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GOING FOR GOLD Abandoned after helping keep Norwegian gold reserves away from the Nazis in 1940, Gometra has now been rescued WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY NIGEL SHARP
Left to right: Bulwark fairlead; Headsail sheet fairlead; Top of the rudder stock
GOMETRA
T
he SecondWorld War had a fundamental effect on the destinies of many boats that had been built for peaceful and personal pursuits. More often than not, it was a detrimental effect as a result of requisitioning and enemy action, or merely from five and a half years of enforced neglect. Few small sailing boats, however, can have had their lives changed in the way that Gometra’s was when, after the German invasion of Norway in the spring of 1940, she was called into service to help save the Norwegian gold reserve. Gometra actually has her roots in the First World War. Her first owner was James Farie, a Rear Admiral in the Royal Navy who was the captain of the Third Destroyer Flotilla at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Just days after the end of the war, his armoured cruiser, Cochrane, ran aground in the Mersey and Farie was reprimanded at a court martial hearing. In 1919, he commissioned his friend Alfred Mylne to design an 18ft auxiliary sailing boat, although it wasn’t until 1923 – soon after Farie retired from the Navy – that she was built, by Mylne’s company Bute Slipway. She was named Ganetra, although she was subsequently listed incorrectly in Lloyds Register as “Gometra”. Farie then commissioned Mylne to produce a bigger sailing boat in which he could go cruising, although he would also race her. Mylne based her on his 1907 design Elvira, which had been built as a racing boat but later proved to be a very able cruiser. The result was the real Gometra, which was launched in 1925 and named after a small island off the coast of Mull. She was built of Norway pine planking on alternating oak and rock elm frames, and she had a Kelvin Poppet Valve Model 6/7 petrol/paraffin engine. Farie, a widower at the time, initially kept Gometra on the Clyde where, in 1928 while taking part in the West Highland Race to Inveraray, he met Eila Laurie, who would become his second wife. Two years later, they decided to move south and they took Gometra initially to Falmouth and then to Lymington, where they found she was too big for her mooring and so put her on the market. She was purchased by William Luard, who wrote about her in his book Where the Tides Meet. He described her as “a typical example of a weatherly fast cruiser” with “surprising ease and steadiness of motion”, and found she was “a stiff, fast, seaworthy and seakindly ship that revelled in a breeze of wind”. When he sold her in 1934, he and crew sailed her from Falmouth to Bangor where her new owner – Leonard Reynolds – would keep her. Writing about the latter stages of the voyage when Gometra was motoring into a headwind in the Menai Strait, Luard described some potentially hairy moments: “Two cables from the (first) bridge, we turned our last corner and saw the boil and seethe of the tide and wind-swept waters. Then the
42
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Top: In Vancouver, mid-1950s, owner Elmer Palmer in the centre. Above: Thought to be the wife of the late-1950s owner, Ken Glass Opposite main: Saloon joinery is all original Inset: Brass hand pump in the heads; The 1954 oil lamp; New steel ring frames fitted in the mast area
engine spluttered, stopped. There was nothing for it. We had to beat through.” They did so successfully – Gometra “behaved beautifully” – and when they were safely moored, one of the crew brought some rum and glasses up from the cabin. “The sun’s over the fore-yard,” he said. “I raise my glass to a good ship, a good passage and the blessings of good fortune.” Reynolds used Gometra for cruising and racing in the waters between Bangor and the Clyde, with his two young children and his friend and family doctor Kennedy Young. Her fourth owner, from 1937, was James Lang. Very little is known about him except that he commissioned Mylne to design a higher aspect rig for Gometra. The mast was extended and given a second set of spreaders, and the boom shortened, which allowed the addition of a fixed backstay and the removal of the upper part of the running backstays. It is with her fifth owner – the Norwegian government – that Gometra’s story becomes particularly interesting. As German forces advanced through Norway, the Norwegian royal family and various members of the government were evacuated to the UK, and so was much of the country’s gold reserve. But the gold wasn’t thought safe even there, so plans were made to take 45 tonnes of it across the Atlantic. Such a sea voyage was, to put it mildly, fraught with danger, as U-boats were hunting down Allied convoys, so Carl J Hambro, the head of the Norwegian parliament, devised a plan to increase the chances of the gold making it safely across the Atlantic. The gold would be stowed in barrels – empty enough to retain buoyancy – which would be transported on the decks of various ships, each of which would also have a small vessel, to which the barrels would be secured. In the event of the mother ship being sunk by enemy submarines, the small vessel would float safely away, towing the gold, and make for the nearest land. Although in most cases these small vessels were lifeboats, at least two – Gometra and the 36ft Sinbad – were sailing boats. Gometra’s mother ship was the 3,800-tonne Bra-Kar which sailed from Glasgow on 27 June 1940 – with Hambro himself on board – initially as part of convoy OB175, although at some point she separated from the other ships and proceeded on her own. On 10 July she arrived safely in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where her cargo was unloaded. While the gold was taken away to be locked up in Canadian banks, Gometra was effectively abandoned. It was there that Charles Rawlings, a correspondent with the American magazine Yachting, and his friend, the naval architect William Roué, first saw Gometra lying at a mooring. Not surprisingly, she was in a poor state. “Lord, she was dirty,” Rawlings later wrote. “Her topsides looked as if pigs had been rubbing their itchy backs against them.
GOMETRA
Up on deck she was covered in soot and clinkers, and small rubbish drifted up against her rails like trash against a slum fence.” But through all that, the two men could see her for the lovely boat she was. Rawlings thought she looked like “an 8-Metre’s tough sister” – a great compliment as far as he was concerned. They found Bra-Kar’s captain, who clearly didn’t care anything for Gometra now that she had fulfilled her role, and kept referring to her as “a crate”. “We’ve been calling boats we didn’t like that derisive name for years,” said Roué “but this is the first time I ever heard of it being literally true.” Soon afterwards, Ernest Bell, the Commodore of the Nova Scotia Royal Yacht Squadron, bought Gometra from the Norwegian Purchasing Commission in New York. He occasionally sailed her – as often as war restrictions would allow – with Roué as his skipper. At the end of the war she was transported almost 3,000 miles by Canadian Pacific Railway to Vancouver when Gus Ortengren bought her. For the next 30 years she was based in Vancouver, in the successive ownership of half a dozen men, many of them prominent members of the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, including at least two Commodores. As such, she was considered the flagship of the club for many years and, in addition to undertaking ambitious cruises as far afield as Hawaii and Harrison Lake, she had much racing success. At some point during this period, it’s said a difference of opinion between her owner and skipper over the colour of the topsides led to the two sides being painted different colours. In 1952, the naval architect Ben Seaborn designed another new rig for her – a 7/8ths fractional rig rather than the 3/4 rig Mylne had given her, with the addition of diamonds and with the backstay moved inboard slightly from the extreme end of the counter. Gometra’s reconnection with Europe began in 1973, when she was sold to Scottish-born David Millis. He cruised and raced her between Canada, Hawaii, California and Mexico before establishing a new base for her in Baja, California. Millis proved to be Gometra’s longest owner to date, but in his later years of ownership he suffered poor health and so, perhaps inevitably, did 44
CLASSIC BOAT OCTOBER 2019
Gometra. When he died in 2003 she was purchased by another Scot, Molly Holt. After an intensive year at Vele Storiche of work on the boat, Holt began a period of extensive Viareggio cruising with her two sons along the coasts of Mexico, Above right: Guatemala and El Salvador until her sons decided they Her lines wer would prefer a less nomadic lifestyle. In 2006 Holt based on the decided to bring Gometra back to Europe, and arranged 1907 Elvira shipment to Toulon and on to Nice. The following year, Matteo Rossi was in Cannes racing on his boat Madifra, a 48ft Laurent Giles design built in Italy in 1965. At the end of the regatta, he drove to Monaco, but, as he was in no particular hurry, he took the coast road instead of the motorway and stopped in Nice. It was there that he first saw Gometra, lying derelict and seemingly abandoned in the harbour. He left his business card on board, not really expecting it to lead to anything. “Three weeks later, we went there with a truck to pick her up,” his son Andrea told me. There was, of course, a great deal of work to do GOMETRA to the boat, but, rather than taking her to an established classic yacht restoration yard, they set up their own TYPE facility in Carasco, a few miles inland from Lavagna. Bermudan sloop “The yards are a little expensive,” explained Andrea. “We decided not to use one as the restoration is part LOA of the fun.” They recruited a small skilled team, led by 42ft (12.8m) Giovanni Ambrosetti – “one of the best woodcraftsmen LWL in Italy” – and they set to work. The wood keel was found to be in good condition, 28ft (8.5m) but the stem and stern post needed replacing, and this BEAM was done in iroko. They were able to retain about 9ft (2.7m) 80 per cent of the Norway pine planking, but the garboards and a few other planks were renewed in the DRAUGHT same timber. However, the frames were mostly in a poor 6ft (1.8m) state and they were all replaced, some with laminated iroko and others in steamed acacia. BUILT Amazingly, almost all of the deck and its structure 1925 has been retained. The original deck was straight-laid Norway pine with canvas on top of it. The canvas BUILT BY needed renewing but the Rossis didn’t want to use Bute Slipway canvas again with its ongoing maintenance implications, DESIGNER and, for reasons of authenticity, they didn’t want to replace it with glass and epoxy. So, having removed the Alfred Mylne Above left:
Gometra racing
GOMETRA
old canvas, a new 8mm thick swept-teak deck was laid on top of the Norway pine. Three new steel ring frames were fitted in the mast area to stiffen the boat up. The deckhouse, skylights and fore hatch were removed, cleaned up, re-glazed and re-fitted. Perhaps the most interesting part of this restoration is the installation of an electric engine. When the Rossis found Gometra, she had a 35hp Yanmar diesel. “It was a bit rusty but working OK,” said Andrea, “but we decided it was not so poetic for such a lovely boat.” He was doing a degree in mechanical engineering at the time, and had focused on electric propulsion for small craft, so it was entirely appropriate that Gometra should have such an engine. Although electric engines are becoming more common now, in 2009 that was not the case, and Andrea had to do a lot of development work himself. In the end, a 13kW 72-volt DC motor from the Lynch Motor Company was fitted, powered by three Mastervolt lithium batteries with 5kW capacity.
HISTORICAL DISCOVERIES Inside the boat, the saloon joinery is original. New quarter berths have been fitted, and the galley has been moved from just inside the companionway to a position slightly forward of the mast where, most likely, it was originally found. During the course of the restoration, two historical gems were discovered. When the brass oil lamp on the forward saloon bulkhead was polished, an engraving reflecting the boat’s previous racing career “Gometra 1st Ballenas 1954” was revealed. And when the lock for the door in the forward saloon bulkhead was taken apart to be serviced, it was found to be marked with the words “Glasgow 1925”. As the work was being done away from an established shipyard and managed by the Rossis around their working lives, the project inevitably took a long time, and it wasn’t until the summer of 2016 that Gometra was launched. Matteo and Andrea clearly got a great deal of satisfaction from their own involvement in both the work and the historical research. “It is never ending,” Andrea said, with regard to the latter. “There is always someone calling me with something new. It is fantastic.” The completion of the project was, however, tinged with some sadness, as Ambrosetti, who had contributed so much, passed away in late 2015. 46
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Above left to right: Sailing in the 1970s; Owner David Millis celebrates after a family regatta
The opportunity for me to sail on Gometra eventually came in October 2017 at Vele Storiche Viareggio, a wonderfully friendly classic yacht event which marks the end of the Mediterranean regatta season. It seemed as if most of the competing boats were being sailed by groups of friends rather than professional sailor, and that was certainly the case on Gometra, whose crew included three of the Rossis’ Swiss friends, who shared the steering. As we were motoring out towards the start, I almost didn’t notice how quiet the engine was until Andrea pointed it out to me. On deck, the only apparent sound comes from the propeller rather than the engine itself, and down below it is easy to conduct a perfectly normal conversation. Andrea told me that, with fully charged batteries, Gometra has a range of 15nm at 4.5-5 knots, and up to 30nm at slower speeds. This may not seem much, but, as Andrea put it, “you have to consider it is an auxiliary engine. Gometra is a very good sailing boat and you want to sail because it is fun.” We were racing in an extraordinarily eclectic class of boats. The seemingly unbeatable (at least in the light winds that prevailed throughout the regatta) 1913 Sonderklasse Tilly XV soon took the lead and extended it throughout the race, while we enjoyed close racing with two Metre boats with Norwegian pedigree: the 1925 Anker 8-M Margaret and the 1937 Jensen 10-M Kipawa. We eventually got the better of Margaret after a slightly disputed mark rounding and we thought we would also beat Kipawa until she sneaked up on us right at the end and beat us by a few seconds. Tilly XV, meanwhile, had finished more than 11 minutes earlier, and comfortably behind us were two Camper & Nicholsons boats: the 1931 Bermudan cutter Patience and the mighty 1910 schooner Orion, which would have appreciated, more than any of us, a lot more wind. In the overall results, Tilly XV won easily, with three race victories, with Gometra second and Kipawa third. As I reluctantly left Gometra, I asked Andrea if he was going to keep Madifra. “Yes,” he said. “So why have two classic boats?” He laughed and said: “It is a problem but a nice problem.” The answer, however, is simple: Madifra has been in the family since Andrea was a child, and is as good a cruising boat as Gometra is a racing boat. Fair enough.