ‘lobes’ on the opposite sheet. The result was a 1:12 staggered joint which is self-locking so it can be clamped together (with a veneer press, in Barnaby’s case) without any chance of it coming apart.

Being a professional woodworker, Barnaby had some interesting ideas about which timbers to use for the project. While most of the boat was built from okoume (aka gaboon) plywood supplied by Bruynzeel and Douglas fir imported from Canada, he used black sucupira for the floors which he claims is “stronger, stiffer, more stable, more durable and cheaper” than oak.

Elsewhere, he used various exotic timbers (all from sustainable sources) he had left over from 8

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above: Luely’s understated interior contains some fancy gear, including chart plotter, sound system, induction hob and – under the chart table – an electric loo

Below: Ingenious ‘lobed’ finger joints devised by Barnaby

his work, such as coracoa de negro (aka ironwood), preciosa (used to make beads) and muirapiranga (used for parquet floors). “What they all have in common,” he explained, “is that they are denser than water (ie they sink) and ridiculously hard: perfect centreboard materials, and a perfect way to use them up.”

It wasn’t all plain sailing, however, and Barnaby had a couple of what he calls “chainsaw moments” when he came close to giving up. The first was when he realised he had left out several coachroof stringers which were specified in the plans but somehow omitted from his CAD drawings. Rather than fudge it, he laboriously cut it all off and built it again, losing weeks of work.

Another was when it came to fitting the centreboards to their cases. He hadn’t fully accounted for the extra thickness of glassfibre and epoxy both on the centerboards themselves and on the inside of the cases, and a ‘tight fit’ turned into an ‘impossible fit’. Rather than rebuild them, he made a couple of temporary boards from acetal (ie plastic) until he felt able to resume that particular battle.

By November 2015, the hull was ready for turning. It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Barnaby is the kind of person who likes to do things properly – indeed he admits to planning the build “like a military operation”. First he built a pair of gantries out of 15mm spruce ply which, combined with a couple of chain hoists purchased on eBay, he used to hoist the lead keel in place. Once the boat was ready for turning, he built two giant plywood wheels which he clamped around it and lowered onto a pair of ‘troughs’ fitted with plywood rollers. He then proceeded to gently turn the wheels around with the chain hoists – all under perfect control.

With the hull complete, it was time to complete the interior, and here Barnaby admits he may have strayed from the path of true Oughtredness.

“I’ve stayed true to Iain’s design as much as possible – after all, what’s the point of hiring one of the best designers in the country if, never having designed or built a boat yourself, you think you know better! My only departure was with the interior, which wasn’t shown in any great detail on the plans. But Iain does say it’s not intended to be a fancy yacht, and I think I might have gone a bit fancy with the galley.”

Crucially, in common with most sharpies, there is very limited headroom – no more than sitting

Clockwise from top: The evening before her launch; Finger jointing the deck; Cockpit in build; Shaping the gaff jaws; The turned over hull; Sheathing the chine with epoxy and glass cloth; The bulkheads and moulds set up in the “toast rack”

LUELY

headroom, despite the boat’s 30ft length. Unlike most sharpies, however, on which the accommodation is often divided awkwardly into two by the centreboard case, Luely has twin centreboards, with the two centreboard cases doubling up as the settee sides, leaving the middle of the boat clear.

Luely’s accommodation is very neatly laid out, with two bunks in the forward area, which doubles up as a fore cabin / saloon, followed by the galley/chart table area amidships, and two generous quarter berths aft.

Barnaby has fitted full half bulkheads, rather than the curved, cutaway bulkheads shown on the plans, which would have created a more open plan interior. But he likes the idea of a more compartmentalised space, where people can draw a curtain and have their own area – not least if they’re sitting on the loo!

The fit out itself is both simple and yet sumptuous.

There’s not a lot there, but what is there is extremely well crafted and well appointed – from the touchsensitive lights to the minimalist-looking electric hob, it’s got the understated ethos that you might expect from a designer/maker of bespoke furniture. There’s even a small chart table, complete with Raymarine charplotter and Bluetooth stereo system. Lift the chart table up, and there an electric loo underneath – a neat space-saving arrangement which suits Barnaby but certainly won’t appeal to everyone.

And he didn’t cut corners when it came to the engine.

After much deliberation, he decided to ‘go electric’, with a 4KW Piktronik electric pod, which is attached to the outside of the hull just aft of the cockpit. Thanks to the rocker of the keel, the pod itself doesn’t add any extra draft, though the (folding) propeller does project a few inches below the keel when the engine is in operation.

Two ‘socking great’ 24V lithium batteries were needed to power the engine, taking the place of some of the internal ballast specified in the drawings, so Barnaby decided to go the whole way and fit an electric hob in the galley, rather than mixing different sources of power, and an electric toilet in the heads, to make it easier to flush in the confined space. The charge for the batteries comes from three possible sources: shore power, a small Honda battery and solar panels (yet to be fitted).

It’s all clever stuff, but Barnaby is understandably bashful about it, not necessarily because of the cost of all this sophisticated machinery, but because he worries it goes against the ethos of simplicity of the design. Yet, in practice, it’s all very discreet and what you notice when 10

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above: Barnaby spent six weeks ‘building’ the boat in CAD, to familiarise himself with every component

LUELY LOA

30ft (9.1m) BEAM

7ft 9in (2.4m) DRAUGHT

1ft (0.3m) DISP

2 tonnes SAIL AREA

337sqft (31.3m2)

you go down below is the quality of the joinery and the rather nice green upholstery, rather than the fancy gizmos.

Barnaby has taken no such liberties with Luely’s rig, and has exactly replicated the gaff cat-yawl rig shown on the plans – though he couldn’t resist commissioning a rather expensive carbon fibre main mast (as mooted by Iain when he originally conceived the boat). It wasn’t a matter of simply replicating Iain’s design in new materials: the mast had to be redesigned to exactly replicate the bendiness of a wooden mast, with the result that it ended up a smaller diameter. Painted white, you’d never know the difference, but it’s infinitely easier to handle than its wooden equivalent.

For the rest of the spars, he stayed traditional and used Douglas fir, apart from the two gaffs which he made out of Sitka spruce to reduce weight aloft. Barnaby opted for a double bumkin, with the two parts passing on either side of the rudder, instead of the single bumkin shown in Iain’s plans.

Thirty-four years after Iain was introduced to the sharpie concept and 18 years after he drew his own sharpie, the first lightweight Haiku was finally launched in June 2020. So impatient was he to test the design that he was willing to drive half the length of Scotland to sail Luely on the Solway Firth with Barnaby – until a lung infection followed by a bad attack of asthma put paid to that idea and resulted in four days in hospital.

Instead, he has to content himself with photos of the boat sailing on the Beaulieu River a few days after she was launched. His response is pure delight. He comments on “the quality of this particular boat” which achieves “a fine balance, sticking exactly to the design, with a finely-crafted but plain finish, with no superfluous embellishments.”

When I tell Barnaby this via Skype, he smiles broadly, as if I had just given him the best present ever.

And Barnaby too seems delighted with his new toy – even if it took him four years rather than the intended six months for Luely to vacate the workshop and another two years before she was launched. Having sailing the boat both on the South Coast and in Scotland, he is in awe of her light weather performance, which he says is remarkable compared to other gaffers he’s sailed. He’s only had her out in one moderately serious blow, on the Solent soon after the photos for this article were taken, but he describes the experience as “exhilarating”.

It’s early days yet for Luely, but softly, softly she is proving she was worth the wait.

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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

Left: GL Watson; Right: William Fife I,II,III

GLASGOW

New Scottish Yachting Archive launched A new Scottish Yachting Archive has been set up by GL Watson & Co, to record the story of yacht design and build in Scotland. The archive was set up after GL Watson & Co acquired the complete Fife archive, which has been moved to Glasgow, where it will be stored alongside the GL Watson archive and other historical documents owned by the company. The Fife archive dates from 1832 and boasts a consecutive run of designs from 1889 until the end of the yard in the 1940s, around 600 boats in all. It contains drawings, technical information, correspondence, half models, photos and other documents relating to the Fifes and their dealings. The archive was kept in Hamble by Fairlie Yachts until the company closed five years ago.

"There are records relating to around 2,500 boats with around 25,000 photos"

repository for the material. This is achieved by detailed cataloguing, appropriate storage, condition assessment and conservation as required.”

He said the archive had an “active collecting policy, whereby it looks to acquire material which will help it better reflect the evolution of yacht design, construction and use in Scotland”, and also that it welcomed community and academic researchers.

Collier added: “In the future we may see more replicas of Fifes. Another 19-Metre being built is not inconceivable.”

Enquires can be made via telephone number +44 141 5010490 or email enquiries@yachtarchive.scot

William Collier, director of GL Watson & Co, said: “We moved into our new premises a week before lockdown in Scotland, so all we’ve done so far is rehouse the archive and we are now beginning to recatalogue. There is significant synergy between the two collections – Watson and the Fifes were friends and design rivals.”

The Scottish Yachting Archives was set up to form an umbrella home for the twin archives and other material collected by GL Watson & Co as part of its commercial work in restoring and rebuilding classic yachts.

Collier said: “There are records relating to around 2,500 boats with around 25,000 photos. There are quite a few books to be written here! The archives are largely technical, often giving us all the information that the original builders of these yachts would have had. But they also contain correspondence, ranging from a routine letter from a supplier to a handwritten card from the Emperor of Germany about the construction of a new steam yacht.

"Alongside technical documents, photographs form the

Looking for 19-Metre information

most important part of the collection. The collection is

The new owner of Mariquita (above) is appealing for information or

particularly strong on Scottish photographers, including

memorabilia related to the 19-Metre class. Mariquita is the only remaining

Maclure, McDonald & Co, T&R Annan, William Ralston, G

19-Metre yacht, her sisters having been Corona, Norada and Octavia.

Innes, J Polmont and GLA Blair, all businesses that benefitted from the yachting trade.”

Aside from the collections of Watson and Fife material,

Mariquita’s new French owner is interested in putting together a book about the pre-WW1 class and is hoping to hear from relatives of those who crewed on the boats, who might have material from those days and later

the archive holds material from other Scottish yacht

years, as well as from others with any 19-Metre information. Meanwhile

designers and firms involved in yacht design and build.

Mariquita has been recommissioned in Concarneau and is based in Brest.

Outside its focus on Scottish yacht design and construction, it holds significant material on Camper & Nicholson. The archive will support GL Watson & Co’s work, but Collier said: “The primary aim is to provide a high quality

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Enquires can be made via telephone number +44 141 5010480 or email research@glwatson.com

TELL TALES NORFOLK

Maud is crowdfunding Supporters of the Norfolk trading wherry Maud, which is on the UK National Historic Fleet, are crowdfunding to buy a new support boat. Having a boat with a more powerful engine will ensure that the Wherry Maud Trust can run more trips and be less restricted by winds and tides. The extra trips will generate donations to make up income that was lost due to the pandemic. As we went to press, the campaign had attracted more than £1,000 towards the £10,500 goal.

All donations via gofundme.com/f/ Wherry-Maud/

Get sent Classi c Boat news

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LONDON

Arthur Beale to leave West End after 500 years

Sign up to our month ly newslette and you ca r n receive m onthly new together by s put the Classic Boat team , as well as noti fication of when the latest issue of the mag azine is on sale. Vis it classicboa Historic chandler Arthur t. co.uk/new sletter Beale will continue to operate online, after its famous shop on Shaftesbury Avenue in London closes in June.

A statement posted online read: “We were left in a very precarious state by the pandemic, but luckily we have found two enthusiastic new investors to help inject some much needed capital back into the business!

“This means we will be continuing to operate online at arthurbeale.co.uk, and we hope to have a London presence again some time in the future.

“There’s still some life in the old ship yet! See you soon.”

The shop started life as John Buckinghams 500 years ago and famously kitted out Shackleton for the South Pole, as well as Tenzing Norgay and Eric Shipton for their first Everest expedition in 1935.

It has been at 194 Shaftesbury Avenue for 150 years.

The statement said: “The impact of Covid-19 means the company can no longer warrant paying the rents that a central London shop demands, so we have no choice but to move on to pastures new.”

Meanwhile there is a “clearance sale with 20 per cent off everything until 24 June”.

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

13

TELL TALES

COWES, IOW

Entry is open for British Classic Week, 17-24 July Entry is open for British Classic Week, in Cowes from 17-24 July.

This year’s sponsors include OneSails, Spirit Yachts and BRIG RIBs,

The 19th regatta organised by the British Classic Yacht Club will see

with event support from Suffolk Yacht Harbour and traditional

racing managed by the Royal Yacht Squadron under IRC, a six-race

chandler Classic Marine. Also new for British Classic Week is an

series including round-the-cans courses and the 30-mile Nab Tower

official partnership with the Tall Ships Youth Trust.

Race. For those non-racing visitors there is a daily programme of

Jonathan added: “This year’s social programme remains as

cruise-in-company events that includes lunches at the Master

vibrant as ever, with a balance of casual and more formal events.

Builders on the Beaulieu River and the Royal Victoria Yacht Club in

While we are mindful of Covid and will adhere to any restrictions, we

Fishbourne. BCYC Commodore Jonathan Dyke said: “After a

are lucky that the mostly outdoor nature of the event means we can

challenging year, we are very much looking forward to hosting British

be flexible with the arrangements.” The social programme includes

Classic Week this summer. With a renewed appreciation for yachting

the traditional welcome reception on the lawn at the Royal Yacht

in home waters and a lack of racing opportunities over the past year,

Squadron on Sunday 18 July. On Tuesday 20 July, regatta attendees

we know classic yacht owners are keen to be back on the water.”

will have the chance to inspect the fleet during the Open Yachts

Criteria for entry is classic yachts of 24ft and over, or modern classic Spirit of Tradition yachts of either wood or steel build.

Pontoon Party, sponsored by Classic Boat with drinks by Hattiers Rum and Dartmouth Gin. Enter at britishclassicweek.co.uk

ONLINE

6-Metre memorabilia sought for archive The 6-Metre Archive, which has been steadily growing online since its launch two years ago, is on the lookout for memorabilia and material related to the class.

The archive was launched by the International 6-Metre Association and is funded by the private donations of its members. The website is run by former National Maritime Museum Cornwall curator Jenny Wittamore, who says: “The archive is essentially a platform to share material that people may have tucked away at home. We include digital copies of plans, correspondence, photographs and other material. It’s an opportunity for people to share what they’ve got and to improve access to material and information that was previously very difficult to find. The more people contribute, the better a resource it will be.

“The website is designed for casual browsers and serious researchers. You can spend an evening exploring and see what you find. Or if you have a very specific research target, you can dig deeper.”

The website contains an individual profile page for every 6-M built – more than 1,200 boats – and is continuing to develop, with photos and information for some boats still to be found. There are also race results from 1908. To mark the centenary of the British-American Cup this summer, Jenny is compiling a series of articles about the eight 6-Metre yachts that raced in the first event.

The cup effectively introduced the class to the US, which at the time was preoccupied with its own Universal Rule. There will be a new article published every two weeks until August, when they will be brought together for an online exhibition to mark the centenary. Meanwhile there is a project to look in depth at the history of 6-Metres in Spain. This is in the run up to the 6-M Europeans in Memorabilia including Acacia III, above

14

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Sanxenxo 13-19 September. Visit 6metrearchive.org

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TELL TALES

COWES

Race against Suhaili at Cowes Classics Week Sir Robin Knox-Johnston has entered Suhaili into Cowes Classics Week,

be on display on The Parade and adjacent pontoons, together with some

which takes place from 4-9 July, organised by the Royal London

treasures from the Classic Boat Museum, the regatta’s official charity

Yacht Club.

this year.

The regatta takes place immediately following the Island Sailing Club’s

Thanks to the generous support of the Isle of Wight ferry operator

inaugural Windeler Cup, a race around the Solent for dayboat classes

Red Funnel, competitors and participants in Classics Day are now able to

including XODs, Solent Sunbeams, Darings and others.

bring their cars, yachts and power boats to Cowes at significantly

New features for Cowes Classics Week 2021 include Classics Day on Tuesday 6 July, in which up to 60 classic cars and classic power boats will

discounted prices.

To find out more and enter, visit cowesclassicsweek.org

RHODE ISLAND

Share your Herreshoff yarns with museum The Herreshoff Marine Museum turns 50 this year, with a and online to mark the occasion.

The museum team is also putting out a call for anyone with a good story to join in: “With over 2,000 boats built, and many still sailing, or motoring, so many of

EVELYN ANSEL

experiences aboard Herreshoff

The new curator of the Herreshoff Museum was born by the water and has stayed there ever since

boats and with Herreshoff people. participate in this year-long party.

WORDS STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES

38

C/O HERRESHOFF MUSEUM

The Wizard’s custodian

us have stories to tell about our

“Telling us your story is one way to

WORD OF THE MONTH

M

series of events planned in Rhode Island

ystic, Connecticut, is almost as charming as its for a taste of the biggest job now faced by museums around the name, which is inseparable from its eponymous world: digitisation. “We had 18 months to digitise the entire museum that covers over 19 acres, with more collection – about 150,000 objects.” These objects ran from than 60 buildings and 500 vessels, from rowing chairs to pepper shakers to album covers and everything in boats to the last surviving whaleship, the Charles W Morgan, between. Today, every item can be found online. recently restored. For a town whose museum receives quarter of By 2016, Evelyn was living in Providence, Rhode Island and a million visitors a year, the population of just 4,000 is fractional. commuting to a new part-time job at MIT in Cambridge, Among them is Evelyn Ansel, the definition of a local, whose Massachusetts, the same commute that a young Nathaniel grandfather and father were both shipwrights at the museum, Herreshoff (as he spelled his name at that age) undertook when which also houses a considerable working boatyard. Evelyn was he was one of the university’s first students studying mechanical working there herself, by the age of “12 or 13”, volunteering at engineering, a degree he never completed. “I was hired for my the boat hire shop, where visitors can take out a rowing boat, or experience of fine art handling and preventative conservation” a small sailing dinghy to explore the Mystic River or go out on a said Evelyn, referring to the wealth of priceless original bigger, skippered boat. “The woman in charge of this, Sharon Herreshoff drawings held there. Soon after that, she started Brown, was great – and when things were slow, she’d tell us to working with the small team at the Herreshoff Museum, home to ‘go advertise’”. This meant, of course, advertise the boats by the Nat Herreshoff half-model room, haunted by the ghost of the taking them out on the Mystic River. The museum was also a great man, and sometimes by the real-life incarnation of grandson source of summer jobs for Evelyn, and by the time she went to Halsey. After three years of working at both museums, Evelyn college to study art, art history and chemistry, with painting started full-time at the Herreshoff Museum and she’s been busy. restoration in mind, she was as steeped in the sea as anyone her It’s easy to think of museums as static environments, but “things age could be. “I nearly forgot to say – I took one semester out to are coming out of the woodwork all the time”. These will typically build a 16ft pulling boat with my grandad in Maine!” be larger items: existing designs are held at the MIT museum and There was also the grant that Evelyn secured to do a boat the bigger artefacts – boat parts and more – are at the Herreshoff documentation project while working for Museum. her BA. This played to one of Evelyn’s Herreshoff has become a towering figure other interests: photography, or, in this in yacht design. Mostly, that is attributable “You realise that instance, photogrammetry, the use of to his pioneering work in yacht design, but when you get software to use an ordinary camera as a the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company 3-D scanner. It’s much cheaper than a was “so prolific for so long” says Evelyn. a boat off the laser set-up to do the same job, and from “More than 2,000 boats over six decades. moulds, it takes on the images produced, a boat’s lines can be They built the whole NY30 fleet in a an organic life” worked up in a CAD package. Using this single winter. It beggars belief. We think technology, Evelyn set off like a modernaround 28 per cent of that output still day Edgar J March, bag on her back, to survives. And 1945, when the company precisely record local vessels in danger of being lost to history. stopped, is still in living memory. It wasn’t that long ago. After Combined with her hands-on boatbuilding experience, this must Nat, A Sidney was very active in the transition to family cruising, have given Evelyn a keen appreciation of the way boats change which was becoming the main thing, as with the Newport 29, a shape, first at the build stage, then more gradually, throughout good racer but a good cruiser too. And there was such a huge their lifetimes. “You realise that when you get a boat off the range in the output.” From schooners to steam yachts to military moulds, it takes on an organic life. I also learned the traditional vessels to the 12.5, there really is a Herreshoff for most sailors. way to take a boat’s lines, with measuring sticks, from my dad.

The pandemic and working from home for a year allowed It’s similar to the modern way, a parallel I like.”

Evelyn to do the sort of research work that would normally be After college, Evelyn returned to Mystic and apprenticed impossible. This has included going through the Stebbens photo herself for 18 months to the end of the huge project to restore archive to find Herreshoff boats for captioning and crossthe Charles W Stanley, today the unofficial flagship of the Mystic referencing. And the museum’s regular lecture series is now fleet. “I never got past apprentice level by the way” she says with conducted online, allowing a greater range of speakers and a laugh. “I’m not classing myself as a shipwright!” audience, if less immediacy. As Evelyn points out, visiting a After the Charles W Morgan, Evelyn gained a Fullbright museum is a “privilege”, which it is from the physical ability to scholarship to work at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, where do so or from a proximity perspective. To that end, she’s been she stayed 18 months. The Vasa, Sweden’s answer to the Mary emptying out all the boats in the collection and photographing Rose, was an early 17th-century Swedish warship raised from the the interiors so that those who can’t climb the ladders to peer deep and preserved over many years – in fact, work is still ongoing inside can still get a sense of the boats. But although digital and the museum attracts as many as 1.7 million visitors a year, resources can enhance the real thing, the future of the museum making it by far the most visited maritime museum in the world. itself and the objects in it is clearly the priority.

“It’s rare that national interest and funds combine to make The museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and something like that possible,” says Evelyn, whose work here was the team has been re-organising the rigged models and the to catalogue and photograph the tools on board, from pocket awls America’s Cup Hall of Fame. “It’s a tiny museum. We all do a bit to joiner’s chests. After that, there was some part-time work at of everything.” Later this year there will be a big digitisation Mystic, followed by some archiving work for the Northwest School project to turn ‘Capt Nat’s model room’ into a 3-D virtual online of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Townsend, Washington, then a tour. And what with the museum opening its doors once again move to New York to work at the Smithsonian Design Museum this summer, Evelyn is going to be busy.

CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2021

CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2021

CB396 CQ Evelyn Ansel.indd All Pages

LIZARD A short length of rope with a thimble spliced into the end, used for various purposes, eg, in 39

25/05/2021 17:32

CORRECTION

square-rigged ships as a fairlead for the

In our interview with Evelyn Ansel last month we cited

buntlines, or hung

virtual and in-person), lectures and sailing events to get

A Sidney Herreshoff as designer of the Newport 29

from the lower

you in the Jubilee mood.

which was, in fact, a Nathanael Herreshoff design.

boom of a ship at

“We’ve also planned a great mix of events (both

And look out for the launch of the 3-D virtual tour of

anchor, and to

and interpretation of the world-renowned Herreshoff

Nathanael Herreshoff’s virtual model room, which

which boats can be

Manufacturing Company!”

should be up and running by the end of June.

made fast

herreshoff.org/50th

See herreshoff.org.

Oxford Companion

“Join us in celebrating five decades of preservation

to Ships and the Sea

16

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

CLASSI C BO AT REST O R ATI O NS

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Hamble Classics 2021 The Royal Southern Yacht Club is hosting Hamble Classics from 10-12 September, the sixth edition of the popular classic regatta. Early entries include Thalia, 1888 gaff cutter that was voted Gstaad Yacht Club Centenarian of the Year in our recent Classic Boat Awards, as well as the Spirit 65 Chloe Giselle, the 30 Square Metre Aeolus and the 16-foot gaff-rigged Herreshoff Gloriana. An early-bird entry rate is available until 5 July for all classes including IRC, RICK TOMLINSON

Gaffers, One-Designs and Regatta Handicap for ‘out of class’ dayboats.

royal-southern.co.uk/racing

Lightship is recognised The lightship West Hinder III, which aided mariners on the North Sea from 1950-94 and has since undergone a private restoration carried out by volunteers, has received an official “certificate of heritage”. It was presented by Flemish Prime Minister Jan Jambon, the Mayor of Antwerp Bart De Wever and the Belgian Minister for Heritage © 2021 ELS VAN HOOF

Matthias Diependaele. The ceremony was organised by the Watererfgoed Vlaanderen (WEVL), whose members restore and operate historic ships in Belgium. The lightship will be one of many significant vessels on show at a maritime festival in Antwerp, 22-25 July next year.

Big entry for Falmouth Over 100 entries, with local boats JAMES ROBINSON TAYLOR

still to come, had entered for the Classics this 11-13 June, as we went to press. Organiser

10-Metre project flagship

Keith Tullett said: “I am delighted that the efforts of

RIVER THAMES

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the organising

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where she was fourth, Marga is today, following a

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Farewell Lady Gay

magnificent restoration that we celebrated back in 2016,

we will have a

The Dunkirk Little Ship Lady Gay was destroyed in a fire

the flagship for an extraordinary project to bring together

good showing in

at the old Thornycroft sheds on Platts Eyot, Hampton, on

all the existing 10-Metres. She is owned by the Classic

the parade of

the River Thames. The Little Ships Mary Irene and Elvin,

Yacht Experience and regularly competes in the

power and sail on

which were also on site, were moved to safety. Lady Gay

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13 June to mark

was a 34ft (10.4m) motor yacht built in 1934 for Lord

at the Olympics hardly does her justice.

Falmouth Harbour

Alfred Dunhill and cost £1,500 to build, reported the

Commissioners’

Association of Dunkirk Little Ships. A cause of fire has yet

150th anniversary.”

to be established.

theclassicyachtexperience.com 18

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LUCY TULLOCH

She’s survived hurricane, fire... even Hugh Heffner!

Her owner has defied the odds to beat terminal cancer.

Today, the two are almost symbiotically linked WORDS LUCY TULLOCH

TIM WRIGHT/PHOTOACTION.COM

HERRESHOFF’S LAST SCHOONER

MARY ROSE

I

with ecology: “I wasn’t afraid that nature would go down the drain or anything negative. I just thought, let’s not destroy it, even, let’s promote it.” At the age of 32, he wrote a 20-page document titled Ecö Economy on the complex subject of how to combine the preservation of nature with commerce. He sent it to the Austrian Prime Minister, who was so impressed that for the next four years, Gerald was invited to work on his concept with a team of experts and a generous annual budget. Together, they changed the world’s perception of commerce and ecology. Closer to home, a purification process was put in place that resulted in lakes across the country being clean enough to drink. Their toxic waste programme was later used in Denmark. Gerald went on to become adviser to the OECD for ecology.

In his 20s, Gerald sailed his 505 zealously along the north African coast while working in Algiers. Later, sailing with friends, his sailing skills developed and over the years, experience in navigation and seamanship followed and his eye always turned towards classic yachts. His father was a chemical engineer and carpenter and Gerald’s love of the smell of varnish and wood stayed with him forever. And he dreamed…

In Warren, Maine, he met a farmer who would become his lifelong friend. With the renowned English shipwright John Anderson, the farmer was restoring the 1930 Q-Class Falcon II (later renamed Hayday and Jour de Fête). Their friendship blossomed and Gerald joked that one day, he would love to own a yacht like Falcon II. “No,” came the reply, “you’ll have something better. Let John restore this one and when I die, you’ll get the next one.” Incredibly, the farmer also had L Francis’s 1926 Falcon in skeletal form. “But…are you dying?” Gerald asked. “If I don’t have a heart replacement, I’ll be dead in 12 months.” But fate had something different written for his good old friend. “Don’t worry, you’ll get your boat” he promised Gerald.

It was 18 months later, when Gerald had returned to Europe, the news came that his friend had actually died of blood poisoning on his farm and that he had been bequeathed the skeleton of Falcon.

There was also a barn for his use for $1,000 a month and the use of a boatyard. Gerald spent every summer for the next seven years overseeing the restoration, carried out by John Anderson. His motto during this rebuild was “No compromise” and so she was restored square inch by square inch.

t is mid-April in Antigua, when Falmouth Harbour would usually be bustling with classics for its annual regatta. Instead, on a calm afternoon, I sit quietly with Gerald Rainer, in the beautifully-varnished cockpit of this very special schooner, to talk about all the lives that crossed and brought him to this point.

Gerald grew up near Lake Traunsee in Austria. It was a small house for the size of family so the rivers, pastures and mountains became his playground. Forbidding the young children to play at the lake, his parents didn’t find out until many years later that he had been learning to sail there instead of studying with school friends as he’d told them. But by then, he was converted...and this early passion would transform his life.

Nearly a century earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, Nathanael & his brother John Herreshoff raced each other up Long Island Sound, building boats to beat not just the fastest patrol boat in the area, but the serious Long Island adults in their quick racing boats. They were only teenagers at the time, but of course history relates that they went on to design and build some of the world’s fastest and most innovative yachts in history, including a succession of undefeated America’s Cup defenders.

‘Captain Nat’, as he became affectionately known, did not want his son’s keen interest in yacht design to be overshadowed by his father’s fame, so he had the ingenious idea to send Francis to work as an apprentice at his biggest competitor, Starling Burgess. L Francis Herreshoff grew up to became a yacht designer in his own right, after he came back to work with his father, designing a series of clipper-bowed ketches including Ticonderoga and Bounty. Some say that the elegant Q-Class Falcon, recorded as designed by Burgess and built by Herreshoff, was actually drawn by Francis while he was there. She inspired the J-Class Ranger.

THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH In Austria, the young Gerald Rainer was awarded the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, attaining a joint degree from Harvard and Tufts Universities in just one year. His mind however, turned to ecology. “Growing up in a tiny hamlet, deep in the mountains, I was always a nature guy, a hillbilly.” Gerald explains his early fascination

22

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

At the age of 78, Nat Herreshoff designed and built his final schooner, Mary Rose. On 5 August 1925, Harold Brooks from Long Island ordered a schooner. It is said that he had already decided on the name. Capt Nat started immediately with the design, inspired by his sloop Flying Cloud whose lines he had drawn in 1910. The stunning Mary Rose was launched the following year and went on to win the New York Yacht Club annual regatta. In 1930 she won the City of Newport Cup, beating the 12-M Iris and the J-Class Enterprise skippered

by Harold Vanderbilt. Many more victories followed.

She is planked in southern yellow pine below the waterline and douglas fir planks above. Surprisingly, much of her interior is teak with a convincing mahogany

TIM WRIGHT/PHOTOACTION.COM

XXXXXXXXX XXXXXX

NAT HERRESHOFF’S LAST SCHOONER

Main picture: Mary Rose sailing at Antigiua Classics Above left: Nat Herresoff ’s portrait below decks Above right: Gerald Rainer

LUCY TULLOCH

LUCY TULLOCH

MARY ROSE

MARY ROSE

stain. But delve more deeply and you will learn why she has been termed the “Stradivarius of classic sailing yachts” because 24 different types of wood are used in very specific places for their different properties.

She was sold in 1936 to Russel B Stearns, member of the Eastern Yacht Club, who changed her name to Gallant but two years later she was tragically destroyed by a category five hurricane that dragged her and her four anchors in the wind. The storm took hundreds of lives and destroyed countless yachts along the East coast, but her fortune turned when E Howard Reed bought the wreck and restored her.

As with many yachts during the war, the US Coast Guard requisitioned Mary Rose from 1942-1945 but in the decades that followed, little is known about the details of her private ownership in California.

Cover girl Mary Rose hosted a deliciously risqué photo shoot with Hugh Hefner in the July 1957 issue of Playboy magazine. There were six pages of on-deck and interior shots with scantily-clad models enjoying a typical cruise aboard the yacht.

Sadly, that very interior was destroyed in a fire in 1975, after which a new caretaker bought her and in 1994 embarked on a six-year complete restoration.

Using plans and documents from the Herreshoff Museum, she was restored meticulously to her original standards. Some 25,000 man-hours and a change of name later, Gallant sailed again away from the dock in 1999 and immediately won the Baruna Trophy in San Francisco.

Gerald had many friends and sailing mentors from 24

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

MARY ROSE TYPE

Gaff-rigged schooner LOS

84ft (25.6m) LWL

46ft 6in (14.2m) BEAM

14ft 4in (4.4m) DRAUGHT

9ft 2in (2.8m) DISP

29 tonnes SAIL AREA

2,547 sqft (236.6m2)

whom he learned much. One trip took him from Greenland to Maine crossing the Labrador Sea where Gerald first saw Gallant anchored in Boothbay Harbour.

The wealthy American couple who owned her became his good friends but she remained out of his reach. Later, when the owner embarked on a substantial restoration project of the Abeking & Rasmussen Sea Diamond, Gerald put in a low offer for Gallant. The owner’s lawyer sent counter-offers to an apparent stony silence...

But far from Gerald being stubborn in the negotiations, he had not actually seen any of the counter offers, being completely out of communication in the midst of escaping a dramatic tsunami in the far east, leaving him clinging to a palm tree and losing everything except the clothes he stood in. His original offer was accepted and the sale was agreed.

Having returned Gallant to her original name, he enjoyed cruising Mary Rose for two months in the BVIs and for two months in Maine every year. Gerald learned his boat well and concluded that there is a relationship between sailor and boat. She has a soul. He strongly believes that if you put your soul into something, it will come back... there will be some response.

He didn’t know it then, but Gerald had contracted a rare type of cancer and it wasn’t until he was in the advanced stages, that he was diagnosed and given a week to live by his oncologist. He immediately underwent an intense nine-hours-a-day chemotherapy course for several months “You have to fall on your nose first before you can recreate yourself,” he says. “If you fall

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

41’ Buchanan Sloop built to Lloyds 100A1 by Priors in 1959. Built for RORC Class II racing where she was a successful boat. Teak planking on CRE frames.

New Beta 38hp engine in 2018, Darglow propeller 2020. 6 berths with 6’6” headroom, very original interior in smart condition. Fast elegant boat in sound condition and sensibly priced. Wales £58,000

34’ Swedish Sloop designed and built in Sweden in 1938. Won in a raffle in 1939 by a Scottish yachtsman who shipped her to Scotland before WWII where she has sailed ever since. Fast and elegant boat maintained regularly and sailed every season, recently fitted out and launched for 2021. 4 single berths with heads and galley. Scotland £24,500

32’ William Atkin Bermudan cutter built in Hong Kong in 1981. Teak hull on tropical hardwood frames, sheathed plywood deck. Large beam gives huge internal volume. Easily handled Bermudan cutter rig, Yanmar 32hp diesel. 6 double berths plus separate heads. Substantially constructed proven blue water yacht. Sussex £34,950

Ron Holland 42 built in strip plank in 1983. Built as a test for the newly designed material Speed Strip, she is the same design as the Swan 42 and therefore comes with the same superb sailing characteristics of that highly acclaimed design. 8 berths with lots of interior volume, rebuilt Perkins 4108 diesel. Main and genoa from 2017. Unusual and fast yacht. Scotland £49,950

30’ Falmouth Pilot 9 ton Ketch built by Falmouth Boat Construction Company in 1964 to a WarringtonSmythe design. Ideal coastal cruising boat with an easily handled ketch rig, safe cockpit and 5 berths in a comfortable interior, including a double berth forward.

Fully documented history in present ownership, a well appointed crusing yacht. Cornwall £32,500

50’ Admiralty MFV built in 1944 as MFV 625. She has a well documented service history, most of which was in the Med. Converted in 1974, she is a comfortable and attractive motor yacht. 5 berths in 3 cabins plus saloon and spacious deck saloon in the wheelhouse.

Foden 6cyl diesel in lovely condition. Marina berth and 4000l of diesel included in the sale. 2018 survey.

Bristol £85,000

16’6” Tela Class gaff sloop built by Salterns Boatbuilders Ltd with a GRP hull. A perfect day boat, half decked with a centreboard and built in ballast.

Perfect for river sailing or calmer coastal passages, easily single handed. Launched and recovered from her trailer. A pretty looking boat in lovely condition, perfect for the summer ahead. Salcombe £9,990

14’ Paul Gartside Skylark professionally built in 2018.

Khaya mahogany on oak timbers. Standing lug rig for simple sailing. Comes with oars, cover and road trailer.

Only launched a couple of times, otherwise dry stored.

Lovely looking boat with generous beam giving good stability, complete package ready to go. Devon £9,000

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.

LUCY TULLOCH

LUCY TULLOCH

MARY ROSE

down… you have to get up.” And it is from this experience of surviving cancer that Gerald decided how to live the rest of his life. “Benevolence and tolerance are my modes of life now.” It shows in everything Gerald is.

And as if summoned, in the quiet afternoon in Falmouth Harbour, a small family of dolphins swim through the harbour breaking the water silently.

In 2010, after a period in the shed in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, she was on a Herreshoff Museum mooring in Bristol for three months while she was prepared for her upcoming Caribbean season. A varnisher went aboard daily to build up the necessary coats to withstand the unforgiving sun and trade winds of the tropics. While an expert in the field of varnishing, he had no sea experience and when 30 knots howled through the anchorage and the mooring chain broke, he was left helpless. Calling the captain for advice, he was told not to touch anything, in case the insurers might not pay. He sat in what must have been terrifying circumstance, as she sailed under bare poles north to south before making an elegant 900 turn to the shore.

She steered a course right through a crop of rocks with no more than 20ft (6.1m) of water either side, and ran softly aground pointing her bowsprit to the estate of Nat Herreshoff. As the tide rose, people gathered on the shore, praying and singing to save the boat.

NOT INSURED The salvage company called Gerald and agreed on a “no cure-no-pay“ arrangement of $10,000 and at high water, the tug pulled her off safely with barely five scratches on her keel. A relieved Gerald called his insurance company to let them know there would be no claim, to discover that, having not received payment demand emails during his cancer treatment, Mary Rose was not insured.

Sailing with Gerald is a romantic experience. He is the most at ease with boat and crew I’ve ever seen. He talks to his guests on board about how a schooner sails and his light touch on the helm echoes his words about a boat’s soul.

“I’ve sanded and varnished the boat from stem to stern at least four times… you climb into the bilges to get them clean, try to figure out that which you are never able to… I think it’s for love.

Falling in love is one thing…but being in love 26

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above left: Saloon looking forward Above right: At anchor off Angitua Below: July 1957 Playboy cover

– it’s the tiny work. It’s not the big things. Show them continuous attention you will get back. You get attached.”

Why do you love this boat, I venture. “I could never master her. I think that’s what it is. I never thought I was the boss. She showed me every time,” is Gerald’s reply.

Gerald has raced for a decade at Antigua’s Classic Yacht Regatta. He sails with an amateur crew made up of friends and family and has won many trophies over these years, including a personal victory in 2015 over two classic greyhounds Mariella and Dorade. There are tiny nuances to sailing Mary Rose that Gerald has learned over years sitting at her helm that led him to these successes. When he was asked why he doesn’t lose speed one day, he replied “Because I know what’s going to happen in the next five seconds.” From talking to Gerald over the years, it seems to me, this is also how he lives his life.

“One day out racing, I tried to force it, and we got stuck. The fleet pulled away from us. Then on the second race, we were having a ball, we beat everybody.”

He doesn’t like the term “owner” and sees himself more as a “caretaker”. He insists on all the work being done to Herreshoff’s original specifications. Four years on the board of the Herreshoff Museum has given Gerald an in-depth knowledge of what the master intended.

Helping him on his mission is skipper Manfred and his partner Gemma and long-time friend Foerbie. There is no one-man-show feel to this boat: everyone is involved in creating what she is today. There is real dedication in all that the four have done on board. Recently the ‘schooner girls’ Gemma & Magdali built a trailer for the Antiguanbuilt Herreshoff sailing dinghy and this spring has seen Gerald sailing in Falmouth Harbour most evenings among the anchored cruising boats and super yachts. Now it takes five minutes to launch and be sailing, “less time than it takes to buy the beers,” Manfred laughs.

Gerald and his team are keen to share the boat with young people, especially those who might not get a chance to sail. Enthusiastic teaching of traditional skills reward those willing to learn, including girls, sometimes disregarded in classic racing. They and the younger generation get involved with every aspect of racing and the graft needed for Gerald’s winning formula. A respectful nod surely, to the Herreshoff brothers’ childhood and their 12½, and to Gerald’s own summer days on the mountain lakes of Austria.

MEMBER OF THE ROBBE & BERKING FAMILY

YA C H T S

VA NI T Y 1936 W ILLIAM FIFE 12MR

In principle, all 12s are beauties, but there are some in the fleet of boats that are particularly striking for their beauty. Vanity V is definitely one of them. The beautiful lines came from the pen of William Fife in 1936 and since then she has always been proud of her lines and her appearance.

Vanity V, is now offered for sale, or comes with the option to become a LOA: 21.58 m

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Beam: 3.72 m

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syndicate partner. Between 1997 and 2000 Vanity received a completely rebuilt, sticking close to the original design. Since then she always has been kept to perfect conditions and even totally equipped for cruising with an elegant interior, she shows her strength successfully at international regattas. Please give us a call to receive additional information.

Draft: 2.65 m

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Price: EUR 1.195.000

A NI T R A 1928 STARLING BURGESS 12MR

Abeking and Rasmussen built six 12mR yachts in 1928 commissioned by the New York Yacht Club. These boats were designed by Starling Burgess and two of them are still alive and one is Anitra. She has been built matching the second rule of the 12mR regulations in 1928. In 2003 Anitra was brought to Germany in a much-desolated condition and was restored by Martin Yachts in southern Germany. After her major refit, which gave LOA: 21.10 m

+ 49 (0) 4 61 31 8 0 3 0 65

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Beam: 3.75 m

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her a brand new and beautiful look, Anitra was brought to Flensburg where she took part in several regattas around the fjord and the Danish south sea, as well as in world and European championships. Her interior design is high end and Anitra is not only a good boat to sail regattas but also appropriate for cruising trips. She comes fully equipped, so that going on holiday or on long deliveries for races is not a problem at all.

Draft: 2.58 m

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Price: EUR 1.350.000

B AU M+KO E N I G @ C L A S S IC-YAC H T S . D E

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W W W.C L A S S IC-YAC H T S .C O M

Saleroom

By Dave Selby

Royal yacht Portsmouth II was scrapped after 129 years of service, yet this rare Georgian dockyard model

CHARLES MILLER LTD

(estimated at £8,000-12,000) survives thanks to an Admiralty order requiring models to be made of every vessel built.

CHARLES MILLER LTD

Sailor king’s favourite mistress Though Charles II, the sailor king, is generally credited with inventing

53-footer with 17ft beam was provided with half a dozen two

yachting, it wasn’t the only sport he was interested in. In rather less

pounders – guns, not burgers – and carried a crew of 14.

woke times there was barely a murmur when in 1674 he named his

In the century that followed, the royal pleasure fleet proliferated, but

new royal yacht Portsmouth after his favourite mistress of the time,

eventually in 1832 the aging Portsmouth, by then renamed Old

the Duchess of Portsmouth.

Portsmouth, fell foul of government cost-cutting, just as Britannia did

Years earlier his passion – for yachts, that is – had first been sparked

when she was decommissioned in 1997. However, Old Portsmouth suffered a worse fate, for when radical politician Joseph Hume

of many royal yachts, the Mary, and in the following year he took part

questioned “the extravagant waste of public money in keeping afloat no

in the first organised regatta, when he won a 40-mile race on the

fewer than five royal yachts” much of the small squadron of royal yachts

Thames against the Duke of York, who apparently did not protest the

was scrapped. This was all the more the pity as Old Portsmouth’s

outcome – another yachting first. With the sport of kings established,

timbers were still sound.

Portsmouth II, pictured, joined the royal fleet in 1703. The 66-ton,

Next Charles Miller Ltd sale: 2 November, 2021

ELDRED’S

MECUM

in 1660 when the City of Amsterdam gave him what would be the first

MECUM

Wet Vette There’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that the sports automobile named after a fast and nimble fighting vessel should one day be realised as a boat – or at least there should be. In 1953 as glassfibre was just beginning to make inroads

ELDRED’S, USA

28

into boatbuilding, the Chevrolet Corvette became the

Big bucks boy toys

world’s first mainstream glassfibre sportscar. The

American Horace Edward Boucher produced mechanical toys that were just

Californian company Malibu Boats paid tribute with a

as coveted by youngsters in the USA as those of Bassett Lowke and Hornby

Corvette-inspired ski boat, that must surely be the

in the UK. And today, HE Boucher MFG Co toys produced from 1905 to 1943

only speedboat with brake lights! Produced in

are just as highly prized by collectors. This live steam hydroplane (top),

collaboration with General Motors, this 1997 C4

which made $1,187, is a masterpiece of scale engineering with its propeller

Malibu Corvette ski-boat is powered by a monster

driven through a miniature outboard engine. The motorised cabin cruiser

400hp 6.3-liter V8, with an arm-wrenching top speed

below proved even more desirable at $2,750.

of 57mph. One of just 150 produced, it sold for a

Next Eldred’s Marine Sale: August 19-20, 2021

bargain $25,300.

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

plastic fantastic endures to this day, and in the 1990s

Yacht Brokerage

2000. Refit in 2008/14/18/19/20. Steel hull with teak superstructure, ELEONORA is an exact replica of the schooner Westward which was designed in 1910 by Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, the ‘Wizard of Bristol’, the designer of the America’s Cup defenders which turned back all six challenges from 1893 to 1920. Westward was arguably one of the most famous racing schooners in the world.

ELEONORA not only follows Westward’s heritage of big schooners racing but she also offers with her comfort and space unforgettable cruising and relaxation experience. She was built at the Van der Graaf shipyard in Holland and was launched in March 2000. Since then, she has successfully participated in a number of classic sailing regattas and hosted on board a number of high-profile guests during her charter activities.

ELEONORA shows astonishing beauty under sail, her slender hull cutting a pathway through the sea, an elegant combination of beauty and power.

With no sacrifice to luxurious standards of comfort, her staterooms and the entire interior display the ambience and elegance of another age.

ELEONORA is registered as a commercial vessel under MCA and classed under Veritas.

162.5ft New Classic Schooner

ELEONORA

2011. As a replica of the schooner ‘Germania’ launched in 1908, she was built at Factoria Naval de Marin in Spain.

As opposed to Germania, which did not include a motor or generators or air conditioning, GERMANIA NOVA has been outfitted with these important features for a charter yacht of her kind. In fact, GERMANIA NOVA has full charter class under LY2. External decks, and sail plan are impressive.

Under deck she is composed of two main zones (guests and crew). Guest area is composed of 5 cabins, including a master cabin and 4 guest cabins. All cabins with unsuited bathroom. One large saloon and a bridge house with all necessary radio and navigation equipment, complete the guest area. Crew area is all located forward, and houses 10 crew in bunk areas, two cabins for officers and captain, a crew mess, a laundry and a galley.

SALE, CHARTER & MANAGEMENT

Also specialises in Transoceanic Charter

196ft New Classic Schooner

GERMANIA NOVA

71ft Laurent Gilles Ketch Aitor

1964. From a Laurent Gilles Design, AITOR is a very nice Gentleman’s classic yacht for blue water cruising and live aboard thanks to her cockpit and deck house.

She is very well built and has been regularly maintained. She has a special character thanks to her classic style. She is easy to handle with 2 main engines.

FRANCE: Montpellier (Head Office) - Paris - La Ciotat - Antibes Monaco • Palma, Majorca • Italy • Moscow Hong Kong • USA California • New Zealand

65ft Sangermani Marconi Yawl Giannella II

1966. Refit 2010. This Eugène Cornu design has been built by the legendary Cantieri Sangermani in Italy, one of the best wooden boat shipyards in the world.

She is a wonderful classic sailing yacht ideal for family cruising in absolute comfort. She has won many regattas including The Voiles de St Tropez and Conde de Barcelona. She features lovely warm interiors and is easy to sail!

Bernard Gallay Yacht Brokerage

1 rue Barthez - 34000 Montpellier - France +33 467 66 39 93 - info@bernard-gallay.com www.bernard-gallay.com

Objects of desire RARE NAUTICAL BOOKS The Peter Harrington Rare Books 2021 Travel and Exploration catalogue, newly published, features plenty for yachting historians and lovers of sailing memorabilia, for example an unpublished set of journals kept by a Royal Navy midshipman during a tour of the Gulf in 1930-33, including an account of a visit to Dubai and an on-board reception for the Trucial Sheikhs, part of a broader British policy of ‘courting’ local rulers.

Also available is a complete set of Cook’s accounts of his three voyages, nine volumnes dating from 1773-4.

Trucial Sheiks £125,000 Cook £60,000.

peterharrington.co.uk

ENDURANCE LOGBOOK BY TOM CUNLIFFE Designed with Classic Boat columnist

SAIL DESIGN

Tom, who is also, among other things, a

Stroodles, manufacturers of

Fellow of the Royal Institute for

environmentally friendly drinking straws

Navigation, the Endurance is bound in

made of pasta, is partnering with Clean

tough royal blue English buckram,

Ocean Sailing to run a competition to

printed on heavyweight paper and lined

draw a sail design for the organisation’s

with a hand-marbled design. It is

1908 gaff schooner Annette. Your design

section-sewn by hand to fold flat on

should “reimagine a more sustainable

your chart table, the left page is

future and an ocean free from plastic

dedicated to navigation data, while the

pollutants”. Enter via the Stroodles

right page is feint-ruled for notes. £165

website. Meanwhile, you could try a starter

englishlogbook.co.uk

A SEA WALL

Norfolk skipper Zoe Dunford has designed this nautical wallpaper to feature boats that she sails herself, as a skipper for the Coastal Exploration Company and an instructor for Neil Thompson’s Boats. Her new wallpaper and fabrics business is called Collingwood Coastal, after a family connection to Admiral Lord Collingwood, who took over British command after Nelson was shot at Trafalgar. £59.50 for a 52cm x 10m roll.

collingwoodcoastal.com 30

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

pack of Stroodles for £2.99

stroodles.co.uk

Yacht Restorers

© Emily Harris Photography 2021

Harbour Marine

Telephone +44 (0)1502 724721 Email info@harbourmarine.co.uk www.harbourmarine.co.uk HMS_DAVEY_CBMay21.indd 1

DAVEY & Co

18/03/2021 17:49

LO NDO N L I M I T E D ˚ E s t . 1 8 8 5

TRADITIONAL YACHT FITTINGS PROPERLY MADE T R AD E

M AR K

Telephone +44 (0)1206 500945 ˚ Email info@davey.co.uk ˚ www.davey.co.uk HMS_DAVEY_CBMay21.indd 2

18/03/2021 17:49

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

31

CHARLOTTE WATTERS

Adrian Morgan

Farewell, canine sailor

bursting for a poo and would we please row him ashore, which we did and, as was his wont, then took his time, wandering about, sniffing the flowers, exploring the rocks, marking his new territory and finally, in his own time, as if to say “you kept me waiting; now it’s my turn...”

House trained to a fault, he was also boat trained, up to a point. At night he would often leap up the companionway into the cockpit, creep around the sprayhood onto the side deck, where his scuttling on the non-slip sounded like a posse of land crabs had snuck aboard.

The scratching would then stop, once, memorably, directly above the head of Rona’s bunk, at the corner of the coachroof which, of all the spots to have a pee, was probably the worst on account of a persistent leak that even Captain Tolley’s Creeping Crack Cure had failed to stem. And here it was that he had decided to cock his leg. The leak has never reappeared.

Bran did not like bad weather, well who does? We would send him below and try and settle him in the leeward bunk, but he never got the hang of tacking. Instead he would stand below the companionway, looking up beseechingly until Rona joined him, and together they would curl up under a blanket until things settled down. And thus we voyaged throughout the West Coast, until the day he became too creaky to risk taking aboard. On the days I went to check on Sally at her mooring, I would leave him ashore, where he would sit on his haunches among the rocks, a lone brown dog gazing out to sea, until his master returned.

Bran is now gone and dog owners will understand what the loss of a companion of 15 years feels like. He was never what you might call a boaty dog, but he was willing to give anything a try, always the first aboard the dinghy on the row out, and the first to leap ashore on our return, always I swear with an almost audible sigh of relief.

Above all he was willing to learn, and his training to the whistle was textbook reward and repeat. If he was told to stay, and moved, he would be marched back until he got it. Teaching by example, however, was not a method that worked with Bran, but that morning, rather than get dressed and go ashore, it was worth a try. And that was why anyone up that early would have seen me cocking my leg against Sally’s mast, watched by a bemused pointer.

Bran was never quite a shipmate – but he was a true mate

I

t could have been a metal mast, but Sally’s is wooden, built in Bristol by Noble in the 1980s. That early morning, at anchor in, luckily, a sea loch we had almost to ourselves, it would not have mattered what the mast had been made of, it would still have struck anyone watching as odd to see a semi-naked man cocking his leg against it.

Bran, our pointer and companion for just a day under 15 years, a master on the hill, was not a natural sea dog; or rather he was happiest curled up in the cockpit, or better still, bleaching his tan on deck. He would take a keen interest in sea life, birds, dolphins, seals; especially seals which we are told are closely related to dogs. He would watch them for hours, and sometimes we worried he might, like a selkie returning to its kind, jump overboard and, with a backward glance, disappear beneath the waves.

One time he swam out from the shore of a skerry in the Summer Isles archipelago to join a group of curious seals. Fortunately he decided fairly quickly that he was still a dog and not ready to join his kin who may well have taken against a creature with four legs and a tail, no matter how friendly.

There was the time we woke to find him standing in the dinghy, which was hanging by its painter a yard or two astern. It was probably his way of telling us he was

32

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

“He was never what you might call a boaty dog, but he was willing to give anything a try”

© Jürg Kaufmann

BONA FIDE

2011

MARIGOLD

2012

OLYMPIAN

2 11 – 2 21

2014/2019

The 10th Gstaad Yacht Club Centenary Trophy 30th September 2021 during Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez

ORIOLE

2015

SPARTAN

2016

TILLY XV

2017/2018

Anzeige-Classic-Boat-half-page-horizontal-230x146mm-2021-2-CMYK.indd 1

28.01.21 15:24

www.blakesandtaylors.co.uk CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

33

BRANDT FAATZ

Bound for unknown seas WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPH BRUNO CIANCI

34

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

BRUNO CIANCI

If you’ve just retired from directing a wooden boat heritage centre, it’s likely your immediate future is going to feature some serious cruising

B

orn in Minnesota in 1961, Brandtt Faatz first sailed in holidays. In the spring of 2020, I stripped and refinished her Colorado, learned to sail keelboats in the San Francisco mahogany house and coamings. Last summer was all about Bay, and eventually became obsessed with boats and the sailing Chloe; the fall was about moving to Port Townsend.

Salish Sea, the network of waterways between Canada Melanie and I sailed Chloe to Port Townsend in December, and the United States, after moving to Seattle on New Year’s Day and I’ve been day-sailing here a dozen times a month since 1997, a city he had been driven to for romantic reasons involving then. I have her set up for light cruising now and plan to join a woman and a sailing boat. A former executive director of the the Palooza Cruisa after the Pocket Yacht Palooza event in Center for Wooden Boats (CWB), located in Lake Union, Seattle, Port Townsend this July. Works, obviously, are always Faatz is now almost fully devoted to sailing. “I retired from the needed. Just a few weeks ago, I started stripping the toe rails.

CWB in March 2020,” he says, “just as the pandemic was Once those are refinished, the last step will be to paint the ramping up, because I wanted to accomplish a lifelong dream: to canvas deck.” explore the world without rush or objective in one of my boats, As soon as spring 2021 started, Brandt Faatz’s attention an Ericson 38 christened Priya. The pandemic forced me to shifted to preparing Priya for her long-awaited journey to freeze the countdown, so I’ve remained somehow involved with Mexico. She spent nearly four weeks on the hard in Port the center, serving as a volunteer on its Townsend’s Boat Haven, where 35 finance, development and capital years of accumulated bottom paint campaign committees. We are raising was stripped, all the through-hulls money to restore the floating buildings replaced, hull, rudder and steering and docks. My successor, Josh inspected, and new barrier coat and Anderson, has done an amazing job bottom paint applied. “She keeping the proverbial ship afloat and splashed in early April” – her proud steering through the storm that was owner says – “and I sailed her to a 2020”. rendezvous of the Coho Ho rally CWB’s journey through the fleet in Blakely Harbor, Bainbridge pandemic is a great story. After closing Island. Normally this would be a for a few months during the first raft up, but Covid protocols had us lockdown, CWB opened up its boat anchoring separately and ship charter operation, youth sailing and visiting by dinghy. Other projects youth woodworking programmes. All this year included beefing up Priya’s of these take place outdoors with Covid ground tackle, replacing her protocols in place. That allowed CWB water-maker and updating some of to provide community experiences in a her running rigging. I had already safe setting. Combined with masterful added solar and hydropower navigation of Covid relief funding sources, a new water-maker, opportunities at the national, state, city, satellite communications and lots of “Last summer was county and private levels, plus the other gear last year. The ship is now generosity of CWB’s donor community, ready.” all about sailing my the organisation was “able to weather As for the owner, he’s been fully Folkboat Chloe” the financial storm extremely well,” vaccinated since May, so – he says Brad. assures – will most of his sailing For now, on his itinerary there is companions be. The cruise on Priya only the west coast of the American is back on this year, with a continent, from the state of Washington to Baja California, departure to Half Moon Bay, California scheduled for although eventually this experienced sailor, who loves to sail mid-August. The starting crew of four should include another solo, could decide to go further. “I was planning to sail to former co-worker of Faatz, Kristin Pederson, an Mexico in August, 2020, but my plan was based on the idea of accomplished offshore sailor, Race to Alaska veteran and crew and guests joining me for various portions of the cruise. licensed captain, “who has a knack for spotting whales The pandemic made crew transfers untenable, so I decided to whenever she goes to sea”. Chloe has been registered for the postpone the whole thing. Instead, I spent the summer staying Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, so the owner is connected with my friends at the CWB and sailing my other planning to fly home for that in September. Then it’s back to boat, a Nordic Folkboat named Chloe, on Lake Union with my California for an October cruise down the coast to San friend and former co-worker, CWB Development Director Diego, with stops in Monterey Bay and the Channel Islands.

Melanie Masson”.

A new crew will join him there for the trip down the Baja Chloe was built in Norway in 1960, and has undergone two Peninsula and up into the Sea of Cortez. “Needless to say” – restorations while in the hands of her previous owners. During he adds – “I did read John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea one of these, the hull was completely re-planked with a durable of Cortez this winter for inspiration”.

Alaskan yellow cedar. “Chloe was in good structural condition Everything seems to be ready, apart from the ideal when I bought her,” said Faatz, “but she needed a thorough environment. For the time being, Brandtt Faatz enjoys cosmetic restoration. In December 2019, I hauled her to paint Chloe’s easy motion and lively manner in the much-loved and the bottom and topsides. Then, with help from my friends at alluring setting of the Salish Sea, as the wind and waves kick CWB, I pulled the mast, stripped it and refinished it over the up, the rail goes under and the spray starts to fly…

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

35

Main picture: The 10-M yacht Mosk II and, above, First Rule 8-M yacht Ierne

1920 OLYMPICS

THE WAR-WORN 1920 OLYMPICS The sailing regatta of the 1920 Olympic Games was so undersubscribed that only one yacht that entered failed to win a medal WORDS NIGEL SHARP

T

he 1920 Olympic Games took place against a background of post-war austerity and devastation. They were supposed to be hosted by Paris but the French forsook the opportunity in favour of Antwerp as some sort of compensation for the suffering that the Belgians had experienced during the Great War. The war’s defeated countries – Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey – were not invited, and just 14 nations took part.

Accustomed as we are to the highly organised and competitive nature of the Olympic Games in recent years, many aspects of the 1920 Games had an element of the absurd. The start time of the 10,000-metre running final, for instance, was brought forward with very little notice from 1730 to 1415 to allow the King of Belgium to appear at an art show opening. Frenchman Joseph Guillemot, who had already won the 5,000 metres three days earlier, only learned of the change of start time as he was finishing his lunch and had no time to digest it. As a result, he vomited as he crossed the finishing line in second place. In cycling’s road race, the 175km course was intersected by six railway crossings. Officials stationed at each of them timed all of the hold-ups but it wasn’t at all clear at the finish who the winners were until appropriate adjustments had been made to finishing

Above: Mosk II 1920 Gold medal

times. And in the middleweight weightlifting competition, two competitors lifted the same weight in the two-handed jerk, and they then drew lots to determine who would be awarded the silver medal.

The sailing events were held between 7 and 10 July at Ostend where an almost unbelievable total of 16 different classes were scheduled to compete. At the previous games in 1912, there had been just four: 6-Ms, 8-Ms, 10-Ms and 12-Ms with a total of 21 boats racing. But in the meantime, the 1919 International Yacht Racing Union conference had taken place and the Second International Rule had been introduced to replace the First Rule.

Although it would make sense that the Olympic classes should be made up of the most modern designs, there was very little time or money to build new boats and so it was decided to have two classes – First Rule and Second Rule – for each of the four classes that had raced eight years earlier. Furthermore, there would also be First Rule 7-Ms and 9-Ms, International 12ft Dinghies, International 18ft Dinghies, 30 Square Metres, 40 Square Metres, 6.5-Ms and 8.5-Ms. The latter two had no connection with the International Rule but conformed to a French measurement formula. They, and the Swedish Square CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

37

1920 OLYMPICS Metre boats, had been given international status – “somewhat hastily” according to The Yachtsman magazine – at the 1919 IYRU conference. All classes would take part in three races starting from the Inner Stroombank Buoy on a course either 6 or 12 nautical miles long and shaped roughly like an equilateral triangle. Only two boats were allowed from any one nation in each class.

It was the first international regatta to be held since 1914 and yet reporting of the games – both in the national press and sailing magazines – was particularly sketchy. The Yachtsman, for instance, barely gave the Olympic sailing regatta half a page in its 15 July issue whereas four and a half pages were devoted to Clyde Fortnight and more than two to the America’s Cup which was about to begin; and each of the next two issues dedicated around four pages to Shamrock IV’s subsequent defeat by Resolute.

Not surprisingly, the huge number of classes resulted in considerable dilution in all of them. In fact eight of the classes had just one entry (including the 10-M and both 12-M classes); there were no 8.5-Ms or 9-Ms at all; and there was only one class which had as many as four boats. Despite that, Yachting World reported that “the number of yachts, both racing and cruising, now in Ostend harbour, and the numerous yachtsmen of many countries who have come to witness the contests as well as take part in them, are eloquent testimony of the interest which exists in international yacht racing, and the universal desire which there is for its re-establishment.”

BRITAIN ONLY HAD TWO ENTRIES Britain only had two entries: in the 18ft Dinghy and 7-M classes. The 18ft Dinghy was a 24ft 5in LOA (7.4m) and 18ft LWL restricted class boat with a bermudan rig. The British representative was Brat which had been designed by Morgan Giles and was sailed by Francis Richards and Thomas Hedburg. That summer, before and after the games, Brat regularly competed against three or four other 18ft Dinghies in the Solent and was by no means the fastest of them. “When she first came out she was nearly uncontrollable in anything beyond a light air and after alteration steered badly,” according to one report in The Yachtsman. But in Ostend she had things much easier as she was the only boat in her class. In fact it isn’t entirely clear how much sailing she actually did while she was there, with one report suggesting that she failed to finish the first race and didn’t start the other two.

However, although it is possible that Richards and Hedburg never actually received their gold medals, as far as the International Olympic Committee’s official records are concerned, they were Olympic champions.

Things were a little harder for Britain’s other entry, the 7-M Ancora, as she had another boat to race against and should have had a third, but the King of Spain’s Giralda V, which was entered, didn’t take part. Ancora was owned by Cyril Wright and his father-in-law Percy Machin, and Wright sailed her with his wife Dorothy 38

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above: 1920 Gold medal for Jo

(the only female competitor in that Olympic regatta), Robert Coleman and William Maddison, all members of the Royal Burnham Yacht Club. In the first race, the Norwegian boat Fornebo beat Ancora by more than four minutes but Ancora came back in the second to win by just over a minute. So it came down to a tense decider in which Ancora prevailed by just 14 seconds. It was to be nearly a century before a British married couple next won Olympic Gold together when, in 2016, Kate and Helen Richardson-Walsh both played in the victorious women’s hockey team.

The 12ft Dinghy class came about as a result of a design competition launched in the UK in 1912 by the Boat Racing Association and won by George Cockshott, an amateur boat designer from Southport, Lancashire.

The first boats were built the following year and were initially called BRA 12 Footers but soon after the First World War, as their popularity spread overseas, they became known as International 12s. In Ostend just two boats, both from Holland where the class was particularly popular, took part. After Boreas won the first race, a dispute broke out after a mark drifted in the second race which took place in the inner harbour in the evening due to strong winds and big seas. It was eventually decided that the race should be void and that, as time had now run out, two more races should take place in the Buiten-IJ near Amsterdam in September. Beatrijis III which had come second in the first race in Ostend when she was sailed by Cornelius Hin and his 14-year-old son Frans, then won both the September races when Frans sailed with his older brother Johan. It is thought that the only other time an Olympic event has been held outside the host country was when, during the 1956 Melbourne Games, Australian quarantine regulations resulted in the equestrian events being held in Stockholm.

The 40 Square Metre class also had just two boats from the same nation, in this case Sweden. One of the crew on the winning boat Sif was Tore Holm who was at the beginning of what would be a highly successful yacht design career. It was also the start of his long involvement with Olympic sailing as he subsequently won bronze in an 8-M in 1928, gold in a 6-M in 1932, came 4th in an 8-M in 1936, and won bronze again in a 6-M in 1948.

Another Scandinavian multi-Olympics sailor was Magnus Konow. In 1920 he won gold on board the Norwegian Second Rule 8-M Sildra, having won all three races against another Norwegian boat, Lyn, and the Belgian Antwerpia V. He had previously taken part in 1908 and 1912, and would subsequently do so again in 1928, 1936 and 1948, winning three medals in total.

In the 6.5-M class, the crew of the Dutch boat Oranje sportingly requested that the first race should be postponed because the only other boat – Rose Pompon from France – had not yet cleared Belgian customs.

Oranje then won all three races. The following month, 6.5-Ms were used to contest the One Ton Cup under the burgee of the Royal Thames Yacht Club at Ryde and Oranje (and a different French boat) came over to the Solent to take part. The overall winner would be the first

1920 OLYMPICS

Top: The Morgan Giles designed 18ft dinghy Brat. Above left: 7- M Ancora. Above right: Edelweiss II, 6-M yacht designed by Linton Hope CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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1920 OLYMPICS

boat to win three races. The British boat – Cordella, designed by Morgan Giles – was owned by Sir Ralph Gore and Algernon Maudsley and they must have regretted not taking her to Ostend as she not only won that One Ton Cup but she retained it in 1921 and 1922.

In the First Rule 6-M class – the only one with as many as four entries – it was the Belgian boat Suzy which became the only one in the whole regatta not to win a medal. It was close, however, because after the three scheduled races, she was tied for third place with the Norwegian boat Stella, but then lost a fourth deciding race.

On the evening of 10 July, a reception was held at Ostend’s Kursaal concert hall where gold, silver and bronze medals were presented to the crews and “handsome statuettes”, according to Yachting World, to the boats’ owners.

SURVIVORS But what of the 1920 Olympic boats which are known to have survived? The Second Rule 6-M Jo – designed by Johan Anker and built by Anker & Jensen – damaged her mast in the first race in 1920 but won the next two to take the gold medal. In 1997, 6-M class historian Tim Street and his wife discovered Jo “lying in a hedge with a tree growing up through her and with both ends chopped off, at the boatyard in Pin Mill, Suffolk”. Tim informed Peter Wilson, then of Aldeburgh Boatyard, who recovered her, found an owner willing to take her on and began to restore her. Following the untimely death of that owner the work stopped for many years but is now under way again for another owner at Demon Yachts.

Another 6-M which may have survived is Edelweiss II which was designed by Linton Hope and won the gold medal in the First Rule class in 1920. On the face of it she had the toughest Olympic regatta as she had to beat three other boats – the Norwegian yachts Marmi and Stella, and the unfortunate Suzy. About 30 years ago, Tim Street was contacted by two Belgians who had acquired Edelweiss II and were researching her history 40

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above: Jo, winner of the Second Rule 6-M class in 1920, and pictured in the shed, with restoration work taking place

and were about to begin a restoration. Tim didn’t hear from them again but it is thought that around 2012 she may have been owned by Werner Huybrechts from Antwerp. Tim also thinks that the Fife boat Marmi “could still be in existence in Italy. She was up to a few years ago,” he said.

Two other boats which are definitely still in existence are the First Rule 8-M Ierne and the Second Rule 10-M Mosk II, both of which won gold for Norway in 1920 although, as the only boats in their classes, they only had to sail over in two races to do so. Ierne – designed and built by Fife – is owned by Huw Morris Jones who found her “rotting in a fruit shed in Portugal in 2006”. After an extensive restoration she won Classic Boat’s Restoration of the Year award in 2009 and since then she has been based in Hull, but is now for sale.

Mosk II was another Anker design which was built at his own Anker & Jensen yard. (In fact Anker himself was a three-time Olympian: not in 1920, but he did win gold in 1912 and 1928.) After the 1920 Games, Mosk II was owned by the King of Denmark for a while, and then by the prominent Swedish Wallenberg family. Since 1997 she has been owned by Christian Gude and his family who keep her in Blommenholm in Norway. They have restored her to “a high standard where originality is the most important thing” and she has twice won the prize for the best restored sailing boat at the Risør Wooden Boat Festival. “We take part in all the big regattas here in Norway every year,” Christian told me.

“At the moment we are a trifle war-worn, perhaps, but at any rate the Olympic ideal has met with scant enthusiasm,” wrote a Yachting Monthly correspondent in a piece titled ‘The value of International Sport’ soon after the 1920 Games. “Human nature is a funny thing, but it must be considered in such matters, and one critic sagely reminds us that the competition between two sportsmen of one nationality is a very different thing to that between representatives of different nations... certainly one cannot trace much good effect from international competition in the past… the feeling is that national prestige is inclined to outweigh purely personal interpretation of right and wrong.”

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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BRISTOL 32

It seems like more than just a decade ago that Win Cnoops of Star Yachts, based in the historic Underfalls Boatyard in Bristol, hit upon his winning formula for the handsome, retro, wheelhouse cabin motor yacht. Strip-plank build, stepped sheer and upright stem are a given, but layout and spec are bespoke: river or sea, single or twin engines… he’s even built an open 16ft (4.9m) launch to the same formula, as a tender to the 32ft (9.8m) matching mothership. Twin Yanmar 110hp diesels, married to one of Andrew Wolstenholme’s tried-and-tested semi-displacement hulls, gives comfortable 20-knot-plus.

The 32 pictured here won our 2018 award for best newly-built powered vessel.

See staryachts.co.uk

POWER GRAB The spirit of tradition is making increasing inroads into the power boat market. Here are just a few WORDS STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES

N

o one could have failed to notice the rise and rise of the so-called ‘spirit of tradition’ sailing yachts. These are simply new yachts, in GRP, modern-timber construction or metal, with the appeal of an older design. From the Cornish Shrimper to Spirit’s new 111 superyacht, the formula has been established for half a century.

The movement, under different names and guises, has been replicated around the world. Even Apple products bear clear similarities to Braun electrical goods of the 50s and 60s, and numerous road vehicles from the FIAT 500 to the London bus have followed suit. Motorboats have been no exception to the rule, with seemingly every other boat at a boat show sporting teak swept decks, classic transoms or a spot of tumblehome, albeit often compromised by the patio doors at the aft end of the house. Have we fallen out of love with the future? Is a planing boat styled with a razorblade now just a figment of the 1980s, like Miami Vice?

The true picture is rather more complex. At the bleeding edge, motor yachts are so radical they need to be seen to be believed. In today’s motorboat press, fully electric foiling boats rub shoulders with cruising yachts with all-glass transoms. If you thought carbon fibre was

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modern, forget it. There are printed boats out there. It’s this riot which, though often interesting and innovative, usually lacks aesthetic sensibility. This has helped to fuel the counter culture for handsome, traditional craft that pay respect to their roots. Boats, in short, that a yachtsman switching to power, would not be ashamed to be seen in.

They are starting to fall into categories: the semidisplacement style of hull now rules supreme in seagoing, cabin motor yachts from 25-60ft or so. These are generally highly capable, fast, seaworthy vessels in GRP or modern wood build that will take you anywhere almost flat, with better visibility and economy than planing craft, and at least 20 knots. They provide the answer to most prayers, but you’d better be ready to dig deep if that’s what you want. Planing boats in this category will go even faster: up to 35 or 40 knots. The ride will be harder but more thrilling and you are even more able to outrun the weather – or face it, by coming off the plane.

Traditional river boats have been news for a long time. These days they are almost all electric. There are also plenty of smaller outboard-powered runabouts and smaller ‘harbour’ launches with an inboard diesel in a box. It’s a fast-growing market, and there is already a lot of choice for those who won’t stand white plastic.

PTS26

The PTS26 has an unusual design cue in the sense that it was drawn, by the huge Dutch design house Vripak, firmly in the manner of the Swedish master CG Pettersson. It’s surely one of the best looking spirit-of-tradition motorboats yet, and it’s proving very popular in Britain too, with a full order book and waiting list at British distributor Henley Sales and Charter. This is a GRP-hulled, single-diesel (or electric) semi-displacement boat of the sort you might call a ‘weekend launch’, with very good cockpit space for the size, an optional sprayhood and some perfectly usable accommodation for two, with a galley and heads. Build quality is second to none and pricing is keen, at about £100,000 or less for river spec launch, more for a seagoing version. The 190hp version we tested did about 20 knots. With nearly 100 built in 13 years, the builder, Statement Marine, is expanding the range with a 31 and a 22. See statementmarine.nl and hscboats.co.uk

HOOD 57LM

We’ve never seen anything quite like this before. You might call this an ‘express cruiser’ as the makers do, which is an apt description but the visual appeal is a masterstroke, combining a solid timber, highly varnished hull with the rugged, yet curvy, appeal of the flybridge sport fisher. The hull is built by a venerable name in American motorboats – Lyman Morse, who built hundreds of open runabouts and sailing yachts. The design is

by CW Hood and Stephens Waring. We’re not alone in doing a double-take at the appearance of this boat, which has created quite a stir in the boating press since its recent launch. Thankfully, the performance matches the promise of its looks: twin Volvo 1,350hp pod-drive diesels on a planing hull give a cruising speed of 32 knots with the top whack at just under 40. Inside, she offers good accommodation for four. There is now a 35-footer in build to the same formula. See cwhoodyachts.com

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POWER BOATS

DALE 37

Welsh company Dale, which is celebrating half a century in the marine trade this year, has carved out a big reputation for its solid, seaworthy, fast, ocean-going twin-diesel semi-displacement yachts. Motorboat magazine reviews rave and gasp in turns, but there’s no mystery when you consider the design of their boats, which is by Arthur Mursell, designer of much of the famous Nelson range, used for decades by everyone who needs a motor launch capable of nearly anything. Users include the Royal Navy, police and pilotage service, but the Nelson is also loved by discerning yachtsmen. The Dale 37, based on that pedigree hull, but with classic styling, is their latest offering, now in build.

The appearance Is more ‘modern retro’ than the timeless, unburstable Nelson 38 pictured here.

See dalenelson.co.uk

DUCHY 35

Cockwells is one of the most diverse boatbuilders in Britain today, having built everything from a traditional wooden pilot cutter, to many wooden boat restorations, through to what they specialise in today – superyacht tenders and modern-retro powerboats, of which the Duchy range is particularly well-known. We were lucky enough to try out a well-specced 35 some years ago. It’s a bespoke offering, but typically comes as a twincabin, twin diesel boat. The appeal is in the mixture of space-age tech, traditional appeal in the design and comfort on board: the level of woodwork detailing in the interior makes the boat feel special. Add 25 knots+ of semi displacement speed, which feels like planing level, and gobs of seaworthiness and you have a stylish, tough, seagoing companion that even a sailor would be proud to own. The rest of the range includes the 27 and the 21, an open picnic launch based on an old harbour boat. Moving up the size range, there is a 45 and a 60.

All boats are in GRP. See cockwells.co.uk/duchy-launches.

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

WHEELER 38

Most spirit-of-tradition motor yachts stem from a specific boat by a specific builder. In that sense, the new Wheeler 38 launched last year by Brooklin Boatyard in Maine is no different. She’s a new interpretation by Bill Prince Yacht Design of a model popular in the 1930s – a Playmate 38. What makes this unusual is that it’s modelled after the Playmate 38 owned by one of the most famous novelists of the 20th century – deep-sea angling aficionado Ernest Hemingway. The original boat was built by Wheeler Shipyard, who built around 3,500 boats before closing in the 1950s. This one was commissioned by descendant Wes Wheeler, who is as excited about rebuilding the brand as he is about the boat itself, a cold-moulded fast cruiser powered by twin Yanmar 370hp diesels to give a cruising speed of 20 knots and a top end over 30. She sleeps four. See wheeleryachts.com.

MAYFLY 21

Like the PTS26, the Mayfly seris of inland waterway launches has been a rare success. For years, mass-market Dutch-style ‘sloeps’ have dominated the English inland waterways day boat market, and it’s good to see British builders like Creative Marine and Landamores offering local alternatives. Taking a Mayfly 21 out for the day from Landamores Boatyard in Norfolk was an eye-opener, even in the pouring rain! The 4kW Torqeedo pod motor, controlled by joystick, is breathtaking in its linear power delivery and absurd torque. You get 60 miles at 5mph, and she’ll seat 10! Combine that with the visual appeal, and you can see how boats like this have made the internal combustion engine history on inland waters.

See landamores.co.uk

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POWER BOATS

MONOMOY 26 Utility-style runabouts are popular once more, and this, designed by Matt Smith and built by First Light Boat Works in Massachusetts, is of the nicest. She ticks many boxes: real timber clinker topsides (the bottom is in wood/glass composite), centre console steering, seating for 8-12, a swim platform, low draught, and ‘beachability’ thanks to a kick-up inboard-outboard motor installation. She’s husky enough to go to sea, with drop-dead looks – and, with a 140hp outboard, will take you all the way to 30 knots if you are in the mood. Sadly, the nearest we got to taking one for a spin was seeing one in build at the yard, in the Massachusetts countryside! See firstlightboatworks.com

SEOL 18

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OUTBOARD DINGHY

This offering is the first motorboat from French spirit-of-

“A practical wee dinghy with plenty of load-carrying

tradition sailing yacht builder Franck Roy, who have built more

capability,” is builder Alasdair Grant’s description of this

than 200 such boats since their inception in 1998. We are firmly

12-footer (3.7m) designed by Paul Gartside. It should make a

in ‘utility runabout’ style language here, albeit in GRP rather

suitable boat for a day of fishing with the family, or as a tender.

than stained and varnished mahogany, as builders like Chris-

She’s built of larch planks copper riveted onto an oak

Craft used to create these kinds of boats. The yard has already

backbone, with oak gunnels and knees and a larch thwart. Two

built a couple, with 80hp outoboards, which should prove

long oak bilge keels help with launching on and off a beach.

plenty for a small (18ft/5.5m) planing boat to fulfil its stated

She’ll take anything from 2.5hp to 10hp on the transom, with

objectives of fun days out on the water and towing a skier,

8hp giving 8 knots, although 10hp might be the ideal choice for

where the aft-facing rear seats will come into their own. Just

getting over the hump and onto the plane. The sight of a

about everything apart from the hull is solid wood, and it’s a

clinker motor dinghy planing under a light motor is timeless.

reasonable tow at 550kg. See cnfr.fr

See isleeweboats.co.uk for more.

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Hardware for traditional ships and classic yachts Webshop: www.toplicht.de Free catalogue: „The little Brownie“

toplicht Hamburg ✯ Germany

Phone: +49 (0)40 88 90 100 Fax: +49 (0)40 88 90 1011 toplicht@toplicht.de

M

ay f ly

21

a classic launch for inland and coastal waters

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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Author swims beneath Celeste, Tuamotu, 2018

SAILING TO DIVE

E

ver since I first sailed to the Tuamotu archipelago 15 years ago, I’ve wanted to dive the famous South Pass of Fakarava atoll.

At that time, I was still fairly new to ocean sailing, and certainly to scuba diving. My partner Seth and I had sailed Heretic, our primitive 38ft (11.6m) sloop copy of the S&S yawl Finisterre, about 10,000 sea miles from Maine, going through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to French Polynesia. Before the voyage we had both been small-boat sailors and racers and those 10,000 miles were our first offshore. As for scuba diving, we were complete novices: we had breathed underwater for the first time in the British West Indies en route to Panama. In the Galapagos, we had earned our advanced dive certification; in the Marquesas, we had made our first dives on our own from Heretic without a guide. We were keen on diving, but little did we know that when we reached the Tuamotu atolls, we would be hooked.

Tuamotu means “many motu” in the local language, a motu being a coral islet. It’s a perfect name for this great arc of coral atolls, stretching across more than 1,000 miles of the South Pacific. An atoll is essentially a coral reef enclosing a lagoon, often with motu atop the reef.

The Tuamotu – part of French Polynesia – lie right in the path of any sailor en route from Panama to Tahiti. They were long known to sailors as the ‘Dangerous Archipelago’ because of the hazards posed by the reefs before GPS and accurate charts. Today much of that risk is gone: sailing there is no longer the sort of adventure where a misstep can bring grave mishap. While that’s pleasant of course, sometimes it’s good to have a challenge. Enter diving.

IT’S ALL ABOUT SHARKS

SAILING TO DIVE

Sailing French Polynesia’s ‘Dangerous Archipelago’ might be easy with GPS, but under the surface it’s all fast currents... and sharks WORDS ELLEN MASSEY LEONARD PHOTOGRAPHS SETH LEONARD

Diving in the Tuamotu is all about sharks and fast currents. If you wish, it can also be about depth and decompression. Most diving takes place in the passes leading into the atolls, and on an outgoing tide, these passes are dangerous for sailors and divers alike. The ebb pours out of some of the lagoons at speeds over eight knots, raising steep standing waves as it sets against the wind. Beneath the waves, the outflow creates a ferocious down-current, potentially lethal to a diver caught in it. All drift dives are consequently done on flood tides, going into the lagoon. Sailors navigate these passes at slack water or the start of a flood, when the surface is calm.

The largest atoll of the archipelago, Rangiroa, also has one of the strongest currents. When Seth and I sailed there 15 years ago, we managed to time our arrival for slack tide. Given that we were arriving at the end of a six-day passage (from the Marquesas, the archipelago about 600 miles to the northeast), our favourable timing was mostly luck, but we took it and wafted through the placid pass under only our genoa. We rounded the corner into the anchorage, tacked up into shallower water, luffed into the wind and dropped the hook. We were true sailing purists – also impoverished 20-year-olds – and never used the engine if we could help it. A few hours later, walking ashore, we saw what Tiputa Pass becomes on the ebb, dolphins leaping from the steep white water: it was quite a sight, not something we would ever want to be caught in.

The following day, on the flood tide, we slipped underwater to witness Rangiroa’s phenomenal diving.

We began by backrolling into the open ocean, right into CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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SAILING TO DIVE a school of barracuda, then descending to a school of grey reef sharks. Still a novice diver at that time, I remember marvelling at the otherworldly sensation of floating weightless in a water column that felt as clear as air, surrounded by the predators whose home this is. Then we let the current take us into the pass and we flew along faster and faster. It was exhilarating, to the point where I ran out of air and had to breath from the dive guide’s extra regulator.

Towards the end, a huge manta ray was turning somersaults right in our path. Even now, with many dives under my weight-belt, this is still my most memorable, partly because it was my first really challenging dive. In the same way, my first crossing of the Pacific remains my most memorable passage.

When Rangiroa’s fringe of palms dipped below the horizon in Heretic’s wake about 10 days later, we vowed one day to return. Through very lucky circumstances, we did, after nearly 12 years. We had sold Heretic by then, and had bought another old classic: Celeste, a 40ft (12.2m) cold-moulded wooden sloop designed by Francis Kinney, editor of Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design.

In 2018 we again made the long passage across the Pacific to French Polynesia, this time from Mexico (CB October 2020). After a week or so in the Marquesas we set off for the southern end of the Tuamotu chain, to an atoll called Hao. The first time we’d sailed from the Marquesas to the Tuamotu, we’d enjoyed a pleasant and even-keeled – if slow – six-day amble downwind. This time, our angle on the trade wind was a close-reach and the breeze was strong. Instead of swaying before the wind wing ‘n’ wing, we punched into head seas for four and a half days under triple-reefed main, jib, and staysail.

Now in our 30s, we were too conscientious to rely on luck for weather forecasting or tide times. So, of course, we got worse weather and our tide tables were wrong. We had to wait outside the atoll, tacking back and forth for five hours before the current calmed enough to let us in.

Sailing inside a lagoon is a treat for an ocean sailor.

The water is flat calm but the wind blows strongly and consistently over the tops of the palms. It’s like a lake, but better because there’s almost nothing to block or shift the wind and because many of these lagoons are immense. You can fly along for hours without any

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pitching or rolling, your boat showing all the best of her performance. Once inside Hao’s lagoon, it was a very quick, pleasant skim across the water to the anchorage.

NUCLEAR ANCHORAGE

Above: Orange-fin anemone fish, Garuae Pass

Below: Seth sailing Celeste inside a lagoon

The anchorage was a crumbling wharf, convenient and very sheltered. Hao is a sleepy place without any tourist infrastructure; the atoll is the site of the former French military base from which the nuclear tests were launched from 1966-1996. Until fairly recently, no one was allowed to visit. Seth and I were curious to see it, partly for its history. Ashore, there is still evidence of the military presence, particularly in the enormous runway, out of proportion to the tiny volume of local air traffic now using it. Underwater, we were saddened to see the state of the lagoon: murky, much of the coral dead, and with significant sunken debris.

In a place like this there are no scuba operators.

Diving while leaving the boat untended is inadvisable, particularly given the bad anchor holding in coral, and the damage it causes, so Seth and I were thrilled to be invited to join the Hao Dive Club, a group of French teachers at the local school who had united to buy a boat and an air compressor. They were all very skilled and rather risk-loving and preferred to make quite deep dives on the coral walls outside the lagoon entrance. This is where most of the big critters were: reef sharks cruising above seemingly infinite schools of red bigeyes; manta rays turning lazy circles just below us at 140ft (43m); schools of rainbow runners and sometimes a big tuna; once or twice a 5m (16ft) tiger shark.

After two months between Hao and an even more remote neighbouring atoll, it was time to sail back to the Marquesas where we planned to leave Celeste for the cyclone season after our visas ran out. We rode east for two days on the back of a low pressure system, sailing upwind until we dropped anchor in the moonlight, alone among the spires of the famous of Baie des Vierges on Fatu Hiva.

The following year we spent entirely in the Marquesas, but last year we returned once again to the Tuamotu.

This time our main destination was the place we had long dreamed of diving: Fakarava Atoll.

Fakarava lies in the middle of the Tuamotu arc and is one of the largest of the group: its coral motu encompass a lagoon with a surface area of over 1,000km2. The narrow coral-lined alleyway of Tumakohua Pass in the south has made the atoll renowned among divers and has led to Fakarava’s status as a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The coral reefs there are brilliantly alive, hosting thousands of reef fish, from little dartfish hiding in the coral to behemoth Napoleon wrasse which can tip the scales at 400 pounds. The reefs are also home to hundreds of sharks, including one of the biggest aggregations of gray reef sharks in the world.

Getting there was a gallop to windward in 12ft (3.7m) of swell. With only jib and staysail up, we had the lee rail buried nearly the entire time and were shipping so much water over the bow that we couldn’t open the centre hatch for air. As we plotted our daily noon position, however, we found we were consistently making our fastest runs ever: more than 180 miles made good one day – in a boat with just 28ft (8.5m) waterline. We covered the 550 nautical miles and raised the atoll in just three days.

Main picture: Ball of paddletail and one-spot snapper, Tumahokua (South) Pass, Fakarava Above left: Picnic at Motu Above right: Reef shark in the shallows, Rangiroa

SAILING TO DIVE

Our first dive, on Garuae Pass, turned out to be one of the most adrenaline-pumping I’ve ever done. We went back again and again. We would backroll into the open ocean just outside the pass, during the height of the flood and descend rapidly to the coral shelf at 120ft (37m) to keep from being swept into the lagoon. Down at depths close to decompression limits, we hooked onto outcrops of dead coral and stare out at the parade of reef sharks.

The current flowing over us was occasionally so strong that it threatened to tear my regulator out of my mouth.

After about 10 minutes of shark lookout – nearly enough time to require decompression – the guide would signal to let go and we would lift off into the 4-5 knot current.

I’d made decompression dives before, and wreck dives well inside submerged ships, but this was a thrilling dive.

Tumakohua – South Pass – was beckoning. Seth and I sailed Celeste the full length of Fakarava’s lagoon, nearly 40 miles along the coral motu lining the windward side.

The protected waters once again made for superb sailing and Celeste heeled cleanly and flew upwind through the flat water. We attached the tiller extension and stood on the windward deck, as though steering a dinghy.

I have never seen such pristine coral as where we began the dive at the drop-off at 90ft (27m). Plate after plate of it staircased into the abyss. The first time we went, we were visited by five of the most enormous eagle rays I’ve ever seen, but every time the sharks stole the show.

Hundreds swam slowly past in phalanxes. In the mix were a couple of species one doesn’t often see: blacktips, open water sharks, faster and more energetic than the reef sharks.

Sailors like to sail, so after as many more dives as we could do, we set off for the less-visited atoll of Toau, making it in two day sails. We anchored in several spots on Toau over the next week or so, doing a few dives from our dinghy, snorkelling, walking the beaches, and getting to know the few local residents. Then we returned to Rangiroa, more touristy than on our first visit over a decade ago, but otherwise unchanged.

The overnight sail to this largest atoll, the site of so many memories from our round-the-world voyage, was the sort to make any ocean sailor forget all the gales and upwind slogs. I had one of those night watches you don’t want to end, ghosting downwind with 15 knots on the quarter, a clear sky glittering with stars overhead, and phosphorescence shining in the wake. One one dive there, 52

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above left: Ebb tide at Hao Atoll Above right: Celeste tied to Hao’s abandoned wharf, author on the bicycle

we were approached by an inquisitive great hammerhead.

To be investigated by this iconic, critically endangered shark, while floating 50ft down, was unforgettable.

We did a couple of sunset dives. Before leaving French Polynesia, we sailed twice more over the rippled lagoon.

Once again we had the beautiful palm-fringed motu to ourselves and we passed a few lazy days strolling the coral beaches and snorkelling. We sailed back up to the pass on the day of our departure for Hawaii and slid through it at just the start of the ebb. As we went, we were visited by Rangiroa’s favourite residents, its pod of bottlenose dolphins, perhaps the same dolphins we had seen leaping clear of the standing waves all those years before. Once again, we vowed to return.

How to get there The challenges in sailing to the South Seas used to be about seamanship and navigation; unfortunately they now also include bureaucracy. Make sure before you set off to check that the countries you wish to visit are even open to non-residents and, if so, what the entry requirements are. Nevertheless, a well-found yacht and sufficient skills to cross an ocean remain the most important considerations. The stakes are higher if you get that wrong than if you mess up the paperwork. And if you mess up the paperwork, you may find yourself on a much longer ocean voyage than planned.

SAILING CONDITIONS French Polynesia is tropical: its weather is governed by the southeast trades in winter (April-September) and by cyclone season from November to March.

Cyclones are rare but most insurers won’t cover a boat over cyclone season.

TIDES The best tide tables for the Tuamotu are on the French site maree.shom.fr.

DIVING CONDITIONS IN THE TUAMOTUS Visibility usually exceeds 100ft (30.1m) outside the Tuamotu passes but can drop to 30-40ft inside the lagoon. Water temperature ranges from 25-28°C. Summer April through September sees stronger winds and choppier seas.

October to March – cyclone season – will be calmer but hotter and more humid. Dives usually involve strong current. Divers should consider evacuation insurance; the nearest recompression chamber is in Tahiti, a flight distance of one to two hours from the islands with airports.

PHOTO: BENJAMIN MENDLOWITZ

ARTISAN BOATWORKS CUSTOM YACHT BUILDERS

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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AFFORDABLE CLASSIC International Folkboat OD

By Peter Poland

GRAHAM PINKNEY, C/O ST MAWES SC

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Two on the market

1976, £8,500. Kept on the

1976, £11,000. New mast

hard, competitive when

and sails 2018, 12hp Dolphin

raced. Road trailer. Lying N

engine, feathering prop.

Yorkshire

Trailer (un-braked).

apolloduck.co.uk

ifboat.uk

IF-Boat fleet racing at St Mawes SC

GRAHAM PINKNEY

T

he Nordic Folkboat – drawn by Tord Sunden in 1942 and built in wood before GRP versions were allowed from the mid-70s – was one of the most influential designs of all time.

However even its greatest fans concede that this delightful and potent little package loses out when it comes to comfortable accommodation. Modified versions such as Jester and Eira completed the first OSTAR and many others have crossed oceans; but the Folkboat is hardly a spacious cruiser.

In 1966, Sunden came up with a solution, designing one of the most successful Folkboat derivations of all time; a beautiful GRP yacht that will grace any classic yacht gathering. The International Folkboat One Design (IF-Boat for short) was built by Marieholm in Sweden and – compared to its Nordic ancestor – it’s slightly longer overall and on the waterline. It also weighs more, has a higher ballast ratio (58 per cent) and higher Sail Area/Displacement ratio (15.18) that enhances light-airs performance. Add a self-draining cockpit and an outboard well or small inboard engine and you have a much more versatile yacht. Proving the IF-Boat’s appeal, well over 3,000 were produced.

The Swedish IF-Boat Association (ifboat.com) says that of the Swedish-manufactured boats, about 2,000 were sold in Sweden. The rest were exported, mainly to Germany, Denmark, Norway, USA, Switzerland and Australia (where it was built under licence).

Over the years, several IF-Boats have made it to the UK and now number around 30. The major UK fleet is at the St Mawes Sailing Club (stmawessailing.co.uk and ifboat.uk). However, thanks to new sailor-unfriendly Brexit rules, importing an old IF-Boat into the UK will now cost more and be a trickier process, as will cruising in EU waters, once you set foot ashore.

Sunden wisely retained the time-tested seakindly Folkboat lines but designed the GRP tooling to achieve a more graceful roof profile and considerably more interior space. The larger sail area also gives good light airs performance. Her sailing qualities are superb. Oliver Barstow of St Mawes SC told me “as one would expect from a Scandinavian-designed and built boat she is very capable in heavy weather and has an exceptionally good performance in light airs. With her long keel, fine lines and 7/8 rig she is well balanced and can sail hands off!

The IF-Boat sails well unreefed; even in heavy airs. I well remember one Falmouth Week in extremely rough conditions when I first owned an IF-Boat. We were led

around in the Champagne race by another IF-Boat that didn’t bother to reef and carried its full genoa all the way round the course.”

Oliver added that “St Mawes SC is home to a fleet of over 20 IF-Boats, 10 or so taking part in regular club racing. As well as round the buoys, there is an active Cornwall Offshore Group in which INTERNATIONAL IF-Boats compete successfully. St Mawes SC organises FOLKBOAT the Eddystone race.”

Down below, the IF-Boat offers much more usable DESIGNER space than its Nordic Folkboat ancestor. A forepeak Tord Sunden with two 6ft+ (1.8m+) berths, longer settee berths in LOA the saloon, a simple heads, a rudimentary galley and 25ft 10in improved stowage space combine to make a feasible family cruiser, even if headroom is a modest 4ft 8in (7.9m) (1.4m). And of course her performance, seaworthiness LWL and easy handling make the IF-Boat as accomplished 19ft 10in (6m) as a racer as she is when thrashing through heavy weather on a long cruise. Barstow said “Most local BEAM boats are crewed by two or three and – while a little 7ft 5in cramped – we have overnighted with four aboard.

(2.1m) However the IF-Boat provides very safe and comfortable cruising for two people. Helford, DRAUGHT Plymouth and Fowey are favourite destinations and 4ft (1.2m) further west to Penzance and the Scillies.”

WEIGHT Another owner summed up her appeal well, saying 4,740lb “I was invited to crew on one and allowed to helm; and from that moment I was smitten. She sails easily 2,150kg in very light winds and doesn’t really need to reef until Force 6. The helm is beautifully balanced throughout…

I have yet to meet a sailor who didn’t appreciate sailing one. However all boats are a compromise. The IF-Boat’s low freeboard and long keel mean she makes virtually no leeway even in strong winds. The trade off is that she is a wet boat in a swell and does not have standing headroom below decks. However I am 6ft 2in (1.9m) tall and am quite comfortable in her, with a choice of three bunks that I fit into.”

Certainly, if I were looking for a beautiful and seaworthy GRP ‘classic’ for club racing and shorthanded Channel cruising, the IF-Boat would be high on my list.

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SPARS

MASTS, BOOMS AND THE REST Amazing design evolution means timber spars can now be lighter than aluminium. It’s time for a catch up on the spars available today WORDS NIGEL SHARP

M

ost spars for classic boats are, of course, made of timber of which there are really only two acceptable species: Sitka spruce and Douglas fir. Both grow on the North American Pacific coast, Sitka spruce between northern California and central Alaska, and Douglas fir (also known as Oregon pine and Columbian pine) between central California and central British Columbia. Of the two, spruce is lighter (approximately 13.5kg per cubic foot compared to fir’s 16.5kg), more flexible and has a better strength/weight ratio (in fact, better than any other timber in the world); while fir is more durable and harder wearing. In cost terms, spar builders need to pay more for either than users in other applications, as it is essential that only old-growth, quarter-sawn timber is used so the tight grain maximises durability and strength – but when making like-for-like comparisons in terms of quality and size, fir has become slightly more expensive in recent years.

These relative properties usually result in a natural selection of one or other for specific applications. On bermudan-rigged racing boats, spruce is more likely to be used for its strength, flexibility and weight; on gaff-rigged boats, where weight may be less of an issue, fir is preferable for masts for its resilience to the abuse inflicted by gaff jaws and mast hoops; and while gaffrigged boats may also use fir for booms and bowsprits where weight low down is less of an issue, spruce would be preferred for gaffs and topmasts. On cruising boats, where durability might take precedence over performance, fir may be the first choice.

That is to put it in very simple black-and-white terms, but things are not always that straightforward. For one thing, the available quality of each species will vary. For instance, in 2015 Collars built a new fractionally-rigged mast for Cetewayo, the keenly-raced 1957 Laurent Giles boat. “But at the time the available spruce in the UK really wasn’t good quality,” said Collars’ Jeremy Freeland, “so we built it in fir. But we gave it a bigger

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internal hollowing so the weight was about the same as spruce would have been.” Wesley Massam of Noble Masts also thinks that spruce spars need thicker walls “which almost cancels out the weight saving” and he generally uses much more fir “because it tends to be much better quality and I go for quality of wood over species.”

SPAR GLUES For many years, the most popular adhesive used in spar building has been Resorcinol, a two-part material comprising a thick liquid and a powder. Its main disadvantage is its dark brown colour which many people consider unsightly, more so in a relatively light-coloured spruce mast and particularly in scarf joints (although others might think it has a satisfactory traditional look). Epoxy might seem to be an obvious alternative but most spar builders think it has several disadvantages, mainly that it is too brittle to match the flexibility of timber spars (especially in a fractional bermudan rig), and that it is likely to soften in hot climates. Although it seems that in recent years modern epoxies have improved in these respects, most spar makers are now using a clear two-part melamine adhesive. Collars have been using it for about five years on most hollow spars, which have a smaller gluing area, but on solid dinghy spars they use aerolite, each component of which is applied to opposing surfaces so there is no wastage. Two big advantages that epoxy does have, however, is that it needs less clamping pressure, and it has good gap-filling properties which lends itself to local use in spars – for instance where a spreader root fitting needs to be fitted in an oversize clearance hole.

The degree of sophistication in the construction of a spar can be hugely variable. At its most basic, a spar is merely machined from one tree, as in the masts for the nine pilot cutters built by Luke Powell, for instance.

Other than that, spars are constructed from a varying number of staves, the name given to each longitudinal

Clockwise from top left: Brasker Masten Metre-Class boom mainsheet set up with custom fittings; Brasker Masten schooner topmast; Solid bowsprit of pilot cutter Pellew; Bird’s mouth mast construction by Noble; Mast and boom for Cynara built by Noble; Schooner mast hoops with hardwood protection by Brasker Masten

SPARS

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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NIGEL SHARP

NIGEL SHARP

SPARS

component, with the construction process always starting with the longitudinal scarfing of staves to form the overall length of the spar, and with the scarves staggered so they are not all in the same place.

Solid masts for sailing dinghies and small keelboats are usually made up of just two staves glued together, one to port, the other to starboard; a typical hollow oval-section mast for an 8-Metre might be made up of eight staves – the four corners, the front, the back and the two sides; a hollow round mast for a big schooner could have as many as thirty-six staves – eighteen outer and eighteen inner; while a solid boom for the same schooner could have thirty-two staves – twenty-two outer and ten inner. In the case of tapered masts, individual staves are usually tapered before they are glued to each other. The importance of this can perhaps best be understood when considering a motor yacht mast recently made Collars, which tapered from 14in (35.6cm) diameter at the bottom to 3in (7.6cm) at the top.

All of the hollow spars made by Noble Masts use a system called bird’s mouth construction for which the company had a patent until the late 1990s. By this method, a right-angled corner of each stave is notched into a corresponding right-angled recess in the neighbouring stave, thus increasing the gluing area. Just as with more common box construction, variations such as tapering, different wall thicknesses in different parts of the section, and sectional shapes other than a simple round are all easily achievable.

TRADITIONAL BUILD Traditionally, a wooden mast would usually be made up by gluing together a number of square-section staves, then shaping the outside. The inside, if you could see it, would still look like a series of boxes and would contain a fair amount of unnecessary material and, therefore, weight.

But one of the ways in which timber spar-building has advanced in recent years is that the inside surfaces of the staves are now generally shaped before assembly. Further significant advances have been made possible by a collaboration between John Lammerts van Bueren, whose company Touchwood BV has sawmills in Holland and Canada, and German naval architect Juliane Hempel.

While the average properties (such as density and modulus of elasticity) of spar-building timbers are well known, the fact is they can vary considerably from one 58

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above left: Collars built a new fractionally rigged mast for Cetewayo, the keenly-raced 1957 Laurent Giles boat Above right: Solid tree timber for these Luke Powell built Pilot cutters

piece to another – “plus or minus 25 per cent” John said – not surprisingly as timber is a natural product. About 20 years ago, John began working with the Institute of Scientific Research in Delft to find ways of accurately measuring the properties of individual pieces of timber.

Today, the spruce that John mostly supplies to spar builders is already machined into individual staves, for each of which he is able to supply the data regarding its properties. For many years, Juliane has specialised in the design of timber spars and has now produced 82 mast designs. Once she has John’s data, she is able to instruct the spar builder whereabouts in the spar each piece should be fitted and with what grain orientation. In simple terms this will allow her to ensure that the densest timber is used low down (where its compressive strength will be most useful and its weight will matter least), that the most flexible pieces are used high up, and that the two sides of the mast are balanced. Wall thicknesses can also be determined in accordance with actual properties rather than average properties. Julianne has also spent a lot of time developing mast sections, for instance increasing the size of the ‘shoulders’ to improve the compressive strength at the back of a mast.

LIGHTER THAN ALUMINIUM An example of how far weight reduction has advanced can be found in the 12-Metre class. About 20 years ago – in the days when the right thing to do was err on the conservative side regarding wall thickness, and when masts were rarely shaped on the inside – a new mast was made for Thea by Harry Spencer, a pioneer of modern timber mast building. This weighed over 700kg. German boatbuilders Robbe & Berking are in the process of making a new mast for the 12-Metre Nini Anker with timber supplied by John to a design by Julianne. “Under 12-M class rules the minimum mast weight is 454kg,” Robbe & Berking’s Jakob Franze told me. “But we are very much hoping that this new mast will be close to the minimum and lighter than the lightest aluminium mast ever made which was 480kg.”

Construction techniques are also advancing at Knierim Yachtbau, a company mostly associated with building carbon fibre offshore racing yachts. They are in the process of building a new spruce mast for a 60ft (18m) S&S yawl, for which the machining of every stave is being done by a five-axis CNC cutter. “This is much

SPARS

Main picture: Schooner boom

by Brasker Masten; Below right: Brasker Masten workshop; Below left: Timber for Luke Powell-built spars for his pilot cutters

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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SPARS

more accurate than a person doing it, especially with the hollowing of the inside faces,” said Gunnar Knierim.

X ONE-DESIGN MASTS Back in the UK, Whittle Marine have been specialising in X boat masts in recent years, having now made 19. They too have been exploiting the properties of different pieces of timber and (legally) the class rules, in order to control the stiffness of individual masts according to clients’ needs.

These masts are just short enough to ensure that – by paying a premium for longer timber – there are no scarves above the gooseneck, thus avoiding any lack of symmetry.

Tristan Stone’s diverse interest in wooden spars comes from his two companies: Stones Marine Timber which sells spruce and Douglas fir to a number of spar builders, and Stones Boatyard which looks after many Salcombe Yawls. Things come full circle sometimes, as demonstrated by the fact that one of his regular clients is Noble Masts who are currently building six Salcombe Yawl masts for him. The rig is now seen as the area of most potential development in the Salcombe Yawl fleet and with that in mind Tristan has been working with naval architect Ian Howlett to research bend characteristics. Such research and accurate record keeping, as well as that undertaken

by Whittle Marine, Julian Hempel and others, also allows valuable further advances in matching the cut of a mainsail with the bend of a particular mast.

CARBON AND FAUX WOOD FINISHES Juliane’s approach to timber mast design has similarities to the way carbon masts are engineered. In fact classic boat owners watching weight might consider carbon fibre disguised as wood, and there are essentially three ways of doing this. In the last 25 years, carbon mast builder GMT Composites of Newport RI has built about 12 rigs with a ‘faux bois’ (painted wood) finish, the biggest of them for the 100ft (31m) Alden schooner Summer Wind.

They employ a specialist artist to apply the paint, which can mimic any wood species. “These rigs tend to provoke two types of reaction,” said GMT’s Nate Williams. “One says ‘it’s an abomination, it should be real wood’ and the other says ‘why wouldn’t you?’.”

Offshore Spars in Michigan is building new faux bois carbon masts for the Bruce King-designed ketch Whitehawk. The boat previously had stability issues that had to be addressed by substantially reducing the height 60

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Above left: XODs Above right: Salcombe yawls Below: X-OD spars from Whittle Marine

of the timber masts. It is hoped that the new carbon spars will allow the boat to restore her original sail plan.

Grapefruit Graphics of Fareham have used vinyl wrapping – a polymeric film which can be stretched in three dimensions then heated – in plain colours on various boat hulls, and the same system to create a wood grain effect on a quarter-tonner mast and on Cetewayo’s spinnaker poles. Dutch company Brasker Masten specialises in building timber spars, but also occasionally collaborates with a carbon spar company to produce spars sheathed in timber veneer, normally 1mm thick. The main problem with this system is that it is not possible to replicate scarf joints, so the joints in the veneer look like butt joints which, of course, would be impossible in a solid timber spar. To compensate for stability problems, a 100ft (30.5m) steel schooner being restored in Singapore is having new painted carbon masts by Selden and a Douglas fir bowsprit and spruce booms, topmasts and gaffs from Collars.

SPAR FITTINGS On bigger timber spars, fittings have to be custom made. Custom fittings are usually made of stainless steel (sometimes ‘tumbled’ or bead-blasted to replicate a galvanised finish) or bronze, both of which can be fabricated or cast. The fittings for Nini Anker’s new mast will be titanium, barely more than half the density of stainless steel. For the fittings on Whitehawk’s spars, Offshore Spars will use a variety of techniques to create a bronze look: the stainless steel fittings will be PVD coated, the aluminium will be treated with a special bronze anodising, and localised parts of the carbon structure will be painted with a special Awlgrip bronze paint.

Fittings should be dry-fitted before varnishing begins; in fact it is preferable that they are designed before the staves are glued up to ensure that all internal reinforcement is in place and – in the case of through bolts, for instance – that they will miss obstacles such as conduits. Most spar manufacturers subcontract the manufacture of fittings but Collars has recently started making them themselves for better control of the production process. And on the subject of local reinforcement, harder timbers – black locust being a popular one - are often used locally, both internally where there may be significant compressive load in way of a fitting, and sometimes externally for items such as winch pads to give fastenings a better grip.

“Blue Dolphin” has a rich history. This Camper & Nicholson from 1968 was first named Phantom. Under this name she has sailed and won numerous prestigious competitions. She competed in the Admiral’s cup in 1969 and won several races during Cowes Week. She is currently in Zeebrugge and has received several upgrades over the years. The interior has largely changed, a well-equipped kitchen was installed, the engine has become a Yanmar 58.8 KW, electric winches, the electrical system was completely changed, a GORI propellor, an unassembled water maker, recent sprayhood, winter tent, air conditioning, and much more.

Please contact us for more information.

Web: www.huysmanyacht.com Email: broker@huysmanyacht.com

With 30 years of experience specialising in traditional and electric boats we will do our best to find the ideal craft to suit your individual needs — for a day or for a lifetime.

With 30 years of experience specialising in traditional and Forwill more electric boats we doinformation our best to contact find the ideal craft to suit your individual needs — for a day or for a lifetime.

Henley SaleS

and

CHarter ltd

For more information contact

+44 (0) 1491 578870 | sales@hscboats.co.uk www.hscboats.co.uk Henley S aleS and CHarter ltd

CLASSIC YACHT BROKERAGE All types of Motor and Sailing Yachts required.

www.classicyachtbrokerage.co.uk

46ft. TRADITIONAL GAFF SCHOONER Designed and built by W Stoba, Fleetwood in 1904. Pitch-pine/Larch hull, Teak laid decks and superstructure. Characterful interior offering four berths, galley and heads compartment. Large deck house. Schooner rig.

Pair recent 48hp Beta diesels. Impressive and historic little ship in fortyfive year ownership. 2020 survey and BSC certificate. Spring 2021 fit-out. £85,000 Lying: Scotland

24ft. YACHTING WORLD FIVE-TONNER SLOOP Robert Clark design, built Kings of Burnham on Crouch 1947 for Group Captain Haylock, editor of Yachting World Magazine. Pitch-pine hull, Teak brightwork.

Traditional interior having three berths, galley and Jabsco heads. Bermudian sloop rig, new rigging 2020, Penrose sails. 13hp Beta diesel. Professionally maintained in long ownership. Full commission, sensibly priced. £5,750 Lying: Cornwall

39ft. EXPRESS MOTOR-YACHT Designed & built Souters/Lallows of Cowes 1968 for R H Stump, London.

Cold moulded Mahogany hull, Teak laid decks and brightwork. Spacious original interior with six berths in three cabins, two heads, galley, aft cockpit, flybridge helm. Pair 315hp Yanmar diesels (2015) design speed 24 knots.

Present ownership over forty years. Full commission, well maintained. £68,000 Lying: Southampton

18ft. CHRIS CRAFT RIVIERA Designed and built Mitchigan 1949. Shipped to Italy 1950s for Sophia Loren. Honduras Mahogany hull and decks, original fittings and red upholstered interior for five. Refurbished original 95hp Kermath six-cylinder engine. Original Chris-Craft storage cradle. Optional new road trailer. Fully restored 2001/2021. Excellent example of these stylish runabouts. .£29,500 Lying: Cornwall

38ft. CLASSIC MOTOR-YACHT Fred Shepherd design, built Moody’s of Southampton 1938 for Lord Mayor of London. Pitch-pine hull, Teak laid decks and superstructure.

Traditional interior, four berths in two cabins, galley and heads. Large aft cockpit, flybridge helm. Pair 53hp BMC diesels. Good 2020 survey.

Interesting history. Good stylish liveaboard/cruising. £30,000 Lying: Hamble

26ft. CLASSIC 1930s LAUNCH Carl Pettersson design, built Stockholm 1933. Carvel Larch/Mahogany hull sheathed, Teak laid decks, varnished sheerplanks and coamings. Large cockpit with seating, forward cabin with twin berth. Cooker and cool box.

Bellman Electric Engine. Professionally restored to exacting standard 2020.

Optional new road trailer. Great option for getting afloat this summer. £45,000 Lying: River Avon

INTERNATIONAL BROKERAGE, ESTABLISHED OVER 28 YEARS info@classicyachtbrokerage.co.uk +44 (0) 1905-356482 / 07949-095075 ASSOCIATE BROKERS: RBS MARINE, BIRDHAM POOL, CHICHESTER

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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TOM CUNLIFFE

THE MONSTER IN THE YARD When a malicious jobsworth tries to run your day, you have to work at night ILLUSTRATION CLAUDIA MYATT

A

fact of life shared by traditional yacht owners is that, one way and another, each of us ends up using boatyards. These may vary wildly from the tottering shed in the saltings to the smart modern structure in what looks more like an industrial estate than a maritime establishment, but most have an office of sorts, and they all have a foreman.

Proper yard offices are rough-and-ready places with wooden desks groaning under unsolved issues of paperwork, boxes of fittings overflowing onto the planked floor, pictures of ancient glories on unpainted wooden walls and dusty glass in the windows, yet the best of them always seem to buzz with a background whisper of longshore banter. The cream of these was in a yard up Chichester Harbour, long since closed following complaints about noise from newcomers in the smart houses abutting its workshop.

Just behind the door of this famously human establishment dangled a classic bird cage. Inside the bars lurked a large parrot, when it wasn’t on a reconnaissance flight to check up on the apprentices having a crafty smoke behind the winding shed. Nobody ever found the time to train this bird to say ‘Pretty Polly’, or even ‘Mind yer backs.’ It was left alone to pick up what chit-chat it could, so it did. The last time I visited, it had fine-tuned its act. It waited until a customer was picking up his hat to leave, then burst out a fortissimo squawk of, ‘Cheque’s in the post!

It goes without saying that the proprietor hadn’t seen fit to discourage such behaviour, and many an impoverished boat-owner had slunk out knowing he was rumbled.

Trouble can arise when senior management start venturing out onto the gravel or the mud to see what’s happening in real life.

Fifty years ago down at Swanwick Shore on the Hamble River when the big yard there was still Moody’s, three Moody brothers formed the top brass. These were the sons of AH Moody himself, who could be seen in his old age walking his dog in the fields. All wore ties as a badge of office, but any similarity in sartorial turnout ended there. Mr Gordon sported a natty blazer and enjoyed a yarn with his poorer customers – me included – in mud berths on what was known locally as Debtors’ Jetty. Mr Alan favoured a ‘corporation brown’ suit over a nondescript shirt. He was always approachable and we at the low-class end of the client base considered him a reasonable man. The third brother, Mr Eric, was

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an immaculately turned out, handsome gent with wavy grey hair.

The trousers of his blue pinstriped suit were well creased and although doubtless a very nice chap in private life, he terrified those of us living on his yard. We knew he was after our money.

We also knew he’d every right to it and that most of us were disgracefully slow payers. What he really needed was the parrot from Chichester, but all he had was a withering gaze which he turned on the likes of us. We avoided meeting his eye while quickly flipping our electricity meters right way up so that they’d go round until he disappeared back to his lair and we could disable them again. Everyone coughed up in the end, of course, and the brothers showed there were no hard feelings by strolling down to see us off when we finally sailed away.

Moody’s was one of the first yards I patronised and because I was strictly a DIY customer I’d had no dealings with the real power on the foreshore. This, of course, was the yard foreman.

Since those days of innocence I’ve rubbed up against a number of these; every one has been a notable character, but one stands out.

‘Watch-out Jock’ ran the yard in a well-known port I prefer not to divulge in case I ever want to go back there. This man hated the world in general. In particular he had it in for any boat owner who entered his sphere of influence. Not only was he surly and generally rude, he actually went out of his way to upset any plans his victims might have over matters such as launch dates.

So unpopular was he among the customers that an unofficial club was formed called the ‘Jock Appreciation Association’. The ‘JAA’ met in season in the local pub and members would swap yarns about the man’s excesses. There was no committee, no burgee, no joining fee and no sub, but some riotous evenings resulted.

Being a DIY man still, I avoided any direct contact with Jock, but, like all pantomime villains, he was determined to have the last laugh. When the mast was out of my 35-ton pilot cutter he saw his chance. I had a weekend charter and the stick was due in on the last of the tide the preceding Wednesday morning. We needed some tide up to approach the crane and we’d worked hard to get ready. So hard, in fact that, at crack of dawn on launch day, my wife Roz had stuck her hair to the hounds with Hammerite while lying under the cheeks to squeeze her brush into the recesses beneath the spreaders. She’d been there for a while and was contemplating ripping her curls out by the roots

when she was cut free by Ron, a pal of ours from the Antipodes.

Ron lived in a Saab 96 in the car park and happened to be passing on his way to plunder the skip.

The yard duly opened, but Jock had gone AWOL and the hand-cranked crane stood idle as the tide ebbed away. On Thursday he showed up all right, but when he produced some obscure excuse, the truth began to dawn that I was to be the next beneficiary of his malice. On Friday I searched him out with all guns blazing, to be told that he wasn’t even sure the crane was man enough for the job. He wasn’t impressed by the obvious fact that it had been strong enough to lift the mast out a month earlier.

Leaving Jock to stew, I stormed into the yard manager’s office to demand his dismissal, only to find a man cowering under the tyrant’s thrall. One look told me that he was no use.

Near despair, I staggered out clutching my forehead. Over on the trestles, the mast was ready to go.

Seven coats of the finest had it gleaming in the morning sun, the iron fittings were all blacked up, the standing rigging was looped over, tarred and dressed with boiled linseed oil. I’d even remembered to hook on most of the blocks and been sure to reeve the topsail halyard as a gantline so I could rig the rest once it was stepped. The tide

was moving on with the week, and high water was now around 0900. No other boat was cluttering up the works pontoon under the crane, but Jock sent the rigger who ran it to another job. It beggared belief, but help was at hand.

I was standing on the towpath controlling my blood pressure when Ron came strolling along. Being what polite society might describe as ‘resident in the yard’, he was well aware of the situation. Jock had been trying to have Ron evicted for months and Ron was keen to give him a poke in the eye. “Do you know how to rig a lifting strop on the mast?” he asked me. I did.

“OK,” he went on. “Here’s a plan. We’ll wait until everyone’s gone home, float the boat in and we’ll step the mast ourselves.”

Sometimes, only direct action will do.

Just on dark, I nudged the big cutter in to the works dock. Ron and Roz trundled the spar under the hook, the winch clacked as Ron did the winding, in went the spar with me down in the bilge guiding the tenon into the step. We three worked all night to rig it, and when Jock arrived in the morning to survey his triumph, we were just slipping our lines. His expression would have done well on Hammer Horrror Movies, the members of the JAA bought Ron drinks for the rest of the summer and as the first frosts of winter settled, Jock was gone.

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CYNARA PART 2

FIRST BIG-YACHT REBUILD IN JAPAN The biggest yacht restoration in years took place in the shadow of Mount Fuji, under a team of Japanese craftsmen and international boatbuilders

WORDS NIGEL SHARP PHOTOGRAPHYS BY PAUL HARVEY AND YOICHI YABE

T

he decision by Cynara’s owner, Riviera chairman Mr Noboru Watanabe, to restore her in Japan was a particularly brave one as no such work had ever been carried out there before.

In total, sixteen skilled European boatbuilders – in addition to the teams from Centreline Marine and Stirling & Son – worked on the project. Typically there were half a dozen of them at a time (and never more than nine) with various people coming in and out for three-month periods.

The first of these were Paul Harvey and Ben Hobbs – both British but long-term Palma-based – who started work in May 2017. They later discovered that their Japanese visas were the first ever to show “shipwright” as an occupation.

The restoration was carried out at Riviera Seabornia Marina – within sight of Mount Fuji and about two hours’ drive south of Tokyo – which is where Cynara had been based for some years. But there was initially absolutely no relevant infrastructure there. “The first six months was really difficult,” Paul told me. “We basically had to build a boatyard from scratch. We had to set up a shed, buy machines, build benches and so on. It took us a while to get going.”

They had great difficulty sourcing materials – “really basic stuff that we don’t normally give a second’s thought to,” said Paul – or at least initially. They imported some of these materials from Europe at first but then began to discover local sources. “It took a while to find industrial quantities of sandpaper, for instance, rather than a few sheets from the hardware shop.”

Single-component paint and metals such as naval brass

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

and bronze also presented challenges. They were banned from importing lead products, but they found that white lead was used in the pottery glazing business and red lead powder for grinding engine valve heads. Linseed oil was freely available and a local window company was able to supply sacks of washed crushed chalk so they made their own putty using the lead products. “It took a while to find it but once we did, there was plenty of it.”

At an early stage of the project, significant quantities of timber were ordered from UK companies – teak for the decking and oak from Stones Marine Timber and oak from Somerscales – because at that time it seemed it would not be available in Japan. Subsequently, however, Japanese suppliers materialised including one with “huge teak boards that had been sitting there for 30 years” and a local timber merchant just a couple of miles away who was able to supply Honduras mahogany. “I don’t know if they know how lucky they are that they have this amazing wood here,” said Paul. “We soon realised that everything we needed was here but we just had to learn where to find it and how to ask for it.”

Among other difficulties were those caused by natural events including “several minor earthquakes” which particularly caused problems while the hull was being de-hogged. “Everything had to be well bolted to the concrete floor and measurements had to be checked regularly,” said Paul. There were also several typhoons causing significant damage to the shed roof “at least a half dozen times.”

Working alongside the Europeans were a number of Japanese, none of whom had any previous experience of working on this sort of boat, or any sort of boat in most

Clockwise from top: Keji Kawashima with, behind him from left to right, Graham Bailey, Nico Calderoni and Mattis Vos; Restoration of the hull; The engine room bulkhead being removed; Paul and Ben inspecting teak supplied by a Japanese merchant; Pre-restoration in 2017

YOICHI YABE

PAUL HARVEY

PAUL HARVEY

PAUL HARVEY

YOICHI YABE

cases. Recruiting them was no easy task, however, not least because of Seabornia Marina’s rural location. One of the first to be taken on was Keiji Kawashima who had previously served an unfinished apprenticeship as a house-building carpenter (almost all houses in Japan are timber-framed). He was involved in the early stages of hull framing, planking and “anything that was going on” and latterly “made some really nice furniture,” according to Paul who has recommended that he join the crew as ship’s carpenter.

Toshiyuki Tatsumi had previous experience making free-standing house furniture and he too “helped out with whatever was happening” but mostly repaired the hatches and skylights and built interior joinery. When I asked him if he found it more challenging dealing with the irregular curved shapes inside a hull he said “yes, but it is exciting every day.” Masaya Hashimoto, too, who has previously made house furniture and some GRP boats, finds boats “more interesting because of the funny shapes.”

Shingo Koiwai, Haruyuki Wada and Makoto Usui – having previously had various jobs such as fruit farming, fishing, cleaning, gardening and hauling out boats at the marina – did a great deal of the painting and varnishing but also helped out with other jobs such as raking out seams and laminating deck beams.

Not surprisingly, Paul and Ben had to devote some time to training these Japanese craftsmen. “They already had exceptional skills,” said Paul. “It was more a question of teaching them techniques to give them confidence, and we never had to show them anything twice. As time went on they got better and better. And if you think your chisels are sharp, you should see theirs!”

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CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Clockwise from top left: Sawamura San in his workshop building the engine room bulkhead; Nat Lemieux giving varnish tips to Haruyuki Wada, Hiromi Saito, Takuya Murata and Shingo Koiwai; The launch of Cynara; The new aft saloon bulkhead being fitted

YOICHI YABE PAUL HARVEY

PAUL HARVEY

PAUL HARVEY

CYNARA PART 2

Paul and Ben realised that, although they had “grown used to an established restoration culture” over the years, they often found that they had to explain to the Japanese – to whom such a culture was a completely new concept – why something should be done in a particular way.

“For instance, telling them to be really careful when taking something apart in the hope that we may save it, even if it looked absolute rubbish,” said Paul.

Much of the engineering work led by Ben was carried out by Pascal Chedoz, a French national who originally trained as an engineer in the French Navy before moving to Japan about 30 years ago and mostly working as a baker ever since. “Every project should have a resident baker,” said Paul. “We had great snacks all the time.”

Of all the Europeans, Ben and Paul have spent the longest periods based in Japan. For much of the time, Ben was joined by his wife and three young children – the eldest of which attended a local Japanese school – before they all returned to Palma in July 2020, leaving Paul as the only remaining European to continue working with a handful of Japanese craftsmen to complete the project. Although Paul went back to Palma on three occasions in his first year, he hasn’t left Japan since the early part of 2018.

Clearly Mr Watanabe is delighted with Cynara’s restoration. “I am proud of the fact that the restoration work was done here in Japan, and that we were able to complete it together with Japanese carpenters,” he said.

“As a project that has no precedent in Japan, everything was a challenge, and just when you think you have solved one problem, you run into another. It was a continuous process every day.”

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Cold-molded hull and built of the best materials to the highest standards. Fully found and off-shore ready. Launched 2010, Flying Fish is a veteran of two Atlantic crossings. Inventory includes new Yanmar 2YM 15 diesel engine, six sails, chartplotter/depthsounder, AIS transponder, radar, Fleming self-steering, nesting dinghy, + more. More details/photos: flyingfishadventure.wordpress.com Available at $100,000 USD in Maine, USA. Contact builder/owner: flyingfishjack@gmail.com

To advertise call Andrew Mackenzie +44 (0)207 349 3718 or email andrew.mackenzie@chelseamagazines.com GAFF RIGGED WOODEN CUTTER FREJA 42’ FOR SALE BUILT BY LUKE POWELL, UK 2012 LOD 42’, Beam 12’2”, Draught 7’, Displacement 18 ton Mainsail, staysail, jib x 2, outer jib, topsail, trysail 35 HP BetaMarine Fully equipped for long distance sailing Sleeps 4 in comfort Registered in Falmouth UK 2012-2019 Since then registered in Sweden, homeport Skillinge.

For further information contact Anders Johnson andejohn@actrix.co.nz

NEW GLORIOUS 50FT TRADITIONAL WOODEN GAFF YAWL

Built by Butler & Co 2012. Strong, fast, comfortable, ocean going yacht. All new sails, Beta 50 engine, rig and fit out. Commissioned and ready for season 2021. £350,000 Further details visit: www.mathaprimrose.co.uk Email: GeorgieHare@hotmail.com Tel: 07776 145859

LE TEMPS PERDU

French gaff cutter, LOA 12,60m, length on deck 9,60m, Beam 3,30m, Draft 1,80m, engine Volvo Penta. Built in Granville, Normandy 1964. Hull iroko on oak frames, coachroof mahagony, teak deck. Successes in several Classic Boat regattas.

Well maintained with boatsmancare and in first class condition.

Owner selling now for reasons of age. Location Andratx, Majorca.

GBP £49.900.

Contact: canvey@hagengrote.de Phone: 0034 606379226

FREYA

A double ended 21 foot 6 inches centreboard, Gaff rigged sailing boat, (based on a West Highland skiff), Built By McGruer of Clynder in 1951, Larch on Oak, with a Vetus 11HP inboard diesel. Much work has been carried out, repair to the mast head, new oak frames, replacement of some planking with larch boards, and much more (all documented). she is in sound condition, with an un braked trailer, made to fit. Lying the Isle of Mull. £11,500.00 ONO Ian Mazur Email: ianmazur@icloud.com Tel: 07887 950126

£29,000

1937 40 FOOT MOTOR SAILOR

Powered by 4 cylinder 4.236 Perkins Diesel Engine.

Lying in Angelsey.

Nicely fitted out with large single bunk in Focs’l with full headroom.

A ‘midships double bunk, wood burning stove, Galley with separate heads. Double bunk in wheel house plus solar panels & GPS. Aft cabin. Double bunk, separate heads and shower.

Telephone 01565 654416

CONCORDIA SLOOP, PETE CULLER DESIGN

17.5 ft Gaff rig. Strip planked, beautifully fitted out, bronze fittings, North Sea Sails. DeGraff braked trailer. Mariner outboard.

Well maintained. Ashore Twickenham £4950 For details email: jglinos@live.com

TZIGANE

HAMBLE RIVER ONE DESIGN 18 FOOT GAFF RIGGED SLOOP.

Built by Luke & Co Swanwick 1913. Awaiting an enthusiast to complete an unfinished project. Oregon pine on elm frames.

She has a new mast and boom, new set of sails, new standing and running rigging. She is sound but needs re-caulking and a few things sorting out to make her seaworthy. £3000.00 Tel: 07813 134297 Email: guy@guygalpin.co.uk

68

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

Tzigane built by Jack Powles of Wroxham in 1958. Fully restored over the last 15 years. Five berth in two cabins with separate shower & heads compartments.

Webasto warm air heating. Single 5 cylinder nanni diesel engine. Quick silver tender available by separate negotiation.

Kept fully covered when not in use.

Moored Norfolk Broads.

Price £65,000.

Email: robertmoore001@hotmail.co.uk Mobile: 0780 325 2154

BOATS FOR SALE

Brokerage listing

C L A S S I C A N D V I N TAG E YAC H T S We hope that you enjoy our selection of vintage and classic sailing yachts. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you require any further information on any of the yachts featured here.

73ft Sangermani Bermudan Ketch 1957

60ft Sparkman & Stephens / Poul Molich sloop 1962

45ft Ed Burnett Gaff Rigged Pilot Cutter 2009

From the 1940s into the early 1990s, together with a band of impeccable artisans, the Sangermani family at Lavagna near Genoa was responsible for a stream of excellence in boat designing and building of the highest quality imaginable. At launching, SAHIB was the second largest yacht they’d built, and may reasonably be considered the cruiser-racer prototype for the 1965 Fastnet Race winner and record holder GITANA IV. Rescued from an ignominious fate and restored magnificently under present ownership, SAHIB is a dream ship in every sense: ready for stylish adventures with family and friends.

Designed and built by perfectionists for a perfectionist, JONATHAN was born lucky as the fourth of Danish shipping magnate Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller’s KLEMs. But it took another forty years for her supremely comfortable and speedy long distance cruising potential to be realised in present ownership during which she has completed four trans-Atlantics, cruising extensively on both shores; always two-handed - plus cats. An ongoing programme of short-handed sail handling upgrades makes this beautiful yacht with immaculate pedigree an elegant and spacious choice for a couple or young family, while recent line hours victories at Antigua Classic Regatta show her potential on the race course.

Her pilot cutter pedigree - hull lines evolved by Ed Burnett and John Raymond-Barker from Bill Tillman’s ocean and high latitudes voyaging MISCHIEF - deep keel, substantial gaff cutter rig, and past and present provenance, make MORWENNA a fast, comfortable and capable boat. From her 2009 launching at the Underfall Yard, Bristol, MORWENNA has been a busy charter boat in British and Mediterranean waters, and a veteran of two Fastnet Races. After a recent period of inactivity, her present, experienced marine professional owner refitted MORWENNA and returned the ‘honest finish’ shine to her undoubted charms. She’s ready for either more of the same, or family cruising in the most authentic of style - or a bit of both. This is a rare opportunity.

€890,000

Lying Italy

€450,000

Lying Netherlands

£220,000

Lying UK

40ft Jac M Iversen Motor Yacht 1954

37ft Robert Clark / AH Moody Bermudan Sloop 1961

26ft Alfred Westmacott / Woodnutt Gaff Cutter 1932

SONJA is from the skilful hand of Jac M Iversen, one of Norway and later Sweden’s most important designers and boat builders – and one noted competitor among others for the design of the Nordic Folkboat. Iversen had spent some time in the USA and perhaps it was his exclusive knowledge of the latest techniques developed there that enabled him to create faster and lighter craft with such a sweetness of line. Iversen’s yard built fast boats for the customs men and possibly even faster ones for the local Baltic smugglers – SONJA was a smuggler in her early years; the cachet does lend a certain excitement! SONJA is one of the most attractive motor boats of this size to have come our way and is testament to the care taken by her dedicated owner of some 30 years always wintering the boat inside – she is a most interesting prospect.

MATAMBU is a fine example both of Robert Clark’s cruiserracer development through the mid-20th Century, and the high-quality boatbuilding and carpentry skills of A.H. Moody & Son of Swanwick. Her air of proportion, purposefulness, comfort, fine craftsmanship and proven performance is a seductive blend indeed. It requires careful custodians over the years to preserve this aura in a yacht now into her 60s, and MATAMBU has been lucky to receive a lifetime of just deserts and sympathetic upgrading from a handful of loving owners. In recent seasons she has been enjoyed as a classic regatta participant and family cruiser and, in our opinion, there can be few better classic yachts of this size for such sailing adventures.

Built to the order of one the Isle of Wight resort of Bembridge’s socialite summer visitors, the delightful pocket gaffer WINDFLOWER has almost always been moored within the sheltered but often boisterous tidal Solent waters known intimately by her designer, Alfred Westmacott. His one-design classes such as the X-OD and Solent Sunbeam have for over a century proven very well suited to the Solent chop, so WINDFLOWER’s ability can thus be taken for granted. A major 2005 refit ensured continuing happy life, and her efficient rig has helped gain many overall regatta wins. Under present ownership since 2008, WINDFLOWER has been kept ashore undercover by winter, with her sail inventory, standing and running rigging continually upgraded. WINDFLOWER is a sweetheart ready to sail away with you.

£58,500

£32,500

€200,000

Lying Sweden

For further information please contact: +44 (0)1202 330077 info@sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

Lying UK

Lying UK

Our classic and vintage yachts & motor yachts are available to view at:

22 Market Street, Poole, Dorset BH15 1NF, UK

– www.sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk –

MEMBER OF ABYA CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

69

Craftsmanship Yard News

SECTION HEAD SUB SECTION

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

LEVINGTON, SUFFOLK

Keel and wheels Here is Andrew Gilmour’s 1959, Tucker Brown-built Stella Timoa about to be towed away from Suffolk Yacht Harbour by his 1959 Austin A35. Hang on, I hear you say! That’s a 34hp car and a 2.7-tonne yacht. Not to worry – it’s a joke photo – no towing took place! Andrew bought his first A35 as a penniless student for £15, made it roadworthy, welded an angle iron to the back bumper, and used it to trail his OK dinghy to races. The boat, too, has a story. It belonged to Andrew’s father in the 1960s and he remembers racing it on the east coast before the family sold it in the mid-1970s.

Andrew found it neglected in a boatyard in Looe 12 years ago, ANDREW GILMOUR

bought it back and restored it at Suffolk Yacht Harbour with his grown-up children and some boatbuilder help at the yard. The family have raced it ever since. This year they plan to step up the campaign, racing as always at the Suffolk Yacht Harbour Regatta in June, and adding the July British Classic Week in the Solent to their calendar.

MALDON, ESSEX

COWES, IOW

Sibbick flyer

70

Boatbuilder Jamie

repaint. The boats are three-masted

Clay has been busy

luggers and are rowed or sailed, each

refurbishing

boat taking 8-10 children. They are

Aethelfleda, one of

well used and have travelled as far as

three unusual large

Falmouth Week, Scotland’s Great Glen

dinghies owned by

Raid, The Great River Race in London,

King Alfred School

even France and Croatia.

in Golders Green in London. The boats were designed by Nigel Irens and built by the staff and pupils under a boatbuilder about two decades ago. The hulls are in yellow cedar stripplank, and the first was sheathed externally with epoxy and glass, the interior receiving

Cowes-based boatbuilder Martin Nott is

only sealing coats of epoxy resin. The

progressing well with Merry Maid, his 24

subsequent two hulls were also sheathed

foot linear rater. Designed and built by

internally before internal fitting out and

Charles Sibbick and launched in 1906, the

have fared well over the years. That first

very lightweight original hull planking

boat though, over a long period of time,

has now been covered with two layers of

has taken up moisture which has caused

thin mahogany veneer. Principal other

some distortion of the planking and glue

work has included new timbers,

failure in the plank joints. Jamie’s tricky-

fastenings, bronze floors, beamshelves,

sounding job has been to cut panels out of

deck beams and a plywood sub-deck.

all the buoyancy chambers to gain access,

Re-launch is planned optimistically for

then to strip all areas of the internal hull

later this year, or realistically early next

surface in order to apply epoxy glass

year.

sheathing, before a complete re-fairing and

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

JAMIE CLAY

C/O MARTIN NOTT

Three-masted lug dinghy

Clockwise from left: Ice boat and Rinamara; Caramba; A pair of Snekkes

PLYMOUTH, DEVON

It never rains, it pours There’s never a quiet day at the No1 Covered Slip overlooking the busy waters of Plymouth Sound. It might be a Scheduled Ancient Monument, Britain’s oldest covered slip (1763), and a place originally conceived of to build battleships for the days of sail, but it’s no museum. It has been home for some years to Will Stirling & Son, and it’s one of the busiest traditional yards in Britain. The huge, wooden, Norwegian ice-class boat is now “seven eighths” of the way through a major refit and is taking a bit of time to take up at nearby Mayflower Marina. Meanwhile, the yard built her two 16ft (5m) launches, both powered by inboard diesel engines.

The 50ft (15.1m), 1968 McGruer yawl Rinamara has been another sizeable job, this time for a new owner. She’s now ready to launch for sea trials. Rinamara is of the cruiser/racer recipe that is typical of James McGruer: elegant lines but a wheelhouse for shelter – “good looking but tough as old boots” as a previous owner put it. She sailed around the world in 1980 and had many successes racing under CIM in the Med in the 1990s and 2000s.

Also just finished is Caramba, a 63ft (19m) 1963-built twin-screw diesel yacht (TSDY) designed by Fred Parker and built by Samuel White. This was a thorough overhaul – “she’s like a little ship inside” says Will. The third motorboat of the moment, and on the slip now, is a 1950s Philips of Dartmouth TSDY of 50ft (15.1m), in for annual work. There is a Stirling & Son team at Mayflower Marina working on the systems of the 52ft (15.6m) bermudan cutter Carillion, built of kauri pine in 1974 in New Zealand, to a design by Bruce Clark.

The little (38ft) race-winning pilot cutter Edith Gray built by John Raymond-Barker is Cornwall at Treluggan Boatyard run by Will’s wife Sara. She is a 35ft (10.7m) Arthur Robbdesigned Bermudan yawl, built of teak at the Cheoy Lee Shipyard of Hong Kong in 1963 and is having new bronze floors, keelbolts and deck. “People think ‘out of sight, out of mind’ with bolts,” says Will. “But I always wonder what’s holding a boat together, other than force of habit?!” In whatever spare moments were left over the winter, the yard built three new clinker dinghies, taking the total to 49. With the 1897 Nicholson schooner Greylag and the 60ft trawler yacht Dawn Hunter on their way into the yard soon, Stirling

From top: New paint for Sybil of Cumae; Dinghy

& Son needs more staff – specifically a yard manager for Treluggan; and for No1 Slipway,

No 49; Bronze floors for Nin Dar Anna

an experienced finisher, a welding engineer and at least two experienced shipwrights.

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILL STIRLING

in for a bit of work and Nin Dar Anna is having a major overhaul over the border in

71

MARINE DIRECTORY

To advertise call Andrew Mackenzie +44 (0)207 349 3718 or email andrew.mackenzie@chelseamagazines.com

Marine Directory

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72

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The Directory listings page for all your classic boat needs, this is a chance to be able to reach an audience that you can take control of really promoting who you are. You can update this as many times as you like throughout the year to stay up to date with what you’re doing and any promotions you have. For more information contact:

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73

CRAFTSMANSHIP

YARD VISIT: HARBOUR MARINE SERVICES

BUSY TIME DURING LOCKDOWN We catch up with the motor boat specailist in Southwold WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS STEFFAN MERYRIC-HUGHES

A

s with so many boatyards, Harbour

hearing from boatbuilders are that they have more

Marine Service has been

work on than ever before – but that the availability

exceptionally busy during the Covid

of skilled labour has never been lower. To address

pandemic – and that’s saying

this, John will soon be starting a project for four

something at a yard whose order book is full for a

new apprentices to restore Elizabeth Green, a 43ft

year ahead in normal times. Is it the amount of

6in (13.3m), twin-engined Dunkirk Little Ship built in

time away from the water that has given boatowners daydreams about floating projects and

1935 by H Milland of Twickenham. She was one of the John Buckley

happier days? Is it just that that time has allowed projects to forge ahead full-bore, without the need to sail?

first to save Allied troops from the beaches, and her record is one of the best-preserved of the fleet. She’s presently an empty hull on the hard outside the boatyard. This

Is it the unprecedented transfer of inherited wealth from a generation

could be self-funding, with the cheaper labour of apprenticeships and

that has fallen prey to Covid to the next generation down? All three,

the resale value of the finished boats. John’s reward, if it works out, will

probably, but whatever the case, the two things we are increasingly

be skilled boatbuilders to employ by the end of the process.

MAGYAR Here’s one they did earlier. The TSDY Magyar, 45ft (13.7m) of teak motor yacht magnificence, built in 1939

by Saunders Roe, before they went on to build hovercrafts, guided missiles and so on.

MAIMONDE Maimonde is a sisterhip to Magyar, the other boat in this photo. They are both to the ‘Medina Class’ of which eight were built.

CRAFTSMANSHIP

JORVIK

BETHAMAR

McGruer designed and built, 1950, 42ft (12.8m) TSDY. The owner, who was also at the yard when we visited, remembers his grandfather taking him down the Yorkshire Ouse on this when he was just four years old.

Built by John Adams of Guorock to William McBryde design in 1938, this is a 41ft (12.5m) TSDY. She first came here five years ago for a difficult engine refurb. Work has been going on piecemeal since then.

He’s sailed all his life, but has wanted Jorvik back in the family for a long time. That dream came true in spring 2020 when he bought her in a terrible state and took her to HMS. This will be launched soon for a summer of trials, then phase two will be in winter. This is how John likes to do things, ideally. The boat will live in Salcombe, Devon, once finished.

KINGFISHER The 1935 John Baine-designed TSDY, built by James Silver to the Silver Leaf class, 42ft (12.8m) long and featured in our March issue (East Coast cruise). The engines were out of alignment with the shaft logs and stern tubes, stopping the engine reaching full revs. “A complete mess,” says John. The yard has rebuilt the break of the sheer, refurbished or replaced deck fittings, steering gear and lot else – too much to list, in fact.

ELIZABETH GREEN

This is the 43ft 6in (13.3m) twin-engined Dunkirk Little Ship built in 1935 by H Milland of Twickenham and one of the first to rescued Allied troops off the beaches of Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo in 1940.

She’s also the bare hull that

RUMMER

HIPPOCAMPUS Ex Travis McGee. Bates Starcraft 33, built 1960. “Britain’s

will, all things being well,

First of 10 to the ‘Rummer’ design

answer to Chris-Craft,” says John. Rotten mahogany cabin

be restored by four new

by Kim Holman, this 33ft (10m)

sides and decks were replaced and she was fitted with an

apprentices. They are going

yawl, will soon be entering the

outdoor helm that blends into silhouette. A lot of work to

to have their work cut out!

shed for a lot of work

the interior was carried out in this refit as well.

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

75

CRAFTSMANSHIP

Boatbuilder’s Notes

By Robin Gates

Chisel knife The Hultafors square-ended chisel knife is rather more knife than chisel, because the edge is bevelled on both sides, but it’s nonetheless a useful hybrid of both kinds of tool worth keeping to hand in a cockpit locker or attached to your belt by its plastic sheath. The carbon steel blade is 70mm long, a sturdy 3mm thick

1

and ground flat on one edge – well up to driving with a hammer, as you might do when

1: Cutting

splitting kindling for a barbecue. The meaty handle

three-strand line

likewise withstands a heavy blow so you might use

with the knife edge

this tool for rough tasks where you’d hesitate to

2: Hinge mortise

deploy a more valued chisel, yet it’s also precise

chopped out with

enough for more critical work like cutting a hinge

the square

mortise. The fact of the handle being longer than the

chisel end

blade assists with accurate positioning, much like a butt chisel. Handy for cutting wood, plastic or rope, and excellent value at around £7.

2

L-R: Wing, Moore & Wright and Lancashire dividers

hammer No 4203 (left) and Warrington

ROBIN GATES

8oz hammer (right)

Step out with dividers

It’s far from being the cheapest pin hammer on the market but I’ve found the 4oz No4203 made by CK (which stands for Carl Kämmerling, who founded the company in 1904) to be a solid investment. This old

Dividers are invaluable for transferring measurements without recourse to a

example has an ash handle, whereas today’s is fitted with

ruler. The forged iron type used by a 19th-century shipwright was securely

the similarly durable and shock-absorbing hickory, but

locked by a screw tightening on a quadrant extending from one leg, and the

the shapely swellings which fit the hand so well remain

tool is also sturdy enough to scribe an arc with sufficient clarity to guide the

unchanged, as does the secure wedging to the drop-

saw. The lighter Lancashire pattern spring dividers adjusted by a wing nut

forged head of carbon steel. The hammer is well

acting against a bow spring are prone to twist if used for scribing, but are

balanced, with the weight of the head concentrated over

favoured by joiners for the more delicate work of stepping out marks for

a small area that’s ideal for driving small nails and pins,

dovetails.

while the flattened cross pein (or peen) is designed for

More rigid and precise than the old Lancashire sort are the spring dividers

getting them started while gripped betwixt finger and

used by toolmakers, such as these made by Moore & Wright around 1950. Legs

thumb. Pictured alongside the joiner’s standard 8oz

pivoting on a hardened steel fulcrum are set by a sophisticated ‘quicknut’ with

Warrington hammer for comparison, the CK pin hammer

split collet, permitting rapid readjustment between wide settings. Similar

has an RRP of £18.22 but may be less at cktools-

M&W-branded dividers are available from Workshop Heaven in Banbury,

superstore.co.uk.

priced at £21.50.

76

CK pin hammer

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

ROBIN GATES

CK 4oz pin

Boatbuilder’s TraditionalNotes Tool

By Robin Gates

CARD SCRAPERS The finest finishing tool known to

moderately convex long edges, the

Clockwise from

across the grain without causing

woodwork is a flat piece of steel: the

sides being left without a hook so that,

above:

tear-out, and is essential for

card scraper. On hardwoods, and

combining top and bottom, there are a

Smoothing a

smoothing thin veneers and the

especially those with confused or

total of four cutting edges. The tool is

hollow with the

alternating grains of inlays. If sharp, it

curly grain, it takes over where the

most commonly pushed using both

goose-neck

generates fluffy shavings and leaves a

plane leaves off, and may be shaped

hands with fingers at the sides and

scraper; Keep

glass-smooth surface in its wake.

to work all manner of curved surfaces.

thumbs pushing in the middle, to

scrapers in a

Store scrapers in a wallet between

generate the bow, also leaning forward

wallet to protect

uses to avoid damaging their

a hand saw is of ideal hardness and

at an angle just sufficient to bite,

their edges;

vulnerable edges.

thickness. It’s hard enough to hold a

although a scraper may also be drawn

Round the

durable edge but not too hard to file

towards the worker, and even used

corners of a

Sheffield-made scrapers (branded

by hand, while also being sufficiently

with one hand. The corners of a

rectangular

Garlick or Pax) have proved extremely

flexible that you can bow the edge as

rectangular scraper may be rounded

scraper with a

useful, and at around £12 for the set of

you push or pull the scraper along.

with a file to avoid risk of them

file

four they are also excellent value.

The cutting edge is unique, neither

digging in.

Tempered high-carbon steel from

bevelled like a plane or chisel, nor

The scraper works with, against or

Over the last five years these

NEXT MONTH: Coe’s wrench

toothed like a saw, but shaped into a continuous hook or burr.

Preparing a new hook requires that the remnants of the old one first be removed by filing. The edge is next made perpendicular to the faces by rubbing on an oil stone, and then a burnisher (which can be the rounded back of a gouge) is pushed along at an angle gradually increasing to about 85 degrees, thereby spreading ROBIN GATES

the steel to create the tiny new hook which is detected using a fingernail.

The most generally useful card scraper is rectangular or with CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

77

Letters LETTER OF THE MONTH SUPPORTED BY OLD PULTENEY WHISKY

Dragon head on the cove line The feature on Lady Edith (CB 395) repeats the well-worn ‘origin’ backstory concerning the Fife dragon ‘arrowhead’ on the cove line or cavetta. In discussion with the late Theo Rye, back in the spring of 2016 when he was Technical Editor of CB, Theo convincingly

THE LADY WITH THE CARVED DRAGON Two decades after a radical restoration, and a period of inactivity, Wm Fife’s Lady Edith has awoken from slumber WORDS BRUNO CIANCI

argued that enduring serpent may have been the work of an itinerant craftsman, likely inspired by the dragonhead on King Haakon’s warship repelled at the Battle of Largs (1263).

In her well-known book on the Fifes, May Fife McCallum ponders both options. The first Fife-built Dragon (1889) certainly did not sport a dragon. I am less certain about Dragon’s II and III, even after examining all the images I can source. Dragons appeared

CB395 Lady Edith.indd 4-5

21/05/2021 15:50

Above: Opening

occasionally on yachts built by Dickie’s, while

spread our May

Fife’s small yachts and one-designs did not.

issue feature on

The Fife III Clio (1907) is the first yacht I have

Lady Edith and

found sporting a dragon at launch. I would

left the dragon

love to hear from readers who can

from Eliean

authenticate an earlier image. See below the 1889 Fife 20-rater Dragon owned by Francis Hill of Ardrishaig and skippered by Itchen Ferry’s own Ben Parker. Dragon was “unconquered in her class” winning fifty-four prizes of the value of £820 (£13,000 today).

This West image was taken in southern waters and appeared in the first issue of The Yachtsman on 25th April 1891. She had traditional trailboards and no dragon.

Euan Ross, by email

Putting your foot in it

Putting your foot in it again

Colin Brown of Saltash asks in his

How about a mustard bath for his injured right

letter with photograph, what it is that

foot? Patrick O’Brian’s surgeon Stephen Maturin

the helmsman on the yacht Flame is

would approve. What a tremendous tiller.

resting his foot in. I think it must be

Kent on the letters page. In case a reader asks

appears to be concave, with a lip.

why Wells was wittering about paddle

Perhaps it is the cover of the

steamers, that image was attached to

lazarette, upside down in the opening.

my email of 13 April.

I am aware of a similar sized,

78

Thanks for running the Clayton painting of

the cover of the lazarette, although it

Matthew Clayton’s pictures are not bad, and

mahogany cover on the yacht

he was well known for them. I suspect there are

Marigold (featured some years ago in

people in Oz and NZ who know him as the

your magazine). It was used to store

painter, and others know him as the hard-driving

things like the sail cover, canvas

Blackwall skipper, without realising

gaskets for stowing the mainsail,

the crossover. Someone in NZ ought to

mooring lines, etc.

write him up.

Robin Whitefield, Herts

Mike Wells, by email

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

SMITHS CPES AND FILL-IT PERMANENT REPAIRS TO ROTTEN WOOD Clear Penetrating Epoxy Sealer Penetrates deeply - finds all rot Restores strength Flexes with wood Epoxy strength & durability Made largely of wood resins Stabilises rotten wood

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Support and advice on: +44 (0)1732 824 700

Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com +44 (0)1206 302863 Tel:Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Email:Tel: sales@jameslawrencesailmakers.com +44 (0)1206 302863 Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 “Proud to have been chosen as Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com www.jameslawrencesailmakers.com Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com Tel: +44 (0)1206 302863 Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com the sailmaker for “Mink” Email: lawrencesails@btconnect.com “Proud tohave have been chosen as “Sails exceeded “Proud to have been chosen asour Email: sales@jameslawrencesailmakers.com “Proud to sailmaker have been chosen “Mink” as expectations, authenticity thethe sailmaker forfor “Mink” “Proud to have been chosen as www.jameslawrencesailmakers.com the sailmaker “Mink” “Proud toperfect, havefor is near sailchosen shapeas the sailmaker forbeen “Mink”

Anne T. Converse PHOTOGRAPHY MARINE • TRAVEL • EQUINE PEOPLE

“Mink “Mink”, Herreshoff Buzzards Bay 25,25, 1914, 1914,sailing sailingoff offMystic, Mystic, USA USA

“Mink”, Herreshoff Herreshoff Buzzards “Mink”, BuzzardsBay Bay

M P MM PPrPr MM irdid adaaMedMe Prird adaMe iPed de M PiPedrePe rMdaw ad riiindiiindaeddaBw dBriet reiindi aw diw iew t d e e n G G h i B B e rer irGire wirtthaiBwr enGirG ethwit h n n n w w e e e t i i i i i i t t t Br it ana raGeaG ittanhtiha raGe hith itah iniGntrraettreh n in traet at in eaatat t

“Proud tosailmaker have been the forchosen “Mink” “Proud to have been chosen asas “Proud to have been chosen and natural cotton really “Proud to sailmaker have been chosen asas “Mink” ‘Ayesha’ thethe sailmaker forfor “Mink” the sailmaker for “Mink” has improved the wayas the sailmaker for “Mink” “Proud to have been chosen “Proud to boat have been chosen sails” - saysas thethe sailmaker for “Mink” the sailmaker for “Mink” the proud owner of “Mink”

P.O. Box 209 Marion, MA 02738 | USA 508 728 6210 anne@annetconverse.com www.annetconverse.com ANNE T CONVERSE IBC CB Aug19.indd 1 Untitled-147 1

26/06/2019 01/03/2019 17:34 14:53

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

79

Next month SAILING TODAY WITH YACHTS & YACHTING

SUVRETTA

HG May’s tough but elegant 35ft West Solent One Design class has always been revered as a thoroughbred among yachts; this one belongs to the chairman of the RYA.

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JOHN GOODE 1950-2021 Tribute to our founder ST+Y&Y July Cover A and B.indd 2

100 NOT OUT

New Zealand’s mullet boats have reached 100 years of racing and neither Corona nor World War Two has stopped them missing a single year.

THE NEXT GENERATION The Shipshape Network, National Historic Ship UK’s programme to train up the next generation of conservators, reaches its first decade.

PLUS...

Meet the new boss at Riva; the forgotten story of the stormy ’57 Fastnet; a visit to classic chandlers Davey & Co; and much more

AUGUST 2021 ON SALE Friday 16 July, 2021 Available online.

Or why not subscribe?

30 YEARS AGO July 1991, CB37 Another interesting cover from decades ago. Rather than the ‘single boat’ style we adhere to now, here is a fleet of Rainbow Class keelboats racing in the Netherlands. The photo is by Peter Chesworth and inside there is an article by Rob Maynard on these little boats, first sailed over a century ago in 1917. The big yacht in this issue is Orianda, a 74ft (22.6m) schooner built in Denmark in 1937 to a design by Carl Andersen. There is one of John Leather’s famously authoritative articles, this time on the boatbuilding Burgoine brothers, a well known name on the Upper Thames, where many of their creations, from steam launches to Thames A Raters, survive to this day. There’s an ad for Davey & Company, the chandler that was established in 1885, and which changed hands very recently – more on that in next month’s issue. Best of all is an article called ‘Fitting out in the Fifties’ in which an old-timer called John Teale reminisces about red-hot pokers used to re-melt caulking glue, a man who built a plywood pram dinghy in a morning, bituminous paint, and a boat so leaky that its berths were covered in plastic sheeting like a four-poster bed!

80

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

17/05/2021 17:09

IN THE APRIL ISSUE l The mindset and the kit you need to make your bluewater cruising dreams come true this year l On test: Discovery 58 – ocean thoroughbred l On test: Jeanneau 60 – cutting-edge liveaboard l Round the Island virgin?

Then read this l Secret south of France – places only locals know Available online or order now post-free from chelseamagazines.com/shop

Considering an Electric Outboard?

“Using a well-engineered electric outboard has been a revelation.’’

TOM CUNLIFFE Classic Boat

Quiet, Convenient, Reliable and Easy-to-Use In the popular 2-4hp category, the latest electric outboards – with their integral and rechargeable lithium batteries – have transformed the market, rendering petrol motors all-but obsolete. Advantages include: From £1650 Epropulsion Spirit PLUS 1276Wh battery Faster to charge Battery floats if dropped Foldable tiller means only one cable to connect › Three shaft length options › Direct drive (no gearbox) › › › ›

› Ease of Use Switch on, twist the tiller handles, go. Almost anybody can do it; no experience, strength or mechanical knowledge is needed. › Ease of Handling The batteries are removable, and the “pass up and down” weight (the shaft/motor assembly) is then 10kg or less. › Ease of Storage These electric motors divide into components, don’t leak oil or petrol, and don’t mind which way up they’re stored. › Quietness & Smoothness Electric motors are a delight to use.

From £1750 Torqeedo 1103 › 916Wh battery › GPS data on tiller gives speed & range indication › Removable tiller (more compact for storage) › Near‐silent direct drive › Much more robust than the previous model (Torqeedo 1003)

› Power Forget slow speed “trolling motors”, these 1kW electrics have huge torque (more like a 3hp petrol). › Range There are many variables, but most users achieve at least 9 to 10 nautical miles per charge, at 4 to 5 knots (2.5m inflatable dinghy).

Much more if you slow down a little. › Reliability Many outboard motors don’t get used very often, and small petrol motors hate this. Electric outboards have fewer parts in general, and in particular there’s no carburettor to “gum up”.

Of course, it’s not all perfect. The range may still not be enough for some users.

And they’re undeniably More Expensive than petrol outboards, mostly because lithium batteries are expensive. But that extra upfront cost is largely offset by their Lower Lifetime Running Costs, including (almost) No Servicing.

NESTAWAY BOATS is the UK’s number one retailer for both Torqeedo AND Epropulsion. You can find out more on our website, and we are always happy to discuss further – and offer advice – by email or phone. If you’d like to see them before making a purchase, we are based in Christchurch, Dorset (UK).

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Sternpost and you want to win; you might choose to do without an engine because you enjoy the challenge – or you can afford a man in a pusher RIB instead; and you might add a guardrail if you are sailing around the world, but not if you want to flaunt your pretty boat at some smart regattas. These are all perfectly reasonable and sensible compromises and, as others have often pointed out, they are often geared towards keeping the boat racing, or even just from the bonfire or the chainsaw.

NAT HERROSHOFF G L WATSON WILLIAM FIFE When I was part of a small team that restored a pre-war Hillyard nine-tonner, we committed many sins. We used all kinds of stuff with long names that came out of squeezy-gun tubes; and lots of it. We used a relatively modern diesel engine because it was convenient – it came with the boat and it worked. We did these things, in short, because we were on a limited n the long-running comedy improvisation show Whose Line is budget, with limited time, in the real world, and because we simply it Anyway, there is a bit where the comedians are challenged to weren’t that ambitious about the level of authenticity in our work. say the least likely think you’d hear in a given situation. One We did, however, manage to do these things without recourse to week, for instance, they were challenged to come up with the last historical fallacy: “David Hillard would’ve, if he’d had Sikaflex, thing a weather forecaster would ever say. One replied: “Tonight, etc.” Would David Hillyard have used modern materials had they for the first time, just about half past ten, it’s going to start raining men.” As far as I know, Whose Line is it Anyway never did “things been available? The question itself is almost impossible to unravel, given the hole it tears open in the space-time continuum. How do you’d least expect a conservator to say” – so let’s have a whirl. you even answer that? If David Hillyard had had access to Sikaflex, Right, contestants: last thing you’d expect a classic Ferrari owner epoxy, fuel-injected diesel engines and chart-plotters that commune to say: “If Enzo had had fuel injection, he would have used it, so with heavenly bodies to guide the sailor’s path, it wouldn’t be 1930; I’ve pulled the carburettor out and put a fuel injector in there.” it would be now. So the real question is: what would David Last thing you’d expect a spokesman from the Rijksmuseum’s Hillyard, William Fife III, GL Watson or Nathaniel Herreshoff be restoration team to say: “If the colour Neon Banana Mania 3 had doing if they were alive today? Building twin-cabin, triple-outboard been available to Rembrandt, he would have used it, so when we production motorboats? Maybe – at least that’s the last stop on the restored The Night Watch, we used it.” The last thing utterance line once with that line of reasoning. Perhaps they wouldn’t be in the you’d hear from the furniture restorer entrusted with your marine trade at all though. Herreshoff, given his track record in favourite family heirloom: “Here is your Sheraton dining table steam engine innovation, not to mention building the hull of the first back. It looks a treat. Oh – and I’ve sawn it in half and put it back aeroplane ever to cross the Atlantic, might be in charge of the Mars together with a nice purple resin river down the middle.”

Rover project today, building the first electric car or teaching The owner of a priceless Fife yacht, who refers to himself as English. GL Watson could be building superyachts, designing ‘merely the custodian’: “We put a ply sub-deck under the original America’s Cup yachts or superyachts or selling double glazing. I teak swept deck. We figured if Fife had had access to high- grade really have no idea; I’m happier to let their legacies rest undisturbed. marine ply and modern glue, he’d no doubt have done the same.”

One thing I’m pretty sure of is that they would not Oh, hang on. You have heard that one! be standing about in an English boatyard in spring, Now, before we go any further, and before every wielding an orbital sander in one hand and a tube of boat-owner and boatbuilder gets the steely-eyed “If the colour sealant in the other. look and reaches for his phone – or a caulking iron Banana Mania Perhaps the idea is more specific than that, and it – let’s get a couple of things settled: firstly, the 3 had been implies the posting of said item through time-travel subject of restoration is a complicated and personal post – ambitious, even for Amazon. A lorry, full of one. The choices of ply sub-deck or not; cotton or available to top-quality marine plywood and epoxy, arrives Dacron sails; twin-speed self-tailers or purchases Rembrandt, outside a boatyard in 1930. The question now, and grunt; engine or not; guardrail or clean look… he would have assuming the boatbuilder realises it can make the choices and compromises are endless, and they used it. So when leak-proof sub-decks (at least until it rots out, but depend on the ambition of the restoration, the importance of the vessel and its intended end use. we restored The he’ll learn about that later), would he use it? Maybe he would, but surely it would be for the conservator You might choose a plywood subdeck because Night Watch, of today, rather than tear holes in the laws of physics you want the extra stiffness and you don’t like a we used it!” and bring the dead back to life, just to say “I didn’t drip in your eye while you nod off; you might want a drip in my eye at night.” choose modern winches because it’s a racing yacht

Would they use epoxy?

Time travel is a risky game, says Sam Hamilton

I

82

CLASSIC BOAT JULY 2021

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