2
Š
Published by Fast On Water Publications 2016
Editors note Belated Easter greetings to everyone. The 2016 season will soon be upon us, with all that entails. We wish all competitors a safe and successful season. Here at Fast On Water we are also gearing up for the projects we have planned for this year. As you know, we are always looking for contributions for future issues – memories, photos, specialist interests. So if you feel like putting pen to paper, we look forward to hearing from you.
All articles and photographs are copyright All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission. Editor Roy Cooper
Contents Contributors Steve Pinson Kevin Desmond David Knight Roy Cooper
Cover painting by Barry Linklater In the 1960s, Linklater contributed illustrations to Look and Learn's adaptation of H. G. Wells' 'The First Men in the Moon' in 1963 and later, in 1967, began producing covers and illustrations on a semiregular basis.
2
3
The Story of Cougar Marine part 2
10
1950s American boat ads
11
James Beard Circuit Boats part 1
13
1950s American Boat Wives
15
The Countess of Arran
18
1950s British Racing Scene
Twin Roars From a Single Beast The Second and final instalment of an article originally published by Kevin Desmond in Multihull International, May 2002. 1972 was a busy year for had Cougar Boscat and Aristocat went campaigning in Class II offshore. Aristocat, pioneering a full tunnel hull with a high angle of attack on that tunnel, was built Ford Keith Dallas who was to race her the following year as High-Speed Blade sponsored by Wiggins Teape, a paper making company.
an order book Cougar felt it needed to move, yet again, to larger premises. Adrian Ewen telephone Clive one day and told him he had just been to see a boatyard ideally suited to Cougar’s needs.
Then two small circuit cats, 15 footers, were designed and built in a hurry to go to South Africa, where the air is a lot thinner and does not give so great a lift. To compensate, the running area was increased for what they decided to call their Altitude Boats. Although not particularly successful in South Africa, one of these, Wood Mariner, was brilliantly driven by James when he won the first staging ever of the Embassy Grand Prix at Bristol. James also finished a 400 mile race at Chasewater at an average speed of 78.3 miles per hour in the same boat.
Clive recalls, ‘it was Netley-Abbey boatyard, a site where vessels had been built in one form or another for 500 years. Having once repaired my Merlin sailing dinghy there in my early days, I knew it was near Southampton and ideally placed for us to test on boats on the Solent. James and myself Jumped in a car and went down to see its present owner, Phil Goddard. He was using it to run the South Coast dealership for Borg Warner. We not only bought the yard, 7000 square feet under cover but acquired the dealership as well. The whole deal course £30,000 and we were installed there by July 1973.’
Their next circuit development was the stepless C2E (Circuit, Two-pointer Marque E). She proved so successful that at the beginning of 1973, Cougar had an order book for 18, as well as a contract to build a 33 ft Class II offshore contender for the proposed 1974 Daily Telegraph Round Britain Race. It was to be named after its sponsor Wiggins Teape; would be powered by four outboard engines and its driver would be Keith Dallas. With such
But 1973 was also the year of the World Fuel Crisis. Overnight Cougar ran out of customers. Sixteen of their 18 orders for the C2E were cancelled, leaving Hodges only two circuit boats and Wiggins Teape to get on with. James beard went off to agricultural college in Cirencester for a year in case he could support the venture by farming. Clive Curtis kept Cougar going by slowly building up the Borg Warner turnover to an eventual quarter of a 3
million pound otherwise the venture would have ended.
overall in the Miami-Nassau race. Then it was re-sponsored again as Penthouse Rizla. Dalas recalls, ‘we changed it from a four-seater to a two-seater which reduced the front end weight of the boat. We took the wing extension off the back and we fitted four new engines each developing 230 hp. In that guise she became an extremely successful boat.’
To add to their problems, just after Wiggins Teape had been constructed, Netley suffered the highest tide for 600 years and Cougar had nearly 2 feet of water through the workshop. The unpainted wooden hull and Wiggins Teape actually started to float off its chocks, prematurely launched and Raring to go. In design and construction, this latter boat was a major challenge in that she must carry a ton and a quarter of fuel to take her round Britain. Having decided that the best place to carry the fuel was in the wing, the problem was to make that wing strong enough to take the prolonged stress of pounding through the seas, particularly after several spars had been removed to make room for the tanks. There was also the problem of making four separate 150 hp Mercury engines work together reliably and consistently.
At last people were beginning to believe in the offshore and Cougar catamaran. In 1975 James experimented with the C2K, its hull incorporating the first camelback cowling. There was also the marathon boat, C2H - better known as the Embassy Cougar. Frustratingly James was testing the boat on the Solent when it ran into the wash of the Isle of Wight ferry and was severely damaged. Had this not have happened, the Embassy Cougar might well have excelled in Bristol, and the Netley yard once again been besieged with C2H orders. Towards the end of 1976, Chris Hodges resigned from Cougar Marine. More recently, his design ideas had begun to differ with those held by James. Not only did Chris have his own ideas about boat building, but also he and his wife were not altogether happy with their working and living conditions. No-one had contributed so much in evolving the sound construction of increasingly large and fast and Cougars, but it was Chris’s decision and the other two abided by it.
As it turned out, thanks both to Chris Hodges’ real skill as a boat builder and to Keith Dalas’s special feel for piloting a catamaran, Wiggins Teape cleaned up on Class II races, finishing second in the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes race of 1974. The following year Dalas had it re-sponsored as Penthouse-Inverhouse and came third
So far, and Cougar had built cats for both Class II and III. If only they could get one contract for a Class I boat! That chance came in 1977, Ken Cassir, Clive’s old 4
friend, had not been having much success with a Cigarette 36 at the World Offshore Championships in South America. He suddenly had the idea of commissioning James beard to design a class I offshore cat.
of the four leading boats – with Unowat, Limit Up and Alitalia Due. If we could keep our engines going, we could win the race, because the calm sunny conditions favoured the faster top speed of our design. We allowed John Irving, navigating excellently for Alitalia Due to find the North Head buoy for us then overtook her going past Hurst Point. Towards the end of the race a helicopter timed us is doing 95 mph. Cougar had at last proved that even in Class I, catamarans could be V bottoms. Clive Curtis was so pleased with the victory that he jumped into the water.
Cassir recalls, ‘James wanted to put the engines in the wing. I asked him if he could put them in the sponsons. Yellowdrama III was built and was duly taken down to Poole to race. It was a hit of a failure; the steering was not strong enough to take the stresses of twin McLaren Chevrolet engines. But we persevered and put in new steering. But even then we had various engine problems in the races leading up to the Cowes-Torquay-Cowes. Indeed Yellowdrama III never actually finished a race.’
The following April of 1978 in the far from ideal conditions, Cassir drove Yellowdrama III to a new Class I offshore record of 92.16 mph, so underlying Cougar’s successful formula. The Class I record has been held by Cougar cats ever since. By now Americans had begun to take notice as well. After much persuasion, Ken Cassir was finally persuaded to sell Yellowdrama III to one of them - millionaire Rocky Aoki, owner of the Benihana chain of restaurants. Aoki paid some $70,000 U.S. dollars – over twice that paid by Cassir to have the boat built. She was then campaigned as Benihana.
On the day before the Cowes-TorquayCowes race, one of the engines had blown up. Working through the night John Hodder and Clive Curtis rebuilt the engine, but as Cassir said, ‘I didn’t really take it too seriously because we didn’t think we would last very long. We then left our lifejackets back in Netley and had to borrow a couple. But James nursed those engines and somehow we lasted down to Torquay, the sixth boat to get there. We had nothing to lose on the return, we started overtaking the rest of the boats one by one. At Portland Bill we were one
Further orders for Class I power boats came in, from both wealthy British drivers like commodity broker Mike Doxford, as well as from Americans lost like Joel Halpern. Clive Curtis recalls, ‘we even had to turn some orders away. Each boat would take three months to build, enabling us to build four of those big ones per year. Our order book was full up for 5
two years. But we were also trying to fit in one or two other projects such as a production catamaran sports boat, this became the CAT 900 of which we have since sold 40 boats. We were looking for something that was like a Boston Whaler, but better in performance. By giving it a narrow tunnel, we found to our surprise that the CAT 900 had both good weightlifting and weight carrying capacity. Whilst it was not too successful in the pleasure market, in the guise of the Interceptor, for carrying assault troops or even fire fighting machinery, it proved very effective.
One customer who had his new Cougar built in aluminium was Ted Toleman, 42 year old head of the Toleman Group. From 1979, Toleman who already ran a Formula One Grand Prix racing-car stable, had repeatedly asked Clive and James if they would sell him a controlling interest in Cougar. Having an inbuilt fear of working for big organisations Clive had at first refused. But then his wife of and James had outvoted him. The named their price - it was paid! Thus the Toleman Group got a 60 per cent holding of Cougar Marine. It coincided with Michel Meynard driving his 38 ft wooden Cougar to win the 1980 World Offshore Championship in Australia. Toleman also clinched the British and European championships in his Cougar, Peter Stuyvesant.
In 1979, one Cougar customer, Mrs. Betty Cook, was extremely satisfied to win the World Championship at Venice in her cat Kaama. By now Cougar was beginning to find that the problem with 100 mph wooden catamarans was that if they had an accident or fracture, the whole hull would literally shatter and disintegrate. They therefore took a leaf out of their old friend and rival, power boat designer Don Shead. His Vee-bottom race boats proved time and time again, that the flexibility of a aluminium hull gave a greater safety factor. Cougar therefore bought a controlling interest in Altech Marine of Arundel. This company built their first aluminium Cougar cat in 1980 for an American customer, Joel Halpern. She was named Beep-Beep. Five years late,r although not piloted by Halpern, BeepBeep won the World Championship. From now on aluminium would always be offered as an option.
Almost immediately, one of the benefits from the Toleman take-over came in January 1981 with Cougar purchasing a second boatyard in Miami. At first their intention had been merely to acquire a warehouse where they could service American Cougar cats. In the end, they purchased the yard on 188st street where Don Aronow had formerly built his successful V-bottomed at Donzi race boats. Again seeking wider horizons, Cougar Holdings Limited, also acquired further building facilities when they bought a 50 per cent share in Asia Craft in the Philippines. The first catamaran built at this yard was the revolutionary Arneson-Borg Warner Drive, making full use of the surface piercing propeller configuration developed by American Howard Arneson. 6
Tragically of all this expansion coincided with James Beard being diagnosed with myeloid leukaemia, an incurable disease. Typical of his restless energy, despite going through debilitating and demoralising chemotherapy treatment, James started to raise funds for the Royal Marsden Hospital in Surrey. Today a new wing of six isolation units is in operation thanks to his considerable efforts. He himself made constant visits to the hospital for blood and marrow transplants. He even agreed to feature in a heart rending TV documentary programme ‘In Their Hands’.
knots. Extraordinary to think that the entire length of the 1969 Volare II could have been fitted into the beam of this Cougar juggernaut. Not that progress had slowed down with a slightly smaller Cougars. Taken for example, an aluminium 46 footer Vbottomed called Mercruiser Special US-1,
Despite all this, James beard never believed that leukaemia was going to get him. Ironically, it didn’t. One day early 1982 he said to Clive, ‘I’m going to run out of puff one day you and you know that don’t you?.’ On April 13th that year, unable to cope with the rejection of the bone marrow transplant he went into a coma. James Beard died in Brompton Hospital in London aged only 38 and at the peak of his career. Powerboating’s entire Hall of Fame attended his funeral.
built specially for George Morales to drive at the 1983 Key West World Offshore Championships (a glass fibre or Kevlar and carbon composite version of this boat soon came to be offered as a production day boat, the US 1-46). And in rivalry to this ‘Super Boat’, a 50ft, eight ton riveted aluminium/ composite Cougar cat by the name of Popeye’s Pepsi Challenger, powered by four Mercruisers totalling 2800hp and driven by American Al Copeland – this second ’Super Boat’ clocked a new offshore speed record of 131 mph on April 5, 1984.
One of the projects with which James had charged Clive took complete just before his demise was to make their 58 ft aluminium Cougar, Dark Moon, run successfully. Never before had they tried diesel engines, especially the 1250 hp coming from each of the American V12 Detroit diesels installed. Although there were other aeration problems on the surface piercing propellers, once the underwater sections around the back step had been redesigned, Dark Moon was able to clock a formidable speed of 47.75
Alongside these continued racing successes, Clive Curtis now began to work in conjunction with J Peter Sutcliffe, a new Cougar recruit, to ease the company into defence contracts. This is exactly what Scott-Paine had done at the British Powerboat Company in nearby Hythe some 50 years before.
7
The 46ft Cougar monohull was offered as the Ultra Fast Patrol Boat 1 (UFPB 1). While the 50ft was scaled up to 56ft and offered it as the UFPB 2, to be powered by four German MTU diesels of 740hp each. In sharp contrast, Cougar’s Miami yard was also ‘dining out’ on the 10ft Cougar Cub. Clive Curtis’s his son, Steve, and two friends had wanted to build a small fun boat. Cougar Incorporated’s president Brownie saw no harm in this and some Cuban workmen were seconded to build an exactly scaled down version of the larger cat design – a fatal approach because the result usually proves unstable.
racing. During 1984 and 1985 over 1000 Cougar Cubs were built and sold on both sides of the Atlantic. Cougar of Miami, whose workforce had risen to sixty, were at one stage turning out 30 Cubs a week. In even sharper contrast to these mass produced playthings was a 65ft millionaire’s plaything by the name of the Virgin Atlantic Challenger. Altech Marine built her twin aluminium hulls through the winter of 1984 and 85. She was installed with V12 NTU German diesels each
Nevertheless, painted in immaculate racing colours, it looked very attractive, so was placed on the Cougar stand that the Miami Boat Show. To everyone’s surprise, some 20 orders were placed for this baby version. Behind the scenes, another nine prototypes then had to be hurriedly built before a cat of only 10ft able to take anything from 7 to 25hp could be made to plane and turn.
developing 1960hp at 2100 RPM. Anyone in the slightest bit interested in Powerboating well knows the outcome of that brave venture. After completing 2973 nautical miles across the Atlantic at an average speed of 41.5 knots the Challenger hit submerged debris and sank less than 200 miles from the UK Coast him.
But once they got it right sales literally took off. And at the already mentioned World Offshore Championships in Key
Not that racing was neglected during the 1985 season either. On July 30th the select volley five ‘Super Boats’ left Miami on the 1257 mile haul to New York to see who would win the Chapman Challenge Trophy. The winner was a Cougar – Maggie’s Mercruiser Special powered by 2400hp of detuned Mercruiser petrol engines. She was driven by George Morales for a total of 19 hours at an average speed of 64.4mph, so claiming ‘the winner takes all’ $500,000 purse. One of Morales throttle men was Steve Curtis.
West at the end of 1983, 15 privately owned Cubs turned up and began stock 8
The sweetest taste of success was unfortunately soured by the fatal accident at the World Offshore Powerboat Championships at Key West. Clive Curtis explains, ‘we realised in the early days that cats were going to go at 100 mph and that’s and at that speed if you have an accident, it doesn’t matter if it folds around you. At least you’re a safe inside it. We’ve now gone past that and are into another nasty stage - 110 plus mph where the cat can flip or change in attitude and nose dive with the wind blowing the hull down into and under the water. I estimate that in his fatal accident, the late Dick Fulham took 10-G, which put his body weight up to 3000lbs which is why he folded 2 frames forward and all the deck down flat in his cat.’
A co-production agreement has been signed with the People’s Republic of China to build commercial cats in that country. Among those boats being built in the UK is Crusader, the 12m British challenger yacht for the America’s Cup - about which Clive Curtis at 53 years old, chuckles that he is merely returning to the lost love of his youth - building and sailing boats. Then there is Pegasus, a catamaran cabin cruiser being built for regular American customer of Cougars, Michell Meynard and built using the very latest technologies in carbon and composite’s. Then there are other more conventional Cougar catamarans, like the latest one built for Popeye racing team; very likely to lift the Offshore Powerboat Record to about 152 to 170 mph.
1986 promises an even more fascinating picture in the 20 year old saga we have so far related. Cougar Inc at Miami has been sold off. Cougar Marine in Netley has been sold off. And Cougar’s new centre of operations is the former historic yard of Fairey Marine also on the Hamble, with 174,000 sq ft under cover. Over 20 times the space occupied at Netley.
Clive Curtis puts it this way. Out of the last thirty five main offshore powerboat races in the United States, we have won 33 of them. That’s not bad record - one which I am sure James Beard, had he lived, would have been very proud of.
9
James Beard Circuit Catamaran Designer Extraordinaire Part 1. Text: Steve Pinson. Photos: Graham Stevens. There is no doubt in any one’s mind that James Beard was an extraordinarily gifted boat designer. In this, the first of three articles we will be taking a look at how he approached circuit catamaran design and the top drivers who chose to race Cougar cats.
1969. The Cougar C3-A. An experimental design by James Beard that never really ran well.
1970. The Pits, Paris Six Hour race. From left: Bill Shakespeare’s V-Hull (blue and white); 15ft Shakespeare (red, no 41), which was my entry; Bob Spalding’s no 39; Tom Percival’s OMC Factory Molinari no 38; the Cougar pickle fork (green) no 37. 11
1972, Fairford. Peter Thorneywork purchased this Cougar in 1972 and called her Snaggle Puss. This was the first Cougar he had I think. He ran it for the first time at Windermere in October 1972.
Cougar Marathon Boat Woodmariner in the 1971 Windermere 3 hour Grand Prix. Driven by James Beard and Clive Curtis. This was the race in which Bill Shakespeare lost his life in practice.
12
13
Article taken from Boat Sport, December 1956
14
The Countess of Arran and the World Electric Powerboat Record Lady Fiona Arran definitely had a thing for speed. Fiona Bryde Colquhoun was born on July 20 1918, the daughter of Sir Iain Colquhoun, 7th Bt of Luss, a war hero and explorer. Her mother, Dinah Tennant, was a champion golfer. Brought up on the banks of Loch Lomond, and educated locally, Fiona recalled her first thrill in a powerboat in 1932 when, aged 13, she rode in Miss England III, a hydroplane powered by Rolls-Royce aero-engines, during its trial run on the loch. On a summer’s evening just before the war, she was aboard her husband’s (Sir Arthur ‘Boofy’ Gore; later the Earl of Arran) supercharged Mercedes car when it achieved 100mph down Oxford Street. Her comment? ‘That was rather fun!’ During the war she was a driver with the Wrens, and subsequently put her mettle to the test on the newly-built M1. When a policeman stopped her (yet again), she said: ‘Fast? Get in, officer, and I’ll show you what fast is.’ In 1965, she witnessed the Paris Six Hours circuit marathon on the Seine. She bet a friend that the following year she would be one of the starters. True to her word, in 1966 she was the sole woman competitor and finished 14th out of 90, in a monohull boat named Badger I.
When circuit racing lost its charm, Lady Arran progressed to offshore. In Badger II, a 20ft Don Shead design, she quickly set a new speed record of 55mph for Class III offshore powerboats. For the 1970 season she was at the helm of Badger III, a Cougar catamaran. She then turned to Lorne Campbell, a young naval architect, who designed a series of three-point hydroplanes in which Lady Arran competed in offshore races. Having broken the Class I record on Windermere in 1971, she lifted the Class D championship in 1976 in the 26ft Skean-Dhu (Gaelic for “dagger”). Campbell next came up with Cael-naMara (“Song of the Sea”), a 30ft reverse three-pointer with three Mercury outboard engines on the back. But the craft’s performance disappointed, and Lady Arran reverted to Skean-Dhu, in which, in 1979, she set a new Class II world record of 93mph. On August 11 the following year she piloted the vessel, with its twin 225hp Mercury outboards, to 102.45mph on Lake Windermere.
Skean-Dhu
She made a late comeback on water, helping to design and construct a revolutionary electrically-propelled 15ft hydroplane named An Stradag (The Spark). She was designed by Lorne Campbell and built by Nick Barlow of Mayday Marine, Woolston, Southampton, of gabon plywood bonded together with epoxy resin to form a 3 point hydroplane 15ft long and weighing in at just 210 lbs. She used four packs of SB40 aircarft starter batteries and four Lynch motors driving through chains to two three bladed surface piercing propellers. On November 22 1989 she piloted the tiny craft to another record, achieving a silent and environmentally-friendly 50.825mph. This beat the previous record set by Miss Nickel Eagle in 1978, by a clear 5mph. Lady Arran was then 71.
Then in December 1987 at Regents Canal, Little Venice, West London, five skiffs fitted with electric outboard motors and one standard 12v Oldham battery, cruised around a 3/4 mile course (1320 yards) until their batteries were exhausted. The winner of this event organised by Lucas, was Andrew Wolstenholme in his 15 foot boat Chippendale-Sprite. This boat was powered by a prototype radial armature, permanent magnet built by Cedric Lynch.
Lady Arran signals her satisfaction
Following in the footsteps of Fiona, Countess of Arran, on November 1st 2005, Helen Loney added more than 18mph to the record when she took to Coniston Water in the restored An Stradag, with an average speed of 68.1mph. The 24 year old peaked at 71.8mph but it was her average that will go down in the Guinness Book of Records. The boat had spent a decade on display in the Lakeland Motor Museum at Holker Hall before being snapped up and given a refit by Penrith man Henry Engelen,
Lady Arran on her record run
The seed for this record attempt was planted three years earlier by a group of men keen to sweep away the prejudices against electric motor boating as being anything other than a sedate 6mph for a limited distance. So it was that in September 1986 Rupert Latham (Steam & Electric Launch Company of Wroxham, Norfolk) and Kevin Desmond steered the 21ft Frolic 998 out onto the Norfolk Broads and cruised continuously for 23 hours, covering 101 miles without recharging.
Helen Loney during her record attempt 16
A quarter of the year gone already and we are still in the process of compiling all the paperwork necessary to apply for Charity Commission registration. It has been an interesting year so far. We have taken on stewardship of An Stradag – the boat in which the Countess of Arran, and then later, Helen Loney, achieved the World Electric Boat Speed Record (see article in this issue). We have also been donated the Bert Savidge Collection, which consists of a late 1940s Jacoby hydroplane hull and twenty two outboards from various eras. Bert was a member of the Lowestoft and Oulton Broad Motor Boat Club and was the winner of the 1949 Daily Mirror Trophy. We feel very privileged to have been given this collection and our thanks go to John Savidge and Dave and Chris Steer for what is a very special Collection. We have been invited to have a stand and boats at this year’s Venture Challenge Cup, which will be taking place in Ireland. The offshore event covers 7 days – starting from Cork and ending in Dublin Harbour, where we will have the opportunity to put a boat on the water. With an expected total attendance of over a million, it should be some event.
Helen Loney after her Record run
Bert Savidge
The Following Article is Taken from the April 1957 issue of Boat Sport magazine
18
21
AJG Electrical, Norwich Expert electrical services and installation 01603 446190 ___________________
iPage web hosting Great value Superb support www.ipage.com
22
Editor’s Ramblings
No motor sport can survive or move forward without sponsorship. But first the Governing Body and the clubs need to think about how to get more people interested in the sport. The only way is to take the sport to the people. Like it or not, it was the events like those held in Bristol, London and Paris that gave the sport its kudos and attracted large numbers of spectators, and consequently sponsors.
With another race season quickly approaching it’s always a time for positive thinking and a vague hope that the sport we all love will begin to start back on the road to recovery. I was watching a TV programme last night – ‘The Snooker Mavericks’ including interviews with Barry Hearn. Before Barry became its promoter snooker was a non- televised sport with only those who played, having any real interest. He turned it into a multi-million pound sport with some of the highest viewing figures for any televised sporting event. And by utilising the individual personalities of those who played, he made them all household names. When he moved on to other things, including the World Darts Tournaments, snooker went into the doldrums. So much so that a couple of years ago he took back over the running of the sport – and once again its popularity is on the increase.
On another topic close to my heart, I heard recently that the RYA are insisting that anyone racing on non cell boat has to wear a full face helmet. In the days when there weren’t any cell boats, it was always considered more of a risk to wear a full face helmet because of the risk from bucketing, when the driver hit the water. I don’t know who does the Governing Body’s assessment of these things but they certainly haven’t done a risk assessment on the best helmet design for drivers who aren’t strapped into their craft. I totally agree with a comment I heard recently from Bernie Ecclestone. He said, referring to F1 and the FIA. ‘Tear up the rule book and start again from scratch.’
You might ask what this has to do with powerboat racing. Only that we have never really had anyone who could put together all the great elements of powerboat racing and package them into a marketable product.
Let’s tailor Health and Safety to suit our sport rather than making the sport fit the often ludicrous Health and Safety policies that are decided on without any real thought regarding fitness for purpose.
I know for a fact that there are many out there who view sponsorship and marketing as dirty words, and I suppose for the lucky ones who have enough funds of their own, they don’t have to think about finding sponsors.
Comment welcome: to Roy Cooper at fastonwater@live.co.uk 23