Classic Boat February 2025

STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES, EDITOR

It's awards time again

I always like to remind readers how our awards started, in 2007, to honour the huge, and rather unconventional rebuild carried out to the world's largest gaff cutter – Lulworth. It's since grown beyond restoration to encompass powered vessels (the rather fussy moniker reflects the fact that they're not all motorboats –electricity and steam feature here too), spirit-of-tradition sailing yachts and people. Our awards, over the years, have been won by a 320mph hydroplane, a 12ft dinghy, an ex-cargo steam ship, the odd superyacht... and an awful lot of lovely, normal old timberplanked sailing yachts. The hydroplane (it was Bluebird K7) and the steam ship (Gonca) were outliers of course. More generally, the shortlist gives a good indication of what's going on in this little world of ours. Readers with sharp eyes will have noticed the return (this year and last year) of a great number of sailing yacht restorations – the bread and butter on which these awards are built. Motorboats also remain strong, particularly with the 2025 Dunkirk return looming, and this year, we had three small, very unusual newly-built sailing boats. So of course, they had to have their own category. Vote at awards.classicboat.co.uk from 3 January on.

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COVER STORY

4 . FIGHT CLUB

e NY40 Rowdy, which has reverted to ga rig to go toe to toe with Chinook

12 . PACIFIC NORTHWEST

Out and about at the late-season events in Victoria and Port Townsend

COVER STORY

20 . DIPPED IN SUNSHINE

e restoration of a beach-built Carriacou sloop in Antigua

30 . UKNOWN CONSERVATOR

An appreciation of the late Chris Cracknell, unsung hero

COVER STORY

32 . AWARDS 2025

e boats that lit up the the world

44 . FRENCH CONNECTION

When Renault teamed up with a ship builder... to build a small runabout

COVER STORY

50 . ALL DECKED OUT

A fashion shoot aboard an 8-M yacht in Sydney Harbour

54 . ALASKAN ADVENTURE

Alaska to the Paci c Ocean through the Bering Sea

60 . SPIRITED AWAY PART 2

We nish with a look at the hulls, rigs and design methods of the world of SoT

68 . BARUNA

Our series on the restoration of the S&S yawl... this time the deck

Tom Cunliffe Ginny Jones

SUMMMER CLOUD ALASKA

RENAULT ROCCA

FIGHTING FORTY

In this, part one of a two-part series, we look at the life, times and success of the 1916-built, Nat Herreshoff-designed New York 40 Rowdy

WORDS NIGEL SHARP

PHOTOS JAMES ROBINSON TAYLOR

In 1915 the New York Yacht Club commissioned Nat Herreshoff to produce a new one-design, 40ft (12.2m) LWL, which would be suitable for cruising as well as racing, and which would bridge the gap between the 1905 New York 30s and the 1913 New York 50s. The result was the New York 40 class – or the Fighting Forties as they would become known – a gaff cutter (or, with the forestays for both headsails converging at the stem and with the aft of the two sails being the larger one, perhaps it is better described as a sloop with a jib topsail). Twelve of the new boats – each with custom interior fit-outs – were ordered by members of the NYYC and all of them were built in about six months and launched within a fortnight of each other in the spring of 1916. One of these NYYC was Holland Duell, a prominent lawyer and politician whose grandfather had helped to form the Republican Party and who had previously owned a New York 30 called Rowdy, the same name Holland gave his new boat. Prioritising sailing over his career during that first season, he competed in at least 38 races on Long Island Sound, albeit without distinction, and ended it by taking part in the NYYC’s Annual Cruise along with about 100 other yachts. By that time, it was clear that the NY40s had a series flaw in that they carried a lot of weather helm. Herreshoff may have first known of this after sailing on Rowdy soon after her launch. So it was that in November Herreshoff designed a new sail plan with a 5ft (1.5m) bowsprit and correspondingly larger headsails, and this was adopted by every boat for the 1917 racing season that was cancelled after the USA entered the Great War, during which Holland served with the American Expeditionary Forces with great distinction, ending as a lieutenant colonel.

It wasn’t until 1920 that Rowdy, or any of the other New York 40s, sailed again. While racing in 30kts of wind in Larchmont YC’s regatta that year, Holland fell overboard and seemed to be in serious trouble for a while before his crew were able to pick him up; but as soon as he was back on board he ordered them to continue racing. Rowdy wasn’t commissioned the following year as he decided to prioritise his political career; and in 1923 he chartered her to SG Shepard while he was trying to resolve his marital problems. So far the opportunity to sail Rowdy for even two consecutive seasons had evaded him, but from that point of view things would now change for the better, as 1924 proved to be his most active, successful season. Rowdy raced more than 43 times with many victories, one of which was the coveted Championships of the Yacht Racing Association of Long Island Sound. Race reports

Above:Rowdy in 1920 with Holland Duell at the helm

Below: Rowdy (on the right) at the start of a race with other New York Forties in 1916

frequently appeared in the New York Times and other newspapers with headlines such as “Rowdy home first in Larchmont Race”, “Rowdy leads fleet of 95 by 22 sec”, “Rowdy home first by only one second”, and “Rowdy is first in drifting race off Larchmont”. Holland then raced Rowdy keenly for the next seven consecutive seasons, with many more victories. “He absolutely loved taking [Rowdy] out on Long Island Sound, where he was always able to find peace and the true inner happiness that would provide balance to his life,” his daughter Harriet-Anne wrote much later. “Rowdy…was his sanctuary, a place of healing, a place where his stress faded away as soon as he stepped aboard. In fact the more stressful father’s life became, the greater was his need to sail aboard Rowdy.”

NEAR MISS WITH NIAGARA FALLS

Holland’s last serious racing season was in 1931. He then took up flying, and although he still sailed Rowdy from time to time, she played second fiddle to his new hobby. In 1936 he transferred ownership of Rowdy to his second wife Emilie who officially owned her for four years. Not much is known of Rowdy’s history for the next decade, except that she had three more owners –Frank Linden, Kenneth W Martin and Frank Zima – who continued to keep her in Long Island Sound. She then spent about 10 years in the Great Lakes with four

Other New York 40s

In addition to the 12 New York 40s launched in the spring of 1916, two more – with Bermudan yawl rigs designed by A Sidney DeWolf Herreshoff, Nat’s son – were built 10 years later. On two occasions the Newport to Bermuda Race was won by a 40: Memory, which had been converted to a yawl, in 1924; and one of the 1926 boats, Rugosa II, in 1928. It was this, as much as anything, that earned the class the nickname Fighting Forties. Apart from Rowdy, four (or maybe five, depending on your point of view) other 40s survive today.

In 2010, Jonno Greenwood, while he was captain of Rowdy, bought “the wreck of Chinook” – along with his partner Sandra Ugolini his brother Tim, Niall Dowling and Michael Boyd - with view to restoring her. Two years later when they ran out of money, Graham Walker bought the project and Chinook was then restored in Tunisia with a great emphasis on authenticity. Graham sold her in 2014 but she is still actively sailing in the Mediterranean.

Wizard of Bristol is in Hawaii and has been having a very slow restoration over the past 20 years with a view to turning her into a daysailer. “I tried to buy her a while back,” said Jonno.

Marilee and Rugosa II are actively sailing in the USA. And the New York 40 which is sure to provoke different opinions as to her survival is Vixen II. In the 1970s when she had fallen into considerable disrepair she was sheathed with ferro cement on her outside and then her original timber structure was removed from within that. She is now schooner rigged.

different owners, all or most of whom were said to be lawyers, and at some point during this period she had her first engine installed. The fourth of these owners was Aurelian F Wigle who is thought to have won Rowdy in an all-night craps game. In 1961 he decided to take her to Florida, via the Erie Canal, Hudson River and Inland Waterway, and it proved to be a rather more adventurous voyage than he might have hoped for. On three separate occasions early in the voyage, Rowdy had to be taken in tow: first, on just the second day, when caught in a gale; then when she missed the canal entrance and was being swept towards Niagara Falls; and finally, after losing her propellor and shaft. Reports of these misfortunes appeared in newspapers all over the country.

By 1962, Rowdy was in Bradenton, Florida, afloat but having had her ballast keel and rig removed, then the following year she was bought by Frank Winn. Frank’s previous boat, a 50ft (15.1m) schooner which had also been his family’s home, had been wrecked and he sought a replacement. After a delay sheltering from not one, but two hurricanes, Frank and his family set off to take Rowdy to California. Yet again, she had to be taken in tow three times but, after transiting the Panama Canal and a voyage lasting about a year, she eventually arrived in San Diego where the family lived aboard her for about eight years.

Rowdy then had a series of owners in California: John Barkhurst who was apparently surprised to find, after he bought her, that the internal pig iron was her only ballast; Marvin and Velma C Stokoe who, when they eventually sold her, took an Oldsmobile Cutlass car in part-exchange;

Gerry Purcell, a yacht broker who fitted a new ballast keel; and Christy Baxter who ended up donating her to a non-profit corporation, Blue Whale Sailing School, as a tax write-off. All of these owners tried, to various degrees, to restore Rowdy, but it was her next owner who really did so.

RESTORATION

When Christopher Madsen bought Rowdy in 1998, “her condition was so far gone,” he later wrote, “with rotten planks, crumbling caulking and failing fasteners, that her bilge pumps ran near continuously, straining to keep her afloat against a tide of seawater that cascaded in though a continuum of leaks.” He took her to Channel Islands Boatyard who initially refused to accommodate her for fear that she would fall apart when they lifted her, or that Christopher would run out of money and abandon her (and he did later admit that in the early stages “money was flying out of my bank account at an alarming and depressing rate”). He then spent six years working 12-hour days, seven days a week to restore her. All the frames, 90 per cent of the planking and the whole deck were replaced. A new engine was installed and all electrical and plumbing systems were renewed.

Eventually, in March 2003, Rowdy was relaunched, and for one of her first sails, Christoper invited Holland Duell’s grandsons and great grandsons to join him for a sail out to the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. Not long afterwards, Rowdy took part in her first race for half a century, the Pacific Corinthian Yacht Club’s McNish Classic, in which she came first in class and won the Bristol Boat Award for the best restored yacht. But the following year Christopher became the father of twin daughters and decided, for financial reason, to put her on the market.

THE MEDITERRANEAN YEARS

Christopher sold Rowdy in 2006 to the highly experienced racing yachtsman Graham Walker, five-time member of the British Admiral’s team (winning it once) and in charge of Britain’s White Crusader America’s Cup challenge in 1987; but he had never owned a classic boat. “He always said to me that something about the

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80ft Long Range Gentleman’s Yacht THEMARA

1962. Refit 2022. Designed by the Scottish naval architects G.L. Watson & Co. and built along traditional lines to Lloyds class by Ailsa Shipbuilding, Scotland. She has a top speed of 11 knots and boasts a maximum range of 4,000 NM, thanks to her twin Gardner engines. She has cruised extensively in all latitudes including a circumnavigation. She was also a support vessel for the filming of Luc Besson’s Atlantis. Her interior has been rebuilt using varnished mahogany, in a timeless style, with modern details for comfort.

60ft Gentleman’s Yacht KIWI

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84ft WINDWEAVER OF PENNINGTON

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2004. Refit 2022. The hull and superstructure are made of wood, mixing traditional construction and design with the latest techniques. She truly resembles the timeless elegance of more traditional classic yachts. DOLCE VITA has been designed with enjoying comfortable holidays in mind, sailing peacefully, easily and safely. Her fuel range stretches to further extended coastal trips.

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90ft New Classic Yacht WHITEFIN

34ft

LA MAGICIENNE

ROWDY

DESIGN AND BUILD Herreshoff, 1916

LOA 59ft (18m)

LWL 40ft 9in (12.4m)

BEAM 14ft 5in (4.4m)

DRAFT 8ft 3in (2.5m)

SAIL AREA 2,074sq ft (192.7sq m)

DISPLACEMENT 23.5 tonnes

shape of the boat intrigued him,” said Jonno Greenwood who joined Rowdy as captain in October 2006, soon after she arrived in the Mediterranean having been shipped from California.

Rowdy had been rigged as a bermudan cutter by one of her California owners (not for the first time, as she also had a Herreshoff-designed bermudan rig for the 1927 season before reverting to gaff) but at 19m (62ft) above deck, it was much too short. And so Jacques Faroux was commissioned to design a new rig, and Chantier Naval Pasqui at Villefranche-sur-Mer to build a new mast 5m taller, the same height as the 1927 rig. The following season, “we did alright,” recalls Jonno, but he was convinced that Rowdy’s performance was being significantly hampered by the weight and drag of her engine, a Yanmar 100hp diesel in the lazarette, hydraulically driving twin propellors. By this time he had been carrying our extensive research into the technical history of the New York 40s and he had come across a plan, drawn by Herreshoff himself in 1933, for an engine installation. So the following winter, more or less following this plan, a new lighter Yanmar engine was fitted further forward with a single conventional offset shaft and Gori folding propeller. “The difference was amazing,” said Jonno. “We won our next 22 races. We raced her with great success for the next eight seasons and had a ridiculous number of wins, although the competition wasn’t as fierce then as it is now. My favourite memory is of Graham trimming the mainsail and looking over his shoulder saying ‘don’t they know there’s a yacht race on?’.”

Below: Graham Walker holds one of the many cups Rowdy has won over the years

BACK TO GAFF

In 2014, Rowdy was sold to Howard and Donna Dyer. They already owned Koo, a 143ft (43.6m) Ed Duboisdesigned sloop they had sailed around the world twice. They had also raced her occasionally – doing the St Barths Bucket six times and winning it once, for instance – and they were keen to race more. They have certainly done so: most seasons since buying Rowdy they have typically taken part in six Mediterranean regattas, usually Antibes, Argentario, Monaco (or Imperia in alternate years), Mahon, Cannes and Saint-Tropez. Almost the only modification they made to the boat until recently was to change from wheel steering to a tiller, ironic considering Holland Duell paid $280 extra for wheel steering.

In September 2022, Rowdy was just approaching the finish in a race at Imperia when “the wind went from 4kts to 40kts in four minutes and we had all sail up,” recalled crew member Robin Elsey, and the mast went over the side. “It was bloody scary,” said Howard. Luckily no one was hurt and it wasn’t long before consideration was being given to a replacement rig. Initially discussions focused on another bermudan rig, until spirited encouragement from various people suggested that a gaff rig should be considered, for the sake of originality, but also to allow boat-for-boat racing against gaff-rigged sistership Chinook and, perhaps one day, Marilee.

So after new spars were made by VMG Yachtbuilders, Rowdy was back racing this summer with the gaff rig Herreshoff designed in late 1916. At the Vela Clásica Menorca regatta in Mahon in August, Rowdy had some extraordinarily close racing with Chinook, which has the exact same rig, finishing just eight seconds behind in one race, for instance. “Previously, we were always ahead of everyone but our handicap killed us, which was a bit boring,” said Howard. “But now we are absolutely neck and neck and I can’t emphasise enough how exciting that is. It’s brilliant.”

Next month – the new rig

Above: Rowdy with her bermudan rig and wheel steering, hard on the wind

SASKIA K26

“SASKIA” International 8Mr - K26 - William Fife & Son – 1931

"SASKIA" International 8 Mr 26 - William Fife & Son – 1931

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be the next custodian of the most iconic 8mR ever built. Seawanhaka Cup (USA) winner 1931 – 1936 Berlin Olympics – Sayonara Cup winner 1955. Represented in both the Royal Yacht Squadron (UK) and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron (AUS) in full Silver Models to commemorate her outstanding successes.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be the next custodian of the most iconic 8mR ever built. Seawanhaka Cup (USA) winner 1931 – 1936 Berlin Olympics – Sayonara Cup winner 1955

Represented in both the Royal Yacht Squadron (UK) and Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron (AUS) in full Silver Models to commemorate her outstanding successes.

Saskia is configured to race in the 8mR Neptune, Classic class. She has been immaculately maintained, has a full North Sails wardrobe and is as competitive today as she was in 1931.

Saskia is configured to race in the 8mR Neptune, Classic class. She has been immaculately maintained, has a full North Sails wardrobe and is as competitive today as she wa s in 1931.

For more information please contact – Miles Stratton +44 (0)7912 038207 Miles Stratton Marine – miles@milesstrattonmarine.co.uk I www.milesstrattonmarine.co.uk

James Robinson Taylor

VICTORIA CLASSIC BOAT SHOW

Celebrating 45 years

WORDS AND PHOTOS JAN HEIN

In late August last year, the 45th Victoria Classic Boat Show filled the city’s inner harbour with a stunning display of power, sail, and working vessels. The annual event, which began in 1978 as a celebration of Canada’s west coast maritime heritage, drew 83 boats from throughout the province, Alaska, and waters of Puget Sound and the Pacific Coast.

Unlike festivals with a schedule of speakers and demonstrations, this event, hosted by the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, is strictly about boats. All weekend, owners conducted tours and told build and history facts; plein air artists and musicians performed on decks; and a team of overly qualified judges combed every entrant in search of winners for a list of fitting awards. Among them were builders Abernathy and Gaudin, designer Tad Roberts, and sailmaker Carol Hasse.

Among the fleet were boats built for the timber trade, a US Coast Guard Geodetic Survey vessel, several that served in WWII. Some fished and a few served as missionary outpost churches. All were gems, yet two in particular stood out for their age and recent rebuilds.

Dorothy, built in Victoria in 1897, served as queen of this year’s fleet, and the infamous Tally Ho, built in 1910, made her boat show debut, earning the People’s Choice Award and Best Overall Sailboat.

The 1938 Midnight Sun hosted Honorary Commodores aboard for the traditional Sail Past, then sail lockers were emptied for the big race, despite a serious lack of wind. Sail training schooners Pacific Grace and Pacific Swift led the drift that culminated in wins for Tally Ho in Class 1, Lorraine in Classic II, and Sir Issac in the schooner class. A total of 29 awards were accepted at a lavish banquet, including Alembic’s win of the coveted Master of Disaster.

Sweethearts of the Salish Sea

WORDS AND PHOTOS JAN HEIN

In early September last year, tents and stages filled Washington State’s Point Hudson for the 47th Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. Like a travelling circus, performers, exhibitors, boats and crew travelled from near and far for the three-day event honoring wooden creations and the skills that get them to the water’s edge.

The schedule o ered so many speakers and demonstrations, hands-on opportunities, and non-stop kid-friendly activities that choosing what to do was exhausting. Highlights were traditional rope makers from Norway’s Hardanger Maritime Centre, half day workshops with systems expert Nigel Calder, and an international panel of women boatbuilders from the US, UK, and Italy. Salish Sea heritage was showcased with a Haida Gwaii sailmaking and canoe building project, two films from the Lummi Nation, and a cedar canoe from the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. For those who like sharp tools and making a mess, the expanded Woodworking tents were a hit with lathes, draw knives, band-aides, everything needed to make and take home a DIY project. Vendors o ered maritime art, building products, and boat gear. Chesapeake Light Craft displayed dozens of designs; Grizzly Tools demo’d their machines, and the NW Maritime Welcome Center told the history of the festival, beginning in 1977.

With so many boats, racing was inevitable. Sailing options included the under 26’ class and the NW Schooner Cup, each with only a whisper of wind. Human powered craft fared better for the Rowing Race, open to all human-powered craft, and the Row, Row, Row Your Boat Rally. The grand finale Sail By had perfect conditions, and then, the boats headed o , on all points of the compass.

Van Den Heede honoured with Pindar/IACH Award

Jean-Luc Van Den Heede was awarded the Pindar/IACH Cape Horners Lifetime Achievement Award during the a star-studded Cape Horners annual lunch in November. The 78-year-old French sea-dog has rounded The Horn 12 times – the most for any living circumnavigator: six times solo east-about, four times solo westabout, once as a member of a two-man delivery crew and once while cruising in 2014. The former maths teacher still holds the world record for the fastest solo west-about circumnavigation of the world, which he completed in 122 days, 14 hours, 3 minutes and 49 seconds back in 2004, together with the record for the Golden Globe Race set in 2018.

Receiving the award from long-time yacht sponsor Andrew Pindar OBE, Jean-Luc said “I am quite surprised and very honoured. In France, some people think that I am not normal, but I can tell you I am completely normal and very happy with my life. I would not exchange anything.”

The French sailing legend began sailing at the age of 17 and was soon bitten by the bug, starting out in dinghies before graduating to cruising yachts, a Corsair and later a Cape Horn. Like many now looking for a pathway to events like the Vendée Globe solo round the world race, he cut his ocean racing teeth in the Mini Transat, coming second both in 1977 and 1979.

He went on to finish second in Class Two in the 1986/7 BOC Challenge sailing his 45 footer Let’s Go – his first solo circumnavigation – and returned to this event in 1994/5, to finish third in Class One, despite running aground spectacularly south of the Sydney stopover after falling asleep in the cockpit of his yacht Vendée Enterprises

Van Den Heede also competed in the inaugural Vendée Globe non-stop round-the-world yacht race, finishing third in his 60ft (18m) yacht, 36.15 MET . That podium place prompted him to leave teaching and become a full-time sailor. He raced in the second Vendée Globe in 1992, finishing second in Sofap-Helvim, in the

His seven-year campaign to break the solo west-about circumnavigation record against the prevailing conditions took four attempts before finally re-crossing the Ushant start/finish line in 2004 after 122 days 14 hours, 3 minutes and 49 seconds at sea. He beat the previous record by a massive 29 hours 50 minutes! Perhaps, Jean-Luc’s most significant achievement was winning the 2018/19 Golden Globe Race at the age of 73, aboard this Rustler 36 cruising yacht Matmut , despite being pitchpoled in 65-not winds and huge rolling seas deep in the Southern Ocean which led to the connecting bolt attaching all four lower shrouds tearing a 9in split in his aluminium mast while leading the race by some 2,000 miles. His initial thought was to head to Chile to make repairs, but that would have relegated him to the Chichester Class for entrants making one stop. That prompted him to work out a way to jury rig the lower shrouds to the spreader root and rejoin the race. By then, he had lost 1,000 miles to 2nd placed Dutch rival Mark Slats who continued to eat into Jean-Luc’s lead back up the Atlantic. By the Azores, the two were almost level. It led to a nail-biting final few days on the race back to Les Sables d’Olonne to keep the Dutchman at bay, which The French veteran did... just... winning the race in what remains a record time of 211 days, 23hours and 12 minutes.

Another memorable moment during the Cape Horner’s lunch came when American Cape Horn veteran Skip Novak spoke about the granite ‘Memory Stone’ he brought back from the beach below the famous cape during his first visit to the Horn, cruising his highlatitude charter yacht Pelagic in 2008. “Touch the stone, and the memories of your first rounding of the Horn will come flooding back,” he told diners. Many took the opportunity to do so. Barry Pickthall

yawl-rigged, narrow-beamed yacht nicknamed ‘Le Cigare Rouge’ –

The Red Cigar

All change

Two of the most notable classic yachts in the world have just been bought… and another is up for sale

Istanbul museum buys Cangarda

The Rahmi M Koç Museum of Istanbul (est 1994) recently expanded its massive maritime collection by acquiring the 138ft (42m) steel-hulled American steam yacht Cangarda of 1901. She was built by Pusey & Jones of Wilmington (Delaware) for the Michigan ‘lumber baron’ Charles Canfield and named after his and his wife’s surnames: CANfield and GARDner. During the second ownership in Canada in 1927, the yacht hosted the then Prince of Wales, his brother Prince George (later Duke of Kent) and the British and Canadian PMs: Stanley Baldwin and William Lyon Mackenzie King. After years of progressive neglect, Cangarda eventually sank in 1999.

A rescue was undertaken by Elizabeth Meyer and the hull then lay on the hard at Fairhaven (Mass) with the machinery and woodwork in store. She was found thus in 2002 by the late Bob McNeil, who had her thoroughly restored by Jeff Rutherford between 2004 and 2009. Cangarda now has a new home in Istanbul: a museum famous for its care of a great number of classic yachts and working boats, the oldest of which is Rosalie, a Dutch steam tug of 1873. Just like Rosalie, Liman 2, Esra, Ysolt and Gonca – to name a few craft in the museum’s collection – Cangarda still runs on steam. See rmk-museum.org. Bruno Cianci

Round-the-world sailor buys Atlantic

The steel three-masted schooner Atlantic, built in 2010 by the Van der Graaf Boatyard in the Netherlands, defined the high-water mark in big replica yacht building. It wasn’t just the stats – 212ft (64.5m) LOS, six lavish guest cabins, three masts and 18 sails – but her connection in name and design to the original Atlantic (no longer extant), which, under legendary Scottish sailor Charlie Barr, set a transatlantic speed record that lasted an incredible 75 years. The yacht was sold by broker Bernard Gallay to a French owner who will keep her in PortSaint-Louis du Rhone on the French Mediterranean coast, but she’s currently in Holland undergoing a programme of winter refit and maintenance work. After that, he plans to sail Atlantic around the world. One wonders now if the man who commissioned the yacht, Ed Kastelein, might have another great new build in mind, now that he’s freed up a bit of cash from the sale? Watch this space!

Mariette for sale

Mariette, like the other boats on this page, is one of the most famous yachts in the world today. She's an NG Herreshoff design, built by Herreshoff Mfg in 1915 in steel plate and her rig is arguably the most romantic of all rigs... two-masted gaff schooner. She's been winning her fair share of races on the classic circuit for around 25 years now, with regular maintenance to keep her in shape, most notably a thorough two-year restoration at Pendennis from 2017-18 and a complete rebuild of her main engines in 2021. She's 107ft 6in (32.7m) on deck, which is big enough for a lot of accommodation below: six guests in three cabins, eight crew in a further three, master cabin with office, one further double, and a twin. The interior is a lesson in traditional comfort, of an appearance that might have satisfied the Wizard of Bristol himself, and it probably goes without saying that at this size, and in steel, this would make a superlative cruising yacht as well as one to race around the cans. She's on for E7 million at edmiston.com.

Classic Yacht Symposium 2025

The 12th Classic Yacht Symposium will be held in its usual venue of Helsinki, Finland, on 29 March. The event attracts a worldwide attendance and combines a day of formal lectures with great social events and incredible networking opportunities. This year the focus is on offshore racing. There will be long and short format talks and for overseas visitors a chance to visit the stunning maritime museum in nearby Turku. The full line-up of speakers has not yet been finalised,

but Robin Knox-Johnston and Marie Tabarly (Pen Duick VI) have been confirmed, as have Steve Tuschiya (America’s Cup historian), Claes Hultling (paralympic sailor), our own Barry Pickthall (author and yachting journalist for 50 years) and Leo Goolden (restorer of Tally Ho). Symposium tickets are E78 and the symposium-and-dinner ticket is E160. You want the latter. Visit helsinkisailing.com/en/classic-yachtsymposium-2025. This is likely to sell out.

From the pages of history – Coelan

The ketch Colean, designed by GL Watson & Co and built by McGruers, pictured in The Yachtsman soon after she was launched in 1939. Her name was changed to Lady Elspeth in 1948, and her last entry in Lloyd’s Register of Yachts was in 1974. Her fate after that is unknown.

The Association of Yachting Historians has digitised 92 volumes of The Yachtsman (18911940) and the complete Lloyd’s Registers of Yachts (1878-1980) and these can be bought on memory sticks. yachtinghistorians.org

West Country Classics prize-giving

At the end of November, the prizegiving for the 2024 West Country Classics Series was held at Saltash Sailing Club. Once again, the series consisted of the three classic regattas which took place in Falmouth, Fowey and Dartmouth. Just one boat – the 1921 6-Metre Sheila, designed by Burgess and built by the Herreshoff Manufacturing Co – competed in all three regattas, while 14 others took part in two. So it was Sheila that took the overall prize with Ben Morris’s 1976 Swan 55 Lulotte in second place with Annemarie Coyle’s Nicholson 43 Sarabande of Dart third. In 2025 the series will have a fourth regatta, Looe Luggers & Classics, which will take place from Friday 25 to Sunday 27 July, while Dartmouth Classics will be on Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 June, Falmouth Classics from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 June, and Fowey Classics from Tuesday 29 July to Friday 1 August. Nigel Sharp

Pictured right: Rosemary Tomison of Lulotte, Charlie Couture of Sheila and Peter Simons of Sarabande of Dart

A PASSING

Andrew Robinson, owner of Antigua’s Woodstock Boatbuilders, knows a thing or two about saving classic boats, so it was the perfect scenario when he got his hands on Carriacou sloop Summer Cloud

WORDS JAN HEIN

CLOUD

Building wooden vessels at the edge of the sea is woven into the history of the tiny island of Carriacou. Traditionally built to carry fish and cargo, these wicked fast sloops now race throughout the Caribbean, thanks to a renaissance of interest and talent, fuelled by the love of Summer Cloud

The 39’ (11.88m) beauty was commissioned in 1995 by Antiguan businessman, Eddie Barreto, to replace his Carriacou sloop, Summer Wind. Years of fishing had taken a toll on the 1982 boat, so he asked Baldwin DeRoche to build a new one on Carriacou’s sister island, Petite Martinique.

The new vessel was bronze fastened, with silver Bali planks from Guyana, a green heart keel, white cedar frames, and local floors. When hull and rig were complete, Barreto sailed her home to Antigua where she met the man who would ultimately save her, time and time again. Andrew Robinson, owner of Antigua’s infamous Woodstock Boatbuilders, recalled, “I was the first person to walk aboard Summer Cloud upon her arrival. I know the boat intimately.” He installed an engine, put the interior in, added knees and stringers, everything built with the skill of a refined shipwright, but to West Indies workboat standards.

Barreto raced her for some years before turning the helm over to filmmaker, Charles Hambleton, who sailed the sloop around the Caribbean. He lived aboard during the filming of Pirates of the Caribbean, giving the boat a bit of notoriety, but not the upkeep that island boats require.

Summer Cloud eventually made it to St Barts, and it was there, during one of the early West Indies Regattas, that Robinson spotted her, ready to sink. Through a twist of fate, or crazy book-keeping, the boat was signed over to him in lieu of money owed for an earlier mast repair with the caveat that Hambleton could race the boat at regattas in Antigua and St Barts. Robinson would have use of the boat the rest of the year, along with the task of keeping her alive. Everyone was happy with the deal, especially the Mayor of St Barts who gave Robinson a ‘key to the city’ for getting the derelict off the dock.

Previous page: Winner of the 2015 West Indies Regatta in St Barts

Below: A fitting detail for an island-built boat

headsail. With no time to spare, Robinson sailed 400 miles south to Carriacou with what he described as, “A crew of characters and near-do-wells.”

Yachtsmen J Linton Rigg started the Carriacou Regatta in 1965 to bolster boatbuilding on the island. Since then, the event runs each summer without ample rules, but with plenty of ingenuity. Robinson’s rebuild efforts paid off. “We beat everyone,” he said, though they only claimed that honour after fighting off a bogus protest for running an engine that the boat didn’t have. The Antiguan-flagged Summer Cloud was the clear outlier that year, prompting rum shop fights, outrageous betting, and a lasting legacy.

During the Round-the-Island-Race, Summer Cloud wore every sail. “We didn’t do as well as we could,” Robinson said, “So for the 2nd race, we changed tactics.” With a rock-star crew from Antigua Rigging, they ascertained that the start happened only when the top competitor, Deep Vision showed up. Once it did, Summer Cloud flew from Watering Bay to the first turn off Petite Martinique (PM), then downwind, where ballast was jettisoned. “There was no turning mark off PM, so we asked the committee about it. Do you know what they said? It don’t matter!” Robinson learned later that amongst the chaos, Summer Cloud’s builder had been watching the race from an anchored boat, despite declining vision. When his son reported, “Dad, that’s your boat,” Baldwin DeRoche’s pride erupted into a smile.

Once back in Antigua, work began. “The first major rebuild was to pimp her out for the Carriacou Regatta,” Robinson said with a grin. “We put a huge rig on her, took internal blast out, melted it into a shoe and attached it to the bottom. It was bolted to the floors, which we changed and beefed up, then we stretched the boat 3ft and moved the mast back 3ft.” An aluminum mast from a Nicholson 34 only worked after they extended it with a telegraph pole, shaped to fit inside. “The mast grew 8ft!” Modifications continued by adding a 17ft (5.18m) carbonfibre bow sprit, scrounged from the Woodstock workshop. Acquiring the ‘perfect’ Bacon Sails mainsail prompted the alteration to the mast with beefed up spreaders and a $50 US kevlar

Looking back, Robinson admitted, “That rig was ridiculous.” Eventually it was replaced with a wooden mast.

“Now she has two masts, a racing rig for spinnakers and the like, and the other, an old gaffer. For Antigua’s Classic Regatta, we put the big rig in. She goes like crazy.” Not content to simply flaunt Summer Cloud as a race machine, Robinson enlisted the boat in an altruistic adventure.

Hurricane David left the island of Dominica without donkeys, so why not round up a few on Antigua, then sail them 120 miles to breed a new herd? Finding and corralling them required a bonafide donkey catcher, the Antiguan police, escaping an angry landowner, and of course, money. The boat was prepped; bunks and furniture were removed and four donkeys filled the space.

“The boat is double planked, but people were concerned they’d kick their way out,” said Robinson. To ease the passage, plywood, fibre lining, and carpet were added.

“The donkeys were teenagers, so on the small side. Their muzzles were tied to the beam shelf, pointed to the port side.” In a very light easterly wind, they sailed for 24 hours to their new home without incident, despite a comedic encounter with customs.

Summer Cloud made another heroic trip to Dominica, loaded to the gunnels with supplies after the island was damaged by a storm flood. The Antigua YC

Clockwise from top left: Charging ahead of the fleet in Antigua; Rebuilding from the keel up; Underway to Dominica during the donkey adventure; Jordi Augusti, fitting the new stem pieces; Crew Jordi Augusti experiencing his work at the Antigua Classic Regatta; The new mast leaves the Woodstock shop; (centre) Returning to the sea after seven years ashore; Precious cargo on their way to Dominica

and Red Cross collected donations and Robinson delivered them. “The boat was literally so full that you couldn’t get down below,” he explained. “We had to run a bilge pump handle to the deck and from there we pumped the whole way.”

In 2017, Robinson bought new North Sails. The bigger main and jib required a new mast, so he hauled the boat to get the job done in anticipation of the Antigua Classic Regatta. Between a growing list of refit projects, a precarious balance of time and money, and a world pandemic, he missed the start of that race by seven years.

Robinson and other talent from Woodstock Boatbuilders removed garboards, checked floor timbers, then replaced a rotten sternpost knee. Forestem and attached floor timbers were removed, replaced with one laminated of 20’ Angelique planks. New floor timbers were installed with 3/4” bronze bolts. Bottom planking was replaced with Sapele scarfs to avoid the need for butt-blocks. Several new deck beams and new hanging knees went in. “For the deck, we cut the bulwark stations at deck level, put a plywood deck on top, all the way over to the sheer plank, to make sure it was secured properly, then glassed over it. We drilled down through that into the top bulwark station, then set in a rod of threaded stainless or bronze threaded stud, then put the top half of the bulwark station on that and the cap rail on the top.” The elaborate deck system was created to prevent water intrusion that ultimately kills these island boats. “It stiffened the boat right up.” Jordi Augusti was the main shipwright, often working alone. He built a new doghouse, put in new transom planks, completed countless projects until there was little he hadn’t touched.

In 2024, the Antigua Classic Regatta start Robinson had hoped to make was finally within reach. In early April, the team shifted into high gear. Paint was

SUMMER CLOUD

DESIGN Baldwin DeRoche

BUILD Baldwin DeRoche

YEAR 1995

LOA 39ft (11.9m)

BEAM c12ft (3.6m)

DRAFT c5ft 6in (3.6m)

RIG Gunter sloop

applied, the rudder hung, the last layer of ply added to the coachroof, bowsprit fitted with hardware. Rigging was freed from customs, and splicing began. With less than a week to the first start, Summer Cloud was finally returned to the sea after seven years ashore.

Above: Trying out new sails on the first day of racing in the long awaited regatta

Below: Final race of the 2024 ACYR

A new mast, built by shipwright Jim Child, was stepped; internal ballast put in place; the deck painted. The following day it was rigged; more deck paint and non-skid applied between torrential rain showers; bilge pumps and a basic electrical system to run the pump, VHF, nav lights, and USB outlet were hastily installed. Then finally, Summer Cloud set off on her debut sail to English Harbour. She was ready to race, almost.

While captains and crews enjoyed a warm regatta welcome, final details on Summer Cloud were completed. She was on the start line the next day, looking like the queen of the Carriacou sloop fleet. Those on board, including Robinson, felt a mix of relief and pride. That day, she placed first in the Traditional class, sailing in a whisper of wind against three other Carriacou sloops and two other vessels.

Two weeks later, Summer Cloud returned to St Barts for the West Indies Regatta, back to where Andrew Robinson saved her from disaster. The two of them experienced many chapters together, each giving life to the other. But now, after all that work, she is ready for a future with a new owner. As for Robinson – he’s ready to save another boat.

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

34’ Bermudan Cutter designed and built by her professional shipwright owner to German Lloyds standards, launched in 2015. Finished to a very high level and maintained to the same exacting standards. Cruised from Norway to the Med. 4 berths in a stunning interior. A very classy and elegant spirit of tradition yacht.

Germany €208,000

46’ Kidby Oyster Smack built in 1907. Complete rebuild finished in 2003. Major upgrades since with engine installation, new interior and all new racing rig. Fast and respected boat in the Smack fleet, very well maintained and cared for. 9 berths inc. 3 doubles. 2024 survey report. A turn key racing Smack at the front of the fleet.

Essex £98,000

48’ Philip 50 Motor Yacht built by Philip & Son of Dartmouth in 1967. Well maintained yacht presented in very smart ready to go condition. 7 berths in 3 sleeping cabins plus 2 heads. Perkins 6354 diesels with huge capacity fuel tanks giving over 2000Nm range. A pedigree motor yacht of attractive size and volume.

Devon £159,000

42’ Kim Holman Cruiser Racer built by Tucker Brown in 1963. Reserve yacht for British Admirals Cup team in ’63. Sailed around the North Cape and down to St Petersburg in recent years. Very elegant and fast yacht, yet easily sailed with current rig configuration. The Aston Martin GT of the classic yacht world.

Devon £120,000

31’ Plymouth Hooker gaff cutter built in 1896. Major rebuild by Butler & Co. in 2006. 2021 survey with a raft of small jobs completed since. Basic interior fit out with 4 berths, space for a new owner to update the joinery if desired. Volvo Penta D1-30 engine new in 2012. Interestin working boat with extensive refit history.

Devon £28,000

35’ Fred Shepherd designed SELENA KING built by Harry King for Arthur Ransome in 1938. Recently brought back to the UK after many years across the Atlantic for the completion of a major rebuild in the present ownership. A historically significant yacht in fine condition. Extensive article featured January CB.

Suffolk £68,000

36’ 12 ton Hillyard launched in 1961. Perhaps the most practical size of yacht ever built by Hillyards. Major refit 2018-2021, full surveys available. Well presented, very well equipped and ready to go cruising. Incredible value for money given the quality of the boat with lots of comfortable live aboard space and volume.

Kent £25,000

63’ Fleur De Lys Motor Yacht built by Dagless Ltd in 1967, one of the largest motor yachts they designed. Elegant and commanding yacht with forward wheelhouse and funnel. 162hp Volvo diesels give easy 8 knots cruising speed. 10 berths in 4 cabins. Covered aft deck area. Major recent refit work. 2021 survey report.

Devon £150,000

BY DAVE SELBY

HENRY ALDRIDGE & SON/SOTHEBY’S

Titanic ticking time boom

Three Titanic time pieces – including one that set a £1.57m auction record for artefacts relating to the tragedy, along with two Rolexes – have one further thing in common; none belonged to anyone aboard the doomed liner that sank in 1912.

The key to the record price of the gold Tiffany pocket sold by Henry Aldridge & Son is the inscription: “Presented to Captain Rostron with the heartfelt gratitude and appreciation of three survivors…”. Rostron was captain of the RMS Carpathia, which rescued more than 700 people from the icy Atlantic. The three survivors who gave him the watch were the widows of John Thayer, John Jacob Astor and George Widener, three of the richest men in the world and among the more than 1,500 who perished.

Ti any pocket watch has poignant connection to the tragedy;

belonging to pioneering underwater cinematographer

The two Rolexes sold at Sotheby’s in New York come directly from multi-award-winning underwater cinematographer Al Giddings. The 1970s Rolex Submariner which he wore on 17 dives to the Titanic for his pioneering documentary and Titanic movie work sold for $54,000. That’s strong money, but his 1980s gold Submariner, which can be seen on the wrist of the actor playing the dive director in the 1997 movie, went stratospheric. Against an estimate of $30,00060,000 it soared to $264,000, which must have been all the more pleasing as Giddings never paid a penny for it, but was given it as a thank you present from Rolex for allowing his images to be used free of charge in a marine conservation ad campaign.

Trafalgar re-match, same result

With their poor accuracy bar and chain shot could only be used at close quarters, but when they hit the rigging and spars the results could be devastating CHARLES MILLER LTD

The Battle of Trafalgar was re-enacted in the saleroom. With the pluck and ingenuity for which we’re famed the British fired an opening salvo of chain shot, consisting of two cannon-ball half cups joined by heavy chain. The unsporting French countered with a round of bar shot comprising a pair of cannon balls joined by an iron bar. Both were designed to sever rigging, and the French bar shot appears to have hit its mark, as it is reputed to have been discovered in the bilges of HMS Victory during its 1905 re-fit, and quite possibly had contributed to the extensive damage to Victory’s rig 100 years before. However, in the saleroom it was the British chain shot that won the day, fetching £1,488, compared with just £744 for the French bar-shot. .

TENNANTS It’s a

wind-up

From the mid-1950s, as Donald Campbell was winding up the world water speed record towards 300mph in Bluebird K7, British toy maker Sutcliffe was also winding up small boys with a tin-plate model of the famous three-point hydroplane. The graphics on the box promised jet-boat performance; the reality inside was a clockwork toy that looked like a lobster and could only crawl along at 1mph.

If that’s not enough to make a boy clobber his sister, it was white, not blue, and called Bluebird II rather than K7. There were reasons for that. Sutcliffe’s model was not authorised by Campbell. It appears that most of the Sutcliffe lobster Bluebirds were stomped to death by size 5 shoes by Boxing Day, while an unusually high proportion of the scarce survivors seem to have been packed back in their original boxes with little or no use, by equally disappointed but better behaved boys. This is such an example and made £265.

Rolex Submariners

Al Giddings

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Sailing

through

red tape

When did selling a boat get so complicated?

It’s easy buying a boat, although I’ve only bought a few in my life, having built some and sold a few. How and from whom I bought Fesquie, a National 12, and my first dinghy, is lost to the miasma of memory, but it can’t have been hard, or the selling of her. Life was simpler in those days, and when Sally came into my field of vision, hanging to a mooring off Hamble, the transaction was similarly straightforward. A price, a handshake – probably not even that – and she was mine. In the three lever arch files I compiled containing details of her build, plans, ownership and photos, there is but a single sheet of paper with proof of her sale, and the signature of one Brian Cooper, a craftsman with a habit of buying and restoring wooden boats (although he himself owned a ferro Colin Archer-type called Sula, if I recall correctly.) Incidentally, what he thought of her crass new owner was summed up a few months later when I bumped into him on Mr Foulkes’ Aladdin’s Cave barge up river, beyond the road bridge. “The only thing I’ve changed is replacing those horrid, modern-looking stainless screws on the engine bay with brass.” He gave me a look.

I did sell an Oughtred double-ender to a Swiss client and although the sale was easy, the paperwork to get her accepted on Lake Geneva was a nightmare. For starters, there was no way the Swiss authorities would let her into their country on a trailer supplied by me. Oh no. An identical Swiss trailer had to be bought in Switzerland, driven over, and specifically registered to his car, which meant double ferry fees. Before that I had to prove she would float, and how much buoyancy the plywood provided, plus a full

“They were glad to see the stern of her, in other words”

manual of how she should be sailed. This reminded me of the section in the manual, along with engine oil and maintenance schedule, that came with the Japanese motorbike I bought in 1990, as in “pull in clutch, engage gear, accelerate gently…” and, it should have added to the firsttime biker reading this on a 100hp machine: “Don’t fall off.” It did advise a crash helmet. I added “always wear a lifejacket” to mine. Strangely, the task of verifying the Recreational Craft Directive in Scotland, in our neck of the woods, fell on… The Highland Council, whose compliance officer must have groaned when she was told it was up to her to prove a boat was or was not a Historic Craft. I tried to make it easy, based on the letter I sent.

It ran as follows: “Dear Madam, I enclose the Legal Compliance Assessment Form, filled out to the best of my ability. As I mentioned when we spoke, question 2.3 did not appear to apply, as I do not make any craft other than generally exempt or historic/ pre-1950 replica craft (2.1, 2.2), for example a traditional Viking faering for a re-enactment society.

“All the craft I build are to generic designs that have their roots in centuries of development and certainly pre-date the 1950s. They are all one-offs, built to order,  primarily with larch, oak and pine using materials and methods that are inherent in the original design. As such I believe they are exempt from the RCD process. Adding “You are welcome to visit me at any time and see the work I do and discuss any issues you might have with my approach to the RCD.”

She never did.

Paperwork completed, RCD side slipped, off she went, and having sailed through British customs, into France she sped, again no questions asked, the customs men eager perhaps to avoid any post-Brexit nightmare. They were glad to see the stern of her, in other words. The trouble came at the Swiss border, I was told, and revolved around a missing document, let’s call it Verification for Import Swiss Law 3(a) ii boats and balloons under 400kg. Whatever, the officer was adamant. No document, no entry which, bluntly, meant back to Blighty. Which was when, as in those border crossing films, his superior popped out from the glass box to see what the fuss was about. “Ah, my friend, what a beautiful boat. What is the issue here? I see, a minor discrepancy.” And, with a pat on her gunwale, off our owner went without waiting for a second thought or a call to head office. Getting her certified to float on Lake Geneva was another matter.

CHRIS CRACKNELL

The quiet conservator

Chris Cracknell was one of those great conservators we never hear of. His death at the end of 2023 was a great loss to the world of historic vessels, but the quality of his work means they live on in his name

WORDS MICHAEL BRIGGS PHOTO BEN WOOD

Chris Cracknell deserves to be much better known than he was in his lifetime. He truly was one of the best and most talented non-professional restorers of classic yachts there has been in recent times.

I first met Chris when looking to buy his Fife 30 Linear rater Mikado (pictured), having, in his absence, fallen hopelessly in love with her at first sight on a casual visit to her marina berth at Cobb’s Quay, Poole, in 1997, after a tip-off from Peter Gregson of Wooden Ships. Chris took me out for two all-day trials in her before I took the plunge and made what has become the best purchase in my sailing life. I have now been her proud owner/curator for 25 years, during the whole of which time, the quality of Chris’s painstaking restoration of her has shone out like the midnight sun.

Chris came across as a genial, kindly but essentially quiet and even humble man. By that I do not mean obsequious; he was the complete and authoritative master of his several crafts and happy to explain (but never impose) all their finer points to any willing audience. But the products of his labours do so much better than any words: Tunnag, Mikado and Skye to name the three I have known in any depth.

I can best describe his qualities by reference to Mikado. She had been designed and built by Fife to the Linear Rating Rule in 1904, a rule that penalised weight and which, in the hands of other designers, therefore produced boats which were notorious for falling apart after about five years. She was almost 90 years old when Chris found her, close to death ashore in Exeter, after a long racing and cruising career all round the British Isles. He trucked her gently back to his barn outside Wimborne Minster for a threeyear complete restoration which he did mainly alone, but with the help of an employed shipwright for about 18 months. Everything was utterly worn out: deck, hull planking, rudder, many beams and frames, all metal fittings, floors, fastenings and straps.

So Chris had a major design job to do before he even laid a hand or a saw upon her. How to restore her original stunning looks and racing performance from her descent into a dowdy old cruiser? How much of her original materials were salvageable? How to achieve a sound compromise between ultra-light designed weight and strength for the future? How to design and deliver a rig that made short-handed cruising and racing possible while preserving (in fact recreating) a classic appearance without modern winches or the need to juggle with running backstays on every gybe? And above all, how to achieve all these compromises while maintaining her essential integrity as one of the most beautiful creations of the designer and builder of the most stunning yachts of all time? And to do it all at his own risk and expense, rather than as a money-making professional project for some aspiring superyacht owner.

Our use of Mikado has been really intense, with no-holds-barred racing against classics and moderns under IRC, trucking to four Fife Regattas in Scotland and a classic season in the Med, with thousands of miles cruising in between, from the Med to the western isles of Scotland. Rumour has it that Chris was worried on our second (windy) trial sail that I might test her to destruction. It’s a thorough demonstration of the integrity and sheer quality of Chris’s work that we have sailed her as hard as possible ever since, with never a breakage or hint of structural distress.

So enduring has been Chris’s work that I don’t believe that Mikado has cost significantly more to keep in tip-top condition, measured over 25 years, than a modern plastic boat. He has produced a restored classic, as good as new, which gives the lie to the generally held notion that wooden boats, and especially old ones, are ruinously expensive to own and run. And that’s after paying someone else to do all the painting and varnishing.

Not content with restoring Mikado herself, Chris also recently completed an exquisite sailing model of her, which was displayed at the 2022 Fife Regatta at the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, to general admiration. Again, all the delicate miniature metal fittings were made from scratch by Chris. Overall she is instantly recognisable as a mini-Mikado.

Tunnag, a 1927 Dickies of Tarbet motor sailer which Chris owned at the same time as Mikado, is another of his restorations, notable for the immaculate engine room with its Gardner diesel – like a shrine to British marine engineering in the middle. It’s a telling demonstration of Chris’s skills as a mechanical engineer. He kept the engine room (after restoration) so clean and shiny that you could eat your dinner off the bed plates.

He also made from scratch a complete full-size steam engine for Skye, although (as far as I know) never fitted it. Skye was Chris’s final restoration and one of his most ambitious, having had to rescue the boat from Portree Harbour in Scotland, where thankfully the boat had been kept in the same boathouse for over a century. As Chris explained: “The most challenging aspect of the restoration was physically removing all the deadly varnishes and paint from the boat that had been there for over 110 years. They were lethal – all poisonous lead paints. Even with all the precautionary masks, I had serious problems with my lungs and ended up in hospital with pneumonia.” Despite the almost overwhelming challenges, Chris completed the restoration to his exacting standards. Skye was launched at Cobb’s Quay and Chris was amazed by her performance. “She was so fast and economical and easily driven. You can cruise all day on a single gallon of diesel. Although not designed for heavy weather she can cope with a chop. We’ve been out in a force 4/5 and had her diagonal to the waves and she performs admirably. The other extraordinary aspect of Skye is that she was so beautifully built, she does not leak. She is a totally unique boat in that she is so old but so complete. She really ought to be in a museum.”

Well, he did all that and more, and my family and I have been the principal beneficiaries ever since. There is simply no doubt that she would have been lost to the world if Chris had not intervened at the very last minute to save her.

Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St Paul’s Cathedral reads “si monumentum requiris, circumspice” (if you seek his monument, look around). The same could deservedly be written of Chris in Mikado’s cabin or in Tunnag’s engine room. There is simply no more that words can portray. Chris Cracknell sadly died in December 2023.

Awards 2025

18TH CLASSIC BOAT AWARDS

THE NOMINEES

Our shortlist of the year’s best restorations, new vessels and more – which gets your vote?

Welcome once again to the annual Classic Boat Awards in association with Classic Marine, where we celebrate the best in the sometimes unsung world of classic and traditional boatbuilding and restoration.

The pages that follow feature everything from antique restored sailing yachts of all sizes to new, cutting-edge, spirit-oftradition yachts and just about everything else you could imagine in between. Here, too, are new and restored powered vessels, and a few contenders for centenarians still sailing today, in partnership with Gstaad Yacht Club.

Some have been complete rebuilds, others partial, and yet more, of course, brand new. Sailing yacht restorations seem to have continued the big comeback started last year. We also have

a new category – for this year at least – which comprises three unique, bizarre and brilliant little sailing yachts. There were many others that could not, for one reason or another, make the cut.

To vote, please visit awards.classicboat.co.uk, a dedicated Awards page that makes it easy to cast your votes. Just tick your winner in as many or as few categories as you like. Anyone may vote; about 5,000 people do so most years, casting up to 20,000 votes across the categories. The awards can only happen with the support of our sponsors: Classic Marine, Simon Winter Marine, Gstaad Yacht Club, Davey & Co- and Dartmouth Gin. Finally, we must thank the owners, boatbuilders, volunteers and associated industries for keeping this most elegant global fleet of vessels afloat and looking forward to bright futures.

AWARDS SPONSORS

Awards 2025

THE NOMINEES

RESTORED SAILING VESSEL OVER 40FT (12.2M)

SHAMROCK V

Design/Build CE Nicholson 1930, LOD 119ft 1in (36.5m), Berm sloop

One of the legendary three existing J-Class yachts from their America’s Cup heyday, and today the only J in the world with a wooden hull. She emerged from Southampton this summer after the biggest refit of her life, led by boatbuilder Giles Bretherton.

CARIAD

Design Arthur Payne, Build Summers & Payne, 1896, LOD 106ft (32.4m), Gaff ketch

They said there were no giants left to restore, but the great ketch Cariad, and a team of dedicated Thai carpenters were the answer. Her complete rebuild was one of the biggest projects the world has seen since Mariquita

SPARKLET

Design and Build, Herbert Bunn, 1905, LOD 41ft (12.5m), Gaff cutter

The unsympathetic conversion of the Edwardian Broads racing yacht Sparklet to a modest cruising yacht before WW1 destroyed her flowing lines but ensured her survive into the 21st century. Thanks to Henry Harston and a team at Broadland Boat Builders, she’s back to original.

TALLY HO

Design Albert Strange, Build Stow & Son 1910, 47ft (14.3m), Gaff cutter

It’s no hyperbole to say that Leo Goolden’s restoration of Tally Ho, which he bought as an abandoned wreck for $1 in 2017, has been the most talked about restoration of all time, thanks to Leo’s YouTube videos that have been watched by millions worldwide. The long-awaited launch was in April.

RICHARD JOHNSTONE-BRYDEN

THE NOMINEES

RESTORED SAILING VESSEL OVER 40FT (12.2M)

ALPHA

Design W Stoba, Build Liver & Wilding, 1904, 52ft (15.9m), Gaff cutter

Alpha worked for two decades as a pilot cutter in the notorious waters of the Bristol Channel before taking up life as a yacht in 1924. Her recent restoration by Ben Hopper in Falmouth entailed a complete re-plank in Danish oak and a deep refit.

SOUTHWINDS

Design Robert Clark, Build Hayes, 1948, LOD 61ft (18.6m), Berm sloop

One associates the British post-war designer Robert Clark with mid-sized sloops like the Mystery, but this larger ketch was drawn for an Australian living in Sydney. Now it belongs to a young Briton living in Sydney who, after a big restoration at Noakes, uses her for charter.

RENDEZVOUS II

Design P Rhodes, Build Olsen Marine Products, 1960, LOD 43ft (13.1m), Rig berm sloop

Moulded in glass in 1960, this was a very early attempt at a production GRP yacht that never happened, and the hull sat discarded, until a Hungarian aviation engineer spent seven years finishing the job in the 1960s. Her recent restoration by M Yacht Services and Tiffany Yachts in the USA left pretty much no stone unturned.

NIGEL SHARP

THE NOMINEES

VICTORIOUS

Design & Build Worfolk & Sons, 1923, LOD 40ft (12.2m), Rig gaff cutter

Ex Marine Henry Chamberlain has run adventure charters o the Norfolk coast since 2011. Victorious, after a thorough restoration at the Rhoda Mary Shipyard in Cornwall, is now the biggest boat in his little fleet.

UNDINE

Design AC Barber, Build Don Colbourn, 1948, 25ft (7.5m), Berm sloop

Around 18 of the 26 of this class, designed in the 1920s for racing on Hobart’s Derwent River, still survive. They are enjoying a renaissance, helped by Undine, brought back to life from just mast and hull by a team of volunteers and teachers at the Wooden Boat Centre in Tasmania.

SUMMER CLOUD

Design and Build Baldwin Deroche, 1995, 39ft (11.9m), Berm sloop

A young boat to be on this list, but a hard life meant that by the time Andrew Robinson rescued her, Summer Cloud was “ready to sink”. Seven years on, rebuilt by his team at Woodstock Boatyard, she’s racing again.

SAIORSE

Design Harrison Butler, Build RJ Prior, 1936, 25ft 6in (7.7m), Berm sloop

She was found abandoned and dying by Nick Gill (of the clothes) and brought back to life by Clive Curnow with help from James Pardoe at the Gweek Quay Boatyard in Cornwall. Now she’s a lovely example of a 1930s ‘tabloid yacht’ with the raised topsides giving her maximum cabin.

THE NOMINEES RESTORED SAILING VESSEL UNDER 40FT (12.2M)

TOBA

Des HG May, Build Berthon Boat Co 1924, 34ft 1in (10.7m), Berm sloop

Toba is part of the West Solent OD class revival. She was one of five ordered by YC Argentino and is now, after a rebuild by a team of friends, the sole survivor from this chapter in South American yachting.

DOROTHY

Design Linton Hope, Build Thames Yacht Building Co (?), c1903, 32ft 10in (10m), Gaff sloop

Dorothy is thought to be a slightly later version of the 1894 design, on which the newly restored Dorothy in Canada, which won last year’s award, is based. She’s just had a mini restoration at Elephant Boatyard.

WALLOP

D Harry Feltham, B Feltham of Portsmouth, 29ft (8.8m), Berm cutter

This lovely, unassuming little boat was given a new lease of life by Harry King & Sons in Pin Mill, Su olk. The main work was a complete deck replacement, but quite a bit more was needed to get her looking like this.

YET

Design and Build Aldous, 1898, LOD 36ft (11m), Rig gaff cutter

The ex-fishing smack Yet has been rebuilt from wreck by Dan Tester who, with late father Barry, has established a microcosm of perfection in such boats over many years. This one is for himself and his wife Marion, and she remains engineless, the way she was built.

THE NOMINEES SPIRIT OF TRADITION

EAGLE 46

Des Hoek, Build Leonardo Yachts, 2024, 46ft 8in (14.3m), Berm sloop

The latest addition to the line-up from Dutch builder Leonardo Yachts follows the formula of the popular 38, the 44 and 54, o ering easy singlehanded sailing, a large cockpit and high performance. There is proper accommodation for five below decks. She comes in carbon or vinylester.

WISP

Des Stephens Waring, Build Artisan, 2024, 39ft 4in (12m), Berm sloop

The cold-moulded timber Wisp is a daysailer/weekender with a large, split cockpit and 6ft+ of standing headroom below decks, where the saloon seats four, with a twin berth for overnighting. Building hull and deck separately, fast becoming the norm, meant a build time of just 11 months.

LINNEA AURORA

Design Hoek, Build SES Yachts, 2024, LOD 129ft (39.4m), Berm sloop When we tested the first TC128 Atalante, we could never have guessed that more would follow. This is the fifth in the line of aluminium J-sized sailing yachts to be launched to the design, after a 30-month build, with interior design by Stockholm-based Daniel Ostman.

LAERLING

Design Paul Spooner and Jim Dines, Build Downs Road Boatyard 2024, 52ft (15.8m), Rig gaff ketch Laerling (‘apprentice’ in Norwegian) was apprentice-built at Downs Road. She’s a mix of new and old, with a Colin Archer-style traditional steel hull, hybrid propulsion, and redundancy in almost everything.

THE NOMINEES

LLANTHONY

Des & Build Camper & Nicholson, 1934, 77ft (23.6m), 2 x Doosan 360hp

The classic Nicholson silhouette and the Dunkirk history were an irresistible draw for a Henley man, who had Llanthony partially replated (she’s steel), then taken to Dennetts yard for total reincarnation. She won seemingly every award at the Henley Trad shortly after.

WHEELER 55

Des Bill Prince, Build Brooklin, 55ft 5in (16.9m), 2 x Man 850hp

The Wheeler 38, a reincarnation of Ernest Hemingway’s fishing boat

Pilar, caused a stir when it was built a few years ago at Brooklin by the reincarnated Wheeler Yachts, builder of Pilar. Now here’s the 55, also stripplanked in solid timber with a modern, luxurious interior.

RUSTLER 41

Des Tony Castro, Build Rustler 2024, 41ft (12.5m), 2 x Yanmar 370hp

After repeated requests, here is the first Rustler motor yacht. She’s quite modern in her looks, but the planing GRP hull is set o nicely by a great timber capping rail and a dab of tumblehome. It’s seaworthy and solid, but low weight (11 tonnes) gives good economy. She tops out at 34 knots.

EASY LIVIN

Design & Build Chris Craft, 1969, LOD 42ft (12.8m), 2 x Volvo 440hp

After 40 years with no upkeep, this GRP survivor from the space race age was in a mess, but her owners wanted no other boat. The restoration carried out by Chris Brignoli and others at Port Townsend Co-op was so deep that some of the 50 sta had to retrain in new trades.

THE NOMINEES

AND RESTORED POWERED VESSELS UNDER 40FT (12.2M)

BOU SAADA

Design and build W King and Sons, 1935, LOD 33ft (10m)

Here’s a nice example of a smaller Dunkirk Little Ship cabin cruiser, singleengined, and subject to a complete rebuild at Dennetts. She’s now a technological tour de force inside and original of appearance outside. She lives on England’s south coast under ice-dancing owner Jayne Torvill.

SPIRIT 35EF

Design & build Spirit Yachts and BAR Technology, 22ft (6.7m), Electric

This could be the future; in strip-plank wood. The 35FE’s foiling system is more advanced than that on an AC yacht. Yet the styling is after the rum runners of the 1930s. She’ll take o at 18 kts and top out at 30. The range is 100 miles. She’s already breaking records for speed and endurance.

WHITE ROSE

Des WE Forster, Build Louis Gale 1937, 32ft (9.8m), 2 x Nanni 65hp

When her new owner saw White Rose, with her plumb stem, slight bow flare and long sweep down to the low transom, he was sold. A restoration involving a partial hull rebuild and new interior followed from Ashley Butler and now she’s back, planing at 16 knots again.

RIVA SCOIATTOLO

Des Carlo Riva, Build Tom Thorley, LOD 14ft (4.3m), 70hp outboard

In 1950, more than a decade earlier than the Aquarama, perhaps the most famous motorboat ever, Carlo Riva drew his only outboard-powered motorboat – the Scoiattolo (squirrel). Fewer than 150 were built and few remain. BBA student Tom Thorley built this one from scratch.

Awards 2025 THE NOMINEES SMALL, UNIQUE SAILING VESSELS

RISVOLD

Des Tom MacNaughton, Build Artisan Boatworks, 2024, 20ft (6.1m), Junk

This solid little yacht was built to the Ha’penny 20 (20ft) design for an owner who plans to sail her around the world. With no cockpit, she has a pilothouse with 6ft 6in of headroom, and a junk rig with a carbon mast. There are no through-hulls, making her virtually a liferaft in her own right.

TINY GIANT

D Gary Dierking, B William Lewis, 2024, 17ft 9in (5.4m), Shunting lateen

Our story ‘Stranger Things’ in the September was about this incredibly rare proa, built by its BBA graduate owner, as a practical, easy-to-trail, light cruising dinghy with plenty of form stability – and a 14-knot top end! The fastest sailing boat in the world (Vestas Sail Rocket 2) is also a proa!

NOOTKA

Design and Build Nikos Daroukakis, 2024, LOD 22ft 9in (7m), Rig junk Nootka is the latest launch from the Aegis (Greece)-based builder Nikos Daroukakis, and this one is for his own use. The hull is strip-planked and the cosy, three-berth interior features 15 di erent timbers. The rig is junk with, unusually, the addition of a conventional jib on a bowsprit.

THE NOMINEES GSTAAD YACHT CLUB

CENTENARIAN OF THE YEAR

Our Centenarian of the Year category, run in partnership with the Gstaad Yacht Club, is open for public vote. An international panel of judges has chosen the shortlist you see below – now we invite you to vote for the winner. The judges started with a long list of centenarians in many di erent countries, ranging from yachts to workboats, and whittled it down to these six, based on authenticity and recent achievements of significance, or on a wider story that deserves praise. The winning boat’s name will be engraved onto the Centenarian of the Year trophy, which was made for the purpose by Robbe & Berking silversmiths and is displayed in the Yachting Heritage Centre in Flensburg, Germany. The winning owner is given a solid silver Robbe & Berking goblet, presented at the Classic Boat Awards ceremony in spring.

BARNABAS, 1881

Design & Build Henry Trevorrow of St Ives, Cornwall, LOD 40ft (12.2m), Dipping lug yawl

The Cornish pilchard driver Barnabas took on a six-week, 1,000-mile voyage in 2024 to visit ports in Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland to educate the public about Britain’s fishing heritage, and to raise funds for her own preservation.

UANDI, 1897

Design Wm Fife III, Build Hutchinson’s, LOD 24ft (7.4m), Sliding gunter sloop

This is not the first nomination for this little boat with looks that could stop tra c. Her restoration by boatbuilder Alastair Garland and these days, the 128-year-old boat lives on Southampton Water but travels by trailer to various regattas

DOROTHY, 1894

Design Linton Hope, Build J Robinson, LOD 30ft (9.1m), Rig Gaff sloop Dorothy could be Canada’s oldest boat. After Tony Grove and Robert Lawson’s complete restoration, she won our Restoration of the Year award for sailing vessels under 40ft (12.2m) in 2024 and now she’s in for this award too!

ADVENTURER 1925

Design John G Alden, Build Hodgon Bros, LOD 52ft 3in (11.6m), Rig gaff schooner

This example of Alden’s famed ‘Malabar’ schooner series caught the eye of sailor Alex Child, who battled against all odds to rescue her from a watery grave in 2022 and rebuild her. Just two years later, she won the concours d’elegance at the Antigua Classic.

GROWLER, 1922

Design TH Hughes, Build Whites of Conyer Creek, LOD 34ft (10.4m), Rig gaff cutter

The resurrection of this half-sized barge yacht from bare hull was carried out over four years by Ash Faire-Ring, who started aged just 17. She was originally designed and built by Whites of Conyer Creek and carries a ga ketch rig.

MARGA, 1910

Design CO Liljegren, Build Hastholm Boatyard, 1912, 56ft 3in (15.2m), Gaff cutter

We hear so much about 12-Ms, 8-Ms and 6-Ms, that it’s easy to forget the 10s. This lovely example raced in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. After a restoration from 2010-2015, she has been actively campaigned on the Mediterranean circuit.

Gstaad YC was formed in 1998 by a group of sailors with the vision to “create a unique global yacht club away from water, instead of another local club by the water”. Based in the Swiss mountains, it was initially met with surprise, but the GYC has developed into a club with 400 members from more than 35 countries. The GYC supports sailing projects at all levels from juniors to professional and has become a solid force on the Swiss sailing scene, especially in Olympic sailing and classic yachts.

Z DRIVE

What could the shipyard that built the liner France and the car-maker Renault have in common? Answer: the early Z-drive transmission that today powers this little Rocca-built motor dinghy

WORDS GERALD GUETAT PHOTOS HENRI THIBAULT

Rocca, a small family boatbuilder based near Paris, were among the pioneers of leisure boating in the wake of the economic boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of its popular 15ft 1in (4.6m) outboard dinghies was later modified to accommodate an inboard Renault 4-cylinder engine, a rare witness to the forgotten venture of the largest French carmaker on the nautical market.

When Domenico Rocca emigrated from his native Italy and arrived in France in the early 1920s, wood was the foremost material in boatbuilding. Domenico started his career at Chauvière, a then-famous aeroplane propeller builder also building river canoes, a few runabouts and some great racing boats. He spent a few years learning the trade as a foreman, before setting up his own business in Vitry-sur-Seine in 1928 with a solid technical background, and specialised in building canoes. After World War Two, with his sons Oreste and Louis, Rocca expanded with a range of outboard-motored hulls. By the mid1950s, the young Rocca brothers experimented with a production boat GRP, a quite rare material at the time. Between 1954 and 1960, their entire production of dinghies gradually changed from wood to GRP. Plastic boats were heavier than wooden ones but the power of the outboard engines increased in parallel. At the turn of the 1960s, the recreational market was booming and this trend extended through the 1970s and 1980s, despite a few economical crises. Rocca became a true trademark, commercially very active and represented by 170 dealers. The yard celebrated the healthy “100,000” boats mark in 1985 before declining step by step and closing their doors a decade later. But, today, the name Rocca is still evocative enough in France to be part of a new venture. Brand new Rocca-branded boats have been recently released, partly as a revival of the 1950s, but in a very modern form…

Previous page and below: Rocca symbolizes access to the pleasures of motor boating in France in the 1950s

The growing market of leisure motorboats was just beginning to assert itself in the dreams of a consumer society in its infancy. In 1960, the same Oreste made a hit on the very popular TV game “La Tête et les Jambes” – something like “Mind and Muscle” – live and in prime viewing time. He was seated behind the wheel of a cute little Rocca racer to clock a record on the River Seine and save a candidate who had failed a cultural questionnaire. He won and shared with his fortunate co-winner a 100,000-Franc prize in front of millions of households. By this era, the international Six Hours of Paris race was run annually – with several Rocca boats as fierce entrants – in front of tens of thousands of spectators at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, a crowd basically unable to tell who was in the lead or behind in the boiling pot of the river. But more and more of these Sunday walkers were going to want to become actors, not spectators, and get behind the wheel of a dinghy. Rocca, the boatyard of a Parisian suburb, well distributed throughout the country, did not fail to take advantage of that event to make its name better known to potential buyers.

INBOARD OR OUTBOARD

RIGHT BOAT AT THE RIGHT TIME

When Rocca, then a canoe builder, embarked on an outboard dinghy production at the turn of the 1940s, modernity was still in its infancy. French car ownership stood at just over two and a half million cars and France had only a few thousand television sets. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, broadcast by the one and only national channel, was followed in France by crowds of onlookers gathered in front of the shop windows of the appliance shops, the short at the front, the tall at the back. In the same year, Oreste Rocca, son of the founder, broke his first world speed record on a home-made prototype.

Under its rather sober look of a carefully preserved classic boat, this Rocca runabout is hiding some very original, perhaps unique, characteristics, as sole witness to the forgotten venture of Renault in the nautical sector. This boat has lived several lives and has been saved from dereliction, if not outright destruction, on several occasions. In 1955, Rocca, the outboard specialist, tried to enter the inboard market with a first attempt, but this prototype has probably been scrapped. Later, the yard came into an agreement with the racing engine tuning workshop Constantin, ending in the production of a few boats at most. The inboard Rocca shown here is of a different breed. Her current owner, Dominique Manoury, bought the boat in 1996 from an automobile museum which has since closed its doors. This place was partly dedicated to the preservation of prototypes, unique parts, technical attempts or memories of mechanical dreams without a future.

From the documentation attached to the boat, Mr Manoury learned that it was motorised by a certain Stauder garage located on the Marne river, probably in the mid- or late-1960s: “The engine is a Dauphine Gordini whose power I increased for water-skiing. This hull must have been built between 1955 and 1960. It has a Quillery automobile steering wheel with the design of a Rocca in the centre”. In fact, the boat is a 15ft 1in (4.6m) model made for outboard motors, one of Rocca’s best-sellers, first produced in wood then, identically, in GRP. Both versions were even briefly

from top left: The original Rocca facility founded in 1928 in Vitry-sur-Seine near Paris; Rocca boats for sale at a dealership, part of a well-established network... Rocca built more than 100,000 boats; Racing successes on the Seine post-war, including in the annual Six Hours of Paris race; Modern production at Rocca in the GRP era; An advertising poster for various of the company’s ever-popular outboard-powered runabouts; Prospective buyers; In the workshop in the earlier, wooden era

Clockwise

proposed to customers as an option. What intrigues the most is this transformation from outboard to inboard, a modification made by Stauder, clearly the work of a skilled professional and absolutely not any kind of a DIY. The Renault-Gordini unit, remarkably compact and lightweight, has been mounted in the former aft compartment near the transom which usually had the outboard motor mounted on it. When looking at the boat’s transmission, it’s useless to try to find a Volvo or a Mercury marking on its perfectly made and ultracompact white Z-drive.

FROM THE QUEEN MARY TO LOCAL BOAT SHOWS

This is where Régie Renault’s very brief foray into the pleasure industry comes in. But, what could this Rocca possibly have in common with the Queen Mary or the famous French Line’s France? The answer is the ill-fated and forgotten production of the RenaultPenhouët RP1 runabout in the early 1960s.

By one of those strange proactive industrial connections, typical of General de Gaulle’s era, the huge Penhouët shipyard, soon to be renamed Chantiers de l’Atlantique, embarked on an unlikely partnership with Renault to produce a series of small GRP motor boats powered by the ultra-reliable Dauphine motor tuned by Gordini.

While motorboating was becoming more and more affordable, the industrialisation of the hulls made possible by GRP moulding would allow the all-new RP1 13ft 9in (4.2m) runabout to benefit from a potential market represented by a network of 5,000 Renault dealers. To make this dream come true, Régie

Above: On this unique Rocca Renault Z-drive, the left lever controls the inverter, the right one the accelerator

Below: The Z drive clearly visible in the boat’s transom; Owner Dominique Manoury puts the boat through her paces

Renault had to design and engineer in-house a complete Z-drive unit, original by its compactness and rather efficient by simplifying the original design and patent of the Aquamatic. On paper, everything was on a perfect course to success, supported by a press launch of Renault proportions. Then suddenly in 1961, the same press learned that some so-called “defects” were making the venture no longer viable. The prestigious builder of the great liner France and Renault put production into ‘full astern’ and halted production. The true cause of this industrial failure remains a mystery and there are only one or two complete examples of the RP1 left today. From that point on, we can only speculate that some enthusiasts sought, at the time, to market a surplus of leftover complete Renault Gordini Z-drive ‘factory kits’. The technical documentation that came with this unique Rocca Z-drive contains very detailed assembly instructions, the result of a real engineering work, perfectly drawn and machine-typed. It is very difficult to estimate how many boats were equipped with this quality kit at the time. The story makes this modest but unique Rocca 4.6 a key witness to a tormented and very French industrial venture.

It also clearly shows how well the Renault motor and drive works on a light wooden hull, meaning that it could have been a success if Régie had contacted the right partner. It could have been Rocca in Vitry-surSeine, in a successful remake of David and Goliath in Technicolor.

Thanks to Dominique Manoury, owner of this Rocca, Henry-Jacques Pechdimaldjian, founder of the Cercle du Motonautisme Classique and Patrick Rocca

ALL DECKED OUT

The ties that have always bonded sailing to fashion were strengthened when a pre-war 8-M yacht played catwalk to a fashion show in Sydney Harbour last year

WORDS NICOLE SHRIMPTON PHOTOS MADELINE MCCORMICK

When crew member Zac West and his girlfriend

Madeline McCormick, a 22-year-old star student from Sydney’s Whitehouse Institute of Design, gently suggested Defiance was the ideal vessel for Madeline’s major coursework on the harmony between yachting and fashion, I applauded their courage and good taste and was instantly on board to assist the aspiring photographer and creative director.

Madeline had been lucky enough to grow up, as I had, in Sydney Harbour. Sailing culture is in our DNA, along with a taste for nautical style. We shared an admiration for the nautically-inspired labels such as Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Ralph Lauren, and in particular Coco Chanel, whose early collections encapsulated the sailors’ agility that she witnessed aboard the Duke of Westminster’s yachts on the French Riviera and in Cowes.

“Fashion is not simply a matter of clothes,” Chanel had once observed. “Fashion is in the air. Borne upon the wind. One intuits it. It is in the sky and on the road.”

The revolutionary designer liberated her clientele from their corsets with the free-moving sailor’s jersey, daring culottes, soft jackets, sporty stripes, bold buttons and accessories with signature chain, leather and rope trim that became the hallmarks of her brand.

Madeline’s aim was to capture that spirit of freedom under full sail in High Tide, a 40-page editorial magazine conceived, styled, shot and laid out entirely by her. Her enthusiasm on the subject was infectious.

“Boats evoke a sense of adventure and exploration, adding depth and richness to the editorial narrative. The diverse settings that boats offer provide an array of creative possibilities,” she said.

JONO WITTEY

JONO WITTEY

Inspired by her quest, it was all hands on deck from the sailing fraternity to help. Cherished props emerged to complement Madeline’s chosen ranges, such as Zimmerman: a just-right Helly Hansen jacket, the latest striped Eres bikini, a contraband woollen skipper’s cap from the Royal Yacht Squadron, and mariner pants and a unique monkey fist bag by fellow student Summer Wanless. Zac’s father Jon stepped forward as RIB driver. Zac and fellow crewman Zac Quinlan volunteered to simultaneously model and sail. Jono Wittey, director of Aero Media and a champion sailor who pioneered the use of a drone camera for Sydney’s 18 Footers fleet, kindly offered his equipment and talent at cost. He and Madeline achieved ravishing angles of the yacht and clothing.

“Usually the nautical shoots I am asked to do are more shore-based,” remarked Jono. “To shoot fashion

on a boat under sail was very cool and quite dynamic. A lot of things lined up. We had good lighting. A perfect day. A beautiful boat. Gorgeous model. Everyone was a sailor. Even the model’s name was Storm.” Indeed, the model Storm McInerny, another sailor, proved adept on Defiance’s slender bow.

“The drone really pushed creative boundaries,” adds Madeline. “We experimented with new angles and perspectives and sequences that were once impossible to achieve. Each of the nine team members on board worked seamlessly together, from managing the yacht’s movements to trimming the sails for optimal lighting, ensuring every detail was perfect.” The extraordinary results are among the best ever taken of a muchphotographed boat. Madeline’s next stop is Cowes Classic Week 2025, for a similar shoot featuring the best of British fashion.

JONO WITTEY

ALASKAN

ADVENTURE

Will Stirling narrates a voyage sailing Integrity – a wooden gaffer – from Nome in Alaska through the North West Passage

WORDS AND PHOTOS WILL STIRLING

Here was Integrity , afloat in Nome, just where I had left her. The harbour freezes over during the winter, so she had been hauled ashore to a sheltered spot and covered in snow. It wasn’t quite your average travel hoist; she came up a gravel slipway on a trailer, towed by a Caterpillar snow plough (a type of modern husky team with a horse power boost).

Given William Scoresby and crew had managed to repair the keel of a 300T ship in the Arctic by careening her between ice flows, I felt confident that extracting Integrity from the water was simple fare for the inventive men of Nome, before they returned to the more pressing and potentially lucrative task of hoovering gold nuggets off the sea bed.

In order to reach the mountains of the Kenai Peninsula and Glacier Bay, where we had identified climbing targets, we had first to double the Alaskan Peninsula, leaving the Aleutians to the west for future exploration.

After a six-day passage, sailing south in relatively clement weather and with no sightings of ice, we reached the narrow passage of False Pass in conditions propitious for a transit. Navigating our way amongst shoals, overfalls and sea otters, we soon entered the small harbour at the settlement of False Pass.

The first vessel we encountered had the name Mar Pacifico emblazoned on her high steel bows.

Entertainingly apt as five miles away through the Ikatan Narrows lay the Pacific Ocean. Now safely ensconced in a superb harbour after having completed the most exposed part of the year’s travel, we caught up on messages to friends and family by lurking outside the fish processing plant. With the fabled Pacific Ocean so close at hand, at this time we were mainly engaged in locating sun lotion and considering tactical tan lines. Negotiating False Pass without incident, we found the weather rather boisterous in the bay to the south of the narrows. However, there was no ground swell, so re-stowing all Hawaiian shirts, sombreros and tanning oil, we decided to enact a man overboard revision. All went well until impenetrable fog suddenly descended and we almost mislaid the dan buoy.

Pushing on to a secluded harbour with a promising isthmus across which we might walk the following day, we saw our first grizzly bear idling in the undergrowth. Two of us were deposited ashore the following morning and this would give our first encounter with the terrain to see how good the going was underfoot. Dave and Harrison sailed the boat around to meet us in the afternoon. Uncle Terry insisted on taking the sawn-off. Polar bears well to the north of us and having sold my rifle in Nome, the sawn off by name supposed a credible weapon but in reality was a shortened fishing rod. I remained unsure where it ranked in our bear defence armoury.

With thigh high grasses and occasional thick patches of 10’ scrub, the going was not good. The easiest course seemed to be to follow the existing narrow tracks, which Uncle Terry pointed out, were probably made by bears.

On reaching the beach on the far side of the isthmus the fog descended again. Walking along the shingle beach and coming round an acute point, we met a grizzly at 80 yards. Uncle Terry cocked the sawn off; the bear turned and fled into the murk.

Nearing the rendezvous and with no comms being received by Integrity, we lit a fire, spread the bright orange emergency shelter on a rock, went for a swim and collected mussels for supper. By the time these activities and a cup of tea had been completed, the fog cleared and Integrity hove into view. Having radioed to confirm they knew our position, she crept into shallower water and picked us up.

There was some confusion as we headed up a longer nearby fjord, taking bearings on headlands and checking off the isolated rocks on the chart. Where was or who had moved Black Rock? This isolated danger played a relatively crucial part in confirming the identity of adjacent rocks and the surrounding hidden reefs. Was that large white item possibly a dead whale ashore on the beach? Black Rock, with a veneer of guano had turned white; an interesting navigational conundrum.

Various attempts were made to approach mountains along the western Alaskan Peninsula. In a strongly tidal bay we had anchored and, knowing there was a beautiful cone shaped volcano towering above us, we sat on deck until nightfall admiring the fog. Having issued night caps and all gone to bed, foolishly I set the tiller over and looped it into a grommet. This keeps the tiller clear of the cockpit. In the night we found ourselves ferry gliding across a

Previous page: Glacier Bay, Alaska

Above: Beating out of Lituya Bay (of 1958 mega tsunami fame)

Below: Uncle Terry, Harrison Knight and David Webster in Nome

Facing page: Fog, rain and pine trees on the Kenai Peninsula

Facing page inset: Will Stirling goes aloft

strong tidal stream and doing our best to drag the anchor over the rocky bottom towards the unseen shore. It took a few minutes of scampering around the deck in pyjamas with night caps and peering over the side with head torches, before we could work out what was going on. Releasing the tiller from the grommet allowed the rudder to compose herself midships and everything settled down, including the crew, to a good night of sleep.

If the fog dispersed, the undergrowth remained as a relatively impenetrable barrier to the snows above, until we finally cracked the barred access by looking for just the right glaciers. Such a glacier had a reasonable gradient and terminated within a few kilometres of the shore. These provided an Alaskan Highway aloft, upon which, with tent and supplies Dan lead us up, over and around the dangers with a surprising degree of explanation, being both a former Royal Marine mountain leader and latterly a sixth form geography teacher.

Fishing skills and methods proliferated in Prince William Sound, although given the quantity of fish and narrow streams, it was difficult to fail. In the company of bears and eagles Owen used the traditional rod and line, Rufus tickled, Kev hooked supper out with an ice axe and Dan, preferring to let someone else do the work, startled a black bear and then stole the fish left on a rock.

While we had hoped to land on the strangely shaped Kayak Island, we found the Pacific ground swell too great and the anchorage exposed. Having expected to be clambering about on terra firma followed by an evening securely anchored in a remote bay listening to jazz music and smoking cigars, we were forced to keep remain at sea, spending the night beating against a head wind combined with a confused swell, which strengthened to such an extent that sickness developed

amongst the crew. We hove-to and instantly the intensity of the situation evaporated. It was a decision which I should have made earlier. We remained hove-to until dawn, suffering remarkably little drift, by which time the wind and swell began to abate.

The next point of shelter was the aptly named Icy Bay, above which Mount Saint Elias towered, the distinctive summit revealing itself through the high cloud late in the evening. South of Icy Bay we were gifted an enormous halibut which fed four hungry sailors four large meals before, with the Northern Lights decorating the sky, we shot into Glacier Bay National Park at high speed on a flooding tide.

Isolated from the Pacific swell by the islands and channels this was a different kind of boating without the edge of exposure and thus very much enjoyed. With a fit and experienced climbing team on board, we could expect a rigorous pace of hillside travel. One evening, having selected an anchorage and feeling our way forward in the dark, the Colonel gently ran us aground on a soft fluvial outflow. While all successes are unequivocally a team effort, no matter what the circumstances, el capitano is ultimately responsible for all errors on board by dint of poor decision making, poor communication or poor planning. Delighted that

for once I wasn’t at the helm, yet unable to articulate the impish glee, while we waited for the tide to make, mountaineering preparations for an early start the following morning were put in hand. Start cold; end cool was the rucksack packing maxim.

To my astonishment, and such a vigorous word is not used lightly, my mother who is fearful of flying and nervous of boats, at 78 years of age, flew half-way around the globe with my sister and wife, to join Integrity for a week in Glacier Bay. She looked at bears through binoculars, marvelled at the sea otters, wondered at the whales and even clambered up onto the snout of a glacier, enjoying meltwater refreshment upon the ice that had conceivably been frozen for millennia. There is often an offset; in this case an unexpectedly boisterous wind in one of the channels en route to Juneau saw Integrity reach her top speed to date of just over 10kts under single reefed and triced main and No.2 jib. The ladies lay down below; not ill but certainly less full of vim and vigour than they had been shortly before. Calm water around the next headland and a whale sighting soon restored all spirits. Integrity will be sailing in Alaska in the summer of 2025. Those interested in joining the team are welcome to make contact with Will via email: will@stirlingandson.co.uk

Above left: Kev Oliver, Rufus Wood, Owen Nye and Will Stirling circumnavigating the boat on an icefloe

Above right: Sunset in Prince William Sound

Below left: Climbing team prepares to go ashore

Below right: Dan Millington and Owen Nye

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SPIRIT OF TRADITION DESIGNERS - PART TWO

Bestevaer II, Gerard Dykstra’s own boat, seen here off Greenland

Facing page, bottom right: Meteor, designed by Stephen Jones

SPIRITED AWAY

In the second of our two-part feature, we look at hull shapes, rigs and the design process that creates them

WORDS NIGEL SHARP

UNDERWATER HULL SHAPES

The hulls and decks of Spirit of Tradition boats typically retain many of the classic visual characteristics of age-old designs: a graceful sheer, low freeboard, long overhangs (although by no means always, as the plum stems on Andre Hoek’s Pilot Classic range and Dykstra’s Bestevaer range attest – “these allow a higher freeboard and higher performance for the same LOA,” said Gerard Dykstra) and an abundance of deck brightwork. But below the waterline is out of sight, and so that is where designers have much more of a free reign. At the extremes are the spindliest fin keels with large lead bulbs at the bottom and balanced rudders, and more traditional long keels with rudders hanging off the back of them. While two of the four SoT boats built to Paul Spooner’s designs have had long keels (one of them being Lärling , a 50ft steel gaff ketch for the purpose of training Heritage Marine Foundation’s apprentices) they are generally rare on SoT boats. “Ninety eight per cent of the time we go for a modern underwater configuration,” said Hoek; Stephens and Waring have designed “maybe a handful” of boats with long keels, and the few long keels on Dykstra’s designs have been almost by necessity, such as that on the schooner Borkumriff IV which is a replica of a Grand Banks schooner.

So with the keel and rudder separated on the majority of SoT boats, it is a question of how much they should be separated, how long (and deep, of course) the fin keel should be, and whether the rudder should be skeg hung or balanced. The major consideration, of course, is what the client asks for, how the boat will be used and where it is likely to be sailed. But it is also important for the designer to have a good understanding of the client’s capabilities. “It doesn’t matter how high performance a fin you design if the client can’t handle it,” said Bob Stephens. “If they aren’t accustomed to that sort of boat they will find it too hard to keep in the groove and too easy to stall.”

Sean McMillan has always separated his keels and rudders “as much as I possibly could” and much prefers a balanced rudder to one with a skeg to

optimise the boat’s balance and manoeuvrability. However, for two Spirit-built gaff rigged boats, he designed a fairly long keel and skeg-hung rudder but only as a compromise after the clients initially indicated a preference for long keels.

While the Rustler cruising boats have reasonably long fin keels and skeg-hung rudders, the Rustler 33 has a much shorter keel and a balanced rudder, and Stephen Jones’s own Meteor has an L-shaped keel with a large bulb on the bottom.

Spirit Yachts have recently contracted Ker Yacht Design to take a close look at the hull design of the Spirit 52 with a view to optimising both the performance and the rating under IRC, but while retaining the visual characteristics for which Spirits have become known. Apart from observing the performance of existing boats at the company’s recent regatta in Guernsey, Jason Ker has used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to study 400 data points on the hull. “If we’re going to have a race boat, then it needs to be an out-and-out race boat,” said Julian Weatherill, “but it will still have our distinctive exterior styling and comfortable accommodation. At the moment it is looking as if we will be able to reduce drag by about 20 per cent.”

While Norfolk Broads river cruisers traditionally had keels and rudders made simply of flat timber boards,

some years ago Andrew Wolstenholme began to design keels and rudders with “decent foil sections, which are of particular benefit when trying to tack up a narrow river,” he said.

THE RIG

So while the classic visual appearance of a SoT yacht isn’t affected by a modern underwater configuration, by no means can the same be said of the rig. Carbon spars clearly have great advantages over aluminium or timber ones: they are lighter and stiffer, of course, but also they don’t have the same issues with corrosion or rot. The vast majority of SoT yachts these days have carbon spars, and it is perfectly possible to ensure that they don’t look too modern. They can be sheathed with a timber veneer or given a “faux bois” finish to make them look like timber, for instance, but a less extreme solution which would be acceptable to many is just to paint them white or off-white.

When Wolstenholme was designing the Crabber 24, part of his brief was to ensure it would comply with Category B of the Recreational Craft Directive. But he soon realised that it wouldn’t do so unless it had a carbon mast to achieve the requisite stability. “Initially Cornish Crabbers were reluctant,” he said, “but eventually they came round to it. And seemingly within weeks of the first boat being launched, they were selling carbon spars to people to retrofit on their Shrimpers.” Jones has also designed three Norfolk Broads cruisers, and he gave them carbon masts simply to ease the process of lowering and raising them every time the boats had to go under a bridge.

But sails are a different thing altogether in that they represent a significantly large part of the visible part of a boat. Many keen racing sailors opt for high tech grey or black sails, often with a square top, or fat top, mainsail, and while for others that might be a step too far on an SoT boat, there is no doubt that such a rig provides significant performance advantages and many designers seem to favour them. “I’ve built a lot of boats with wooden spars early on in my career and they look the part,”

Above right: The Hoek-designed Halekai, the fourth Truly Classic 128.

The fifth has now been launched

said McMillan. “But they’re not nearly as efficient as a really well-designed carbon rig with modern sails made by a sail maker who really knows what they’re doing.” While many Spirits have had black sails, up to now none have had a square top mainsail, but that is about to change with the newly configured 52.

“With the under bodies of our boats, we’re committed to delivering the best performance that we can,” said Stephens, “so why wouldn’t we apply that to the rig? The aerodynamic benefits of a square top main are significant, although they are not for everyone as they either need running backstays or strongly swept back spreaders and that changes the style of sailing that people do.” “I love fat head mainsails and carbon spars as they are really efficient,” said Jones.

“With SoT boats you can take some freedom with the rig,” said Dykstra. “Things move on over time - for instance, even Britannia, which was gaff rigged for most of her life, eventually had a bermudan rig.”

TRAINING AND DESIGN TECHNIQUES

Two of the designers we spoke to - Gerard Dykstra and Sean McMillan - are all-but retired now (and, incidentally, never had any formal training in naval architecture or yacht design) but they still retain strong links with their companies. “They treat me very gently,” said McMillan, “and they just wheel me out every now and get me to talk to a group of people or to do something like that,” while Dykstra told me that “it is still a lot of fun to be in the office.”

McMillan thinks that his degree in fine arts gave him “an understanding of aesthetics which has stuck with me ever since” and in some ways he thinks his lack of specialist training may have been an advantage. “I was never taught what the rules were,” he said, “so I was quite happy to break all the rules if I felt like it because I didn’t know what they were. I could just do what I wanted.”

Most designers have progressed over the years from designing with pencils

Above left: Paul Spooner-designed Niebla

Below: Sean MacMillan of Spirit Yachts at his design board

and paper to using computer aided design (CAD). This is particularly important these days to allow electronic drawings to be easily transmitted, and to allow boatbuilders to then develop them further with the necessary myriad of details.

Wolstenholme started using CAD about thirty years ago “It was quite clear where the future lay,” he said, “and if I was going to be staying in the business, then that was the direction I had to go. And that coincided with a time where the kit became relatively affordable. But I think it was a great benefit starting off drawing by hand with all the discipline that that entails. That is something that today’s designers miss out on, but then they will probably wring more out of a CAD system than we older designers. I’ve still got a drawing board but it’s cluttered with all sorts of stuff.”

McMillan started using CAD in the late ‘90s and since then he has used it primarily for designing hull lines – “for one simple reason only, which is I can do the mathematics with three clicks of a mouse instead of two weeks of long division.” Once he has produced the lines, he goes back to the drawing board and does everything else by hand. “I can’t think with a computer. It’s a very unresponsive, dead thing as far as I am concerned.” Tom Smith, who is Spirit’s full time Lead Designer, generally starts the design process by sketching on his iPad to facilitate discussions with clients, and then designs fully with CAD.

Both Stephens and Waring started using 3D hull modelling programs around 2000 and they both admit to missing hand drawing. “I really loved it as a skill and as an art, but I also love what we’re able to do designing in 3D,” said Stephens.

Andre Hoek does very little designing himself these days as much of his time is spent managing his team, all of whom use CAD, and with clients. But he is very involved in the basic design of all the company’s projects, “so that the concept is correct and that the lines are right, and that the boat looks well balanced. And then the team does all the number crunching and detail drawing work.”

Before Dykstra retired, he too worked on concepts using pencil and paper, and then handed over to colleagues who would progress the designs by CAD. “The last drawing board left the office twenty years ago,” he said.

While Spooner says he uses CAD for “98%” of his design work, Jones does his entirely by hand. About fifteen years ago he did a CAD course which was part of government scheme and free to attend. “I found it so tedious,” he said. “I just couldn’t be bothered with it and I like drawing by pencil anyway.” Once he has drawn a set of hull lines, he passes it on to “some clever people who convert it to CAD”. Once they have done that he takes the faired sheer line and then designs the deck “using simple trigonometry maths by generating coordinates within 0.1 of a millimetre, and then it is just a question of joining the dots to create a fair surface.”

But however they choose to work, all of these designers have been highly successful in creating a variety of stunning SoT boats. “For all of us, the common thread is the love of the aesthetic, and then trying to make everything work within that,” said McMillan.

Above right: The 180ft (55m) ketch Adele, built in 2005 to a Hoek design

Below: The foiling Spirit 37FE

Tom Cunliffe

Ginny Jones

The late, great Madam of

Newport

When my crew and I fetched up in Mystic Connecticut in the late summer of 1983 aboard the 35-tonne pilot cutter Hirta, we passed through the bascule bridge in the centre of the little wooden town into the wonderland of ships, boats, artefacts and workshops that is the working Seaport Museum. The Charles W Morgan, built in 1841 to hunt the whale, the Grand Banks schooner LA Dunton and Olin Stephens’ masterpiece Brilliant set a unique backdrop, but it was the people who will always remain in my mind. Shipwrights, blacksmiths, riggers and sailors were keeping the ancient skills alive as they built boats, maintained historic square riggers and sent classic yachts out across the ocean.

As you’d expect with so many saltwater people, the social scene was colourful in the extreme, and at its heart was the magnetic figure of Virginia Crowell Jones, ‘Ginny’ to her friends, and ‘The Madam’ to us all. Her traditional timber house on a leafy street across the bridge was open to every soul who loved the sea and was universally known as ‘The Mystic Mission to Seamen’. Wandering sailors would find a berth there for a night, a week or a month while they hunted for their next ship; famous yacht skippers called on their way south, crowding round the scrubbed kitchen table while workers from the museum tiptoed in to listen to the wildest yarns on the planet and to sit at the feet of the mighty.

Officially secretary to the Restoration Shipyard, Ginny was an imposing figure. She was strong, uncompromising and notably unwilling to suffer fools, but whenever sailors were down on their luck she had their back. She cooked for them, listened to their woes and their joys, made connections for them through her wide-ranging network and saw them on their way strengthened by her undemonstrative support. Her influence stretched from the rocky shores of Maine where the Emery boys ran the schooner Rachel B Jackson to the Traditional Boat Works at Port Townsend on the Pacific Coast, headed up by her son Douglas. While I was under her wing at the Mission, she was looking after the South African Pat Cullen who circumnavigated from Durban in the 1960s with the Colin Archer Sandefjord. Sometimes it seemed that you had only to peep in through an open door into a quiet back room to find legendary names from American yachting: Maynard Bray, Nat Benjamin, Barry Thomas, George Moffett, Richard Griffiths, and there among them would be the shipsmith Clint Wright with Bob Crowley the museum shantyman, drinking coffee with the girl who manned the yards for stowing the square topsails on the Joseph Conrad to the roar of ‘We’ll pay Paddy Doyle for his BOOTS!’ If they weren’t there on the day, their spirit was alive in the Mission.

During the long, hard winter that followed, things could have gone catastrophically wrong for my boat and my family but, backed up by a redoubtable New York contingent, the

Madam and her crowd at the Mission looked out for us. On the day they finally sent us on our way we were in better shape than when we arrived.

Friendships forged in tribulation are the strongest. For 40 years and more the Madam kept in touch. Once, she sailed across to the Solent on her own keel, then joined us on a passage to Norway. Although an ocean aristocrat, she was always first in the galley at wash-up time. She was with us in the famous summer of 1988 when the Bretons really got their festivals together at Douarnenez. Hirta lay in a small raft of four unrestored Bristol Channel pilot cutters. The next raft was all Galway hookers manned by the ultimate Irish band. With the late Conn McCann on fiddle and Paddy Barry himself on guitar, they skirled the nights away while Ginny yarned with Tim Magennis on the Morning Star, an old friend of the Mission who had been with Pat Cullen on the Sandefjord circumnavigation.

The Madam was an island girl from Martha’s Vineyard who grew up a stone’s throw from the shorebase of none other than Joshua Slocum. When she left Mystic she returned to the Vineyard and kept up the good work all her days. The clapboard house with chickens scratching in the yard was bursting with books rare and common, but she was no dreamer. She’d been there and done it and the sea was in her blood. One hot afternoon she and I were sitting in the parlour discussing Moby Dick. Whalers out of New Bedford and Nantucket are well documented but I asked her about the Vineyard. She left me reading Melville by the window while she disappeared up an impossibly steep creaking staircase to return with her arms full of dogeared journals and ancient paperwork. The books turned out to be the logs of a whaling ship commanded by her great-grandfather, together with some of his surviving charts. One of these took the form of a scroll that was longer than the room was wide, detailing the whole of the Eastern Seaboard. The mice had taken a nibble out of it here and there but I never saw the like. The chart of the South Seas had been well used and in the daily logbook pages the Old Man had marked successes with an image of a sperm whale pressed in from what must have been a rubber stamp.

One cold night last November, Ginny’s son Doug called me from the Vineyard. The Madam wanted to have a few words. Her voice was weak but the spirit was as strong as ever. She told me outright that she was dying. We let that pass and spent half an hour yarning about great old times with ships, men and women on deep water and shoal. The following night she quietly slipped her cable.

The final word should go to our mutual shipmate John Lovell: A quartering breeze, a William Hand schooner and sunshine all the way. Sail on Ginny…

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Lazy Days

Dunkirk fever – and that’s not an exaggeration – has been building for a long time in anticipation of the 2025 ‘return’ when the remaining fleet make a commemorative cruise from Ramsgate to Dunkirk and back, just as they did in 1940 to save 338,000 troops in Operation Dynamo. It’s not too late to join. Henley Sales and Charter have to on their books – the little launch Lady Isabelle

ORIGINAL PILOT CUTTER

Alpha

Alpha ’s designer, William Stoba of Fleetwood, Lancashire, had never built a pilot cutter for the notorious waters of the Bristol Channel before being commissioned by her first owner, William Prosser of Newport, but Stoba had gained an enviable reputation for the design of his fast Morecambe Bay Prawners and Lancashire Nobbies – and some fine yachts. Prosser was prepared to take a risk on Stoba in order to steal a march on his competitors: to be first to the ships requiring pilotage, time and again. So Alpha , with her typically ‘prawner’ cutaway and rounded forefoot profile, is a little different from Bristol Channel Pilot Cutters by other designer-builders, and that feature is credited for her famous turn of speed, particularly in light winds. That she was successful is proven by her retention by Prosser for 20 years. Her life as a yacht began with a new name, Black Bess , in 1924. A succession of owners from the 1930s, when she regained her original name, to the near present, followed. Her present, very experienced traditional boat owners were looking specifically for a Bristol Channel pilot cutter at a when Alpha was available. After her major restorations they have easily sailed her short-handed and successfully raced her fully crewed.

Alpha ’s 2007-2010 restoration at Gweek Quay, Cornwall, was

that was the smallest in the fleet when she went over in 2005 – and this, Lazy Days , veteran of many returns as well as Operation Dynamo itself of course. In fact – she’s already booked on to the 2025 return with the new owner in mind! She was built at the Hyland yard in 1930 and measures 34ft (10.6m). She benefited from a major restoration in 2015, for a 2020 return that never happened (covid) and now offers a nice interior sleeping four in two cabins, with a biggish aft cockpit for entertaining six to eight.

Lying UK, Asking £140,000, hscboats.co.uk

carried out by luminaries such as David Walkey (master shipwright), David Cox (surveyor), Ed Burnett (naval architect), and Tommi Nielsen, who re-masted and re-rigged her close to the original configuration, and installed the new hydraulic drives. Then, 2023-2024, in the same ownership, she was completely replanked in Danish oak and deeply refitted by a team assembled and led by Ben Hopper at Penryn, Falmouth. This included restoration of Alpha ’s original counter shape and refurbishment of the electric systems. She offers accommodation for up to nine in three cabins in a typically cosy, well-realised modern/traditional interior.

Lying UK, Asking £450,000, sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

To see more boats for sale go to classicboat.co.uk

DUNKIRK LITTLE SHIP

PUT A LID ON IT

Dan Houston continues his four-part series on restoring Tara Getty’s 1938 S&S yawl Baruna with captain Tony Morse

WORDS DAN HOUSTON

PHOTOS KOS EVANS

How was Baruna’s deck originally built TM Baruna’s deck consisted of Port Orford cedar planks fastened to the spruce deck beams with bronze wood screws and plugged. The seams were caulked and payed with Jeffery’s Marine Glue No1. Bronze cross-strapping was installed at the main mast and aft of the deck house to provide extra strength under sail. A mahogany bulwark and cap rail completed the structure. The original deck had been replaced, with a plywood sub deck overlaid with teak – all somewhat rotten through. She also had her Barient winches, a milestone in development, being the first two-speed, geared in both directions. They were named after the developers Jim Michael and Tom Moseley’s yachts, Baruna and Orient. Baruna was a testing platform for Barient hardware and saw numerous deck configurations in her history, playing a pivotal role in the winches of today.

For the new deck, could you replace like for like? I lost count of how many times I read the original spec for Baruna. I did the same with the CIM rules, which allow plywood for a sub-deck. But cedar is lighter than ply and for a deck of 50m², it adds up. The original spec called for a cedar deck and we still had a lot of Alaskan Yellow cedar left over from the hull. We used modern glues to engineer a stiff, lightweight, and watertight sub-deck from the cedar tree we had, adding some western red cedar for the underside with teak planks laid on top – four layers in

Above left: Removing old (not original) deck

Above right: Some of the deck sheet blocks in place with new coated SS cheeks

Below: Preparing the new deck layers; middle layers are at 450 from the centre line

all. We built the sub-deck off Baruna with each layer epoxy-glued and vacuum-bagged to the next. The lower planks were western red cedar, so it looks right from below. Over them are laid two layers of 200 x 8mm Alaskan Yellow Cedar planks, the first laid at a +45-degree angle from the centreline; the second at -45 degrees. Then 60 x 14mm scarfed teak planks are sprung laid on top. Following the original design, we fitted a mahogany cover board with a half-lap joint on the inboard edge to accept the new cedar deck. The end result is a strong, light deck that looks original, with the opposed planking managing torsional loads.

Talk us through the new deck layout and design

We developed 20 iterations of the deck plan before we even got close. Crew need to be able to move around easily, and there are 18 of us. The helmsman needs to see the tell tales, and trimmers need an unobstructed view of the sails, while not being in the grinders’ way. You have the layout of handrails, sheet leads working efficiently through foot blocks, use of stops or parking cleats to free up a winch for manoeuvres, placement of pad eyes and fairleads to direct sheets and keep crew safe from heavy loads. The deck must be functional and safe, but I was also aware of protecting Baruna’s beautiful varnish and the yacht’s heritage! I analysed each manoeuvre for the way we sail and mapped out the deck hardware based on that. It’s crucial to evaluate what lies beneath the deck, specifically deck beams and structure, for what additional reinforcements and foundations are needed for the intended loads. For safety and performance, bolting deck hardware in place is an art in itself.

CB How did you choose the deck fittings and achieve their finish?

We chose Lewmar, as they were prepared to work with us and could produce a custom package of deck hardware. Hendrick Van Der Linde from the Netherlands worked closely with me throughout the restoration. For classic

Above right: All the old gear removed

Below left and right: Lewmar three-speed, stainless steel winches with their new bespoke colour coating, developed by trial and error to match the colour to that of nickel aluminium bronze

yachts, cast-bronze deck hardware comes to mind, along with crew members on deck – polishing it. Today, with computers and CNC machining, casting hardware is less common. We did consider nickel aluminium bronze, which stands out because when left to oxidize it produces a beautiful natural bronze patina. But it’s very difficult to work with so we chose a PVD (physical vapour deposition) coating over stainless steel which proved highly effective. We had a sample piece of nickel aluminium bronze that we finely sandblasted to knock off the gloss for the desired finish. After much trial and error, we finally attained the perfect colour and finish: PVDcoated stainless steel that looked like nickel aluminium bronze. Most deck hardware was a standard CNCmachined design, semi-customized for Baruna. We couldn’t use original Barient designs because of the higher expected loads from the Dacron sails. Something like a wooden-cheeked block, say, would need to be excessively bulky to withstand the loads. We required hardware that could support the adjustment of car positions on the tracks while under sail, all while maintaining functionality, safety, and a classic aesthetic. To achieve this, we selected stainless steel-cheeked blocks with bearings and track cars with slide rods. On deck, there are numerous six-tonne foot blocks, all with bearings, ensuring safe, efficient load-handling. All 21 of Baruna’s winches are manual. The pedestals are cross-linked under the deck; the workings of the under-deck pedestal system are somewhat a piece of art on their own! We recently fitted new gearing ratios to increase the speed for our spinnaker take-down line.

CB What would you change about the deck today if you could?

Maybe I’d make a few small adjustments, but thanks to careful planning, there is no need to drill extra holes or reposition hardware. I can’t emphasize enough how much planning, design, and construction go into a deck layout. The hardware is engineered to withstand the immense forces experienced when pushing the yacht hard. It’s the meticulous engineering that ensures everything works seamlessly.

Above left: Preparing the wooden pads for the deck sheet blocks

Craftsmanship

Yard News

PLYMOUTH, DEVON

Edited by Steffan Meyric Hughes Email steffan@classicboat.co.uk

All go at historic slipway

A busy autumn is leading into a busy winter at Stirling and Son at the No 1 Covered Slipway in Plymouth’s naval dockyard. The 80ft (24.4m) Brixham sailing trawler Vigilance is reaching the final phase of her comprehensive hull and decks restoration on the eastern slipway. She was launched in 1926 from Upham’s shipyard in Brixham, where she will return to early next year for fit out and rigging by volunteers of the Vigilance of Brixham Preservation Trust before commissioning ready for her centenary year. The western slipway is occupied by the 84ft (25.6m) Knud Reimers sailing yacht Agneta which is beginning a thorough hull restoration. The yacht, with her semi-composite framing and varnished topsides, is suspended above her ballast keel while the backbone is renewed.

In order to haul out the deep-drafted Agneta on an average tide, the yard received permission through the Marine Management Organisation to increase the depth of the slipway by running the

foundations and rail tracks below chart datum. The yard has also, alongside the bread-and-butter shipwrighting, upgraded engineering and metalwork capacity. Will Stirling said: “We are really lucky to have such a good team, experienced and efficient; it’s the most important thing.”

Dwarfed by these events, the yard has rebuilt the hull of the 29ft (8.8m) sailing yacht Pierette (probably built in the 1870s) with full-length pitch pine planking, and work has started on her deck structure. In the new industrial units built at the nearby Stirlingowned Treluggan Boatyard, two smaller projects are underway; one a 15ft (4.6m) sailing dinghy and the other a Teak Vertue, returning for cosmetic work after a restoration by the yard 10 years ago. The usual winter cycle is also underway with small yard teams going on site to the Mediterranean to help on Stirling and Son-restored yachts with lay-up, period servicing and maintenance work.

Above left: Vigilance (centre of photo) and Agneta (right). Above right: Same boats from the stern

Boats for sale

Reach over 50,000 readers each month

To advertise call Hugo Segrave +44 (0)7707167729 or email hugo.segrave@chelseamagazines.com

JEDANOR

Privateer 30 built by Falmouth Boat Co in 1964 and designed by Rodney Warington-Smyth. A four berth cruiser with a surprising turn of speed,she is a comfortable, stable and well equipped yacht. Jedanor is a perfect cruising boat for two people and the owners since 2012 have sailed her to Northern France, The Isles of Scilly and all points west of Chichester Harbour. Currently ashore in Poole. £9,500 Contact: anthony.young1948@gmail.com or Tony on 07581 127463

Robert Clark 1937 Cutter available for restoration transport cost only. Described by Yachting World as a

design built in St Monans Fife. Pitch Pine on Oak with Original Spruce Spars and mid-90s rigging.

Draft

Perkins Diesel 4-108 40hp engine. Restored in the 1990s she is now in need of further restoration work. Ashore Inverness. Contact: Kirsten Geddes at kirged@aol.com

FORERUNNER II

The last of the composite Nicholson 36’s, 1966 GRP Hull. Extensive refit 2021-22 including full new deck and redesigned interior. 2022 Nanni 30 (35 hours) . All new Z-spars rig including in-mast furling for easy shorthanded cruising, or participation in classic races. Ashore SE Cornwall. £49,950 Contact: Jon on 07970 835550 or jonelwell@btinternet.com

LETTY (1905)

Fast Rowles built original pilot cutter completely rebuilt in 2020 incl. new engine/ sails/rigging etc. Hydraulic autohelm Well maintained. Extensive inventory Owner retiring. Afloat Plymouth. Priced to sell at £265,000

Contact: 07836 765765

NEW CLINKER PRAM DINGHY

Recently completed, traditionally built. 10ft clinker pram dinghy. Larch on oak with mahogany and sapele, copper fastened. Hand made oars, chrome rowlocks and fittings. Very pretty boat. Can deliver at cost. £5,000 ono. Contact: Alastair on 07936505755 or via alasdair.maclachlan123@gmail.com

HEIDI OF BEMBRIDGE 42FT

Teak and mahogany 12.9m Wade, IOW 1968 to design by John Askham [Nelson 40] 2 x 2005 Vetus Deutz 170hp diesels,10kts @ 2000rpm, 19 l/h, Walter V-drives, bow thruster. 7 berths in 4 cabins, dual control, huge inventory. Lying in Liverpool.

Contact: ros@poptel.org www.coburgbrokers.com +44 7860 642328

16 FOOT MAYFLY ELECTRIC LAUNCH Teak decking on fiberglass hull. Regularly maintained, with new batteries and cover, and repainted hull, within the last 7 years. Moored in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. £10,000 Contact: robin.leigh@lateralcapitalgroup.com

MISCHIEF III

FULLY RESTORED YONNE CLASS BERMUDIAN CUTTER, MISCHIEF III, designed by Dr. T Harrison Butler and built by A W Clemens of Portsmouth in 1935. Winner of ‘Classic Boat Magazine’ Best Restoration 2012, Voted ‘TOP 100’ Classics 2013. Looking for a new custodian £39,500 Contact: Jonathan on 07547042000 or via sellboats@vividbluemarine.com

TWINKLE 12

A fine Twinkle 12 built by Wright & Sons, Ipswich in 1950. Traditional fine craftsmanship, mahogany on oak. This little gem sails both easily and safely. In 2023 she was fully overhauled and restored at the historic wooden boat shipyard in Málaga. All rigging is new and she comes complete with road and launch trailer, cover, new sails, oars, rowlocks, etc. She currently resides in the classic wooden boat museum, El Nereo, Málaga, Spain. Asking price for this little historical masterpiece is €5,250. Contact: Geoff on 00 34 666061 096 or via oliascasa@hotmail.com

GALANTE

RING 16FT 10 EX OFFSHORE RACING BOAT

PFM raced mid-late 80’s, 90 horse power Yamaha, full rig 1984

This boat does require new flooring, however the hull is very sound and the trailer has three new tyres recently fitted. A chance for you to buy a piece of history. Collection in person - Hertfordshire area.

Price £3,495 ONO Contact: Mark on 07791747291

FAIRLIGHT

Very special classic 43’ Bermudan Cutter, built 1938 by Hinks. Design developed by Laurent Giles as one of the very few examples of an enlarged Vertue, along with Wanderer 111 and Dyarchy. Current ownership for over 45 years, lying afloat in Cornwall. Pitch pine on grown oak frames. Five berths in two cabins. Delightful, spacious saloon, clear decks, large cockpit, easily handled, powerful rig. Volvo Penta diesel 50hp. Appeared in www.VertueYachts.com newsletter Spring 2023. Remarkably low asking price of £78.000 Ono. Contact: syfairlight@gmail.com

ISLA

PEEL CASTLE

50’ three masted Cornish lugger built in 1929. Pitch pine planking on oak frames. 14.5’ beam. Length over spars 85’. New solid deck 2023. All standing rigging overhauled, with new running rigging in 2024. Sleeps 12. Very comfortable liveaboard with solid fuel stove and beautiful craftsmanship. Cruised extensively in European waters and much admired at traditional festivals. 120hp Ford D series engine overhauled 2023. Fascinating history with extensive archive material & photos. Lying West Cork, Ireland.€60,000 Contact: Graham Bailey ghambailey@yahoo.ie +353 86 085 7067

Alfred Mylne designed Scottish Island class yacht. Built 1958 at Ardmaleish yard. Length 28’ overall. Yanmar 1GM diesel installed 2010 and recently overhauled. Currently stored at Fairlie Quay. £15,000 Contact: Peter Wylie on 07808 917 625 or p.wylie@btconnect.com

FIFER 33 WOODEN MOTOR SAILOR KETCH BUILT 1962

Wylde One is probably one of the very best Fifers still afloat, having been lovingly maintained by a ship wright for over 30 years and upgraded by the present owner in 2023. She is very solidly built with excellent sea-keeping abilities. Powered by a New Holland 85hp diesel professionally installed in 2001 she cruises at 8 knots burning 4 litres/hour and with her 455-litre tank gives a cruising range of circa 900 miles. Presently lying on the hard near Dartmouth and reluctantly for sale as I need a bigger boat for extended ocean voyages in my retirement. Offers sought at around £36,000. Contact: Chris on 07712 578961 or email me at chris.leonard@mego.co.uk

LOGIE (GBR 339)

Vintage Dragon, built 1960 by Ernie Nunn. Wooden build. Only two owners since she was built and in excellent condition. Refitted extensively over the years, including new deck. Comes with 6 sets of sails (Fritz & North)..Raced extensively, including at Burham-onCrouch, Medway, Falmouth. Comes with galvanised steel trailer Last in the water 5 years ago. Has been kept in a dry storage since then just outside of Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. £6,000 Contact: Oliver - omeyrick@gmail.com

and with

MILLER

Brokerage listing

CLASSIC AND VINTAGE YACHTS

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.

Romantically named and conceived – a dream come true for Cornwall-based boatbuilder and educator Luke Powell and many who worked on and followed this remarkable project – the replica Falmouth Pilot Cutter PELLEW is one of the most memorable boats we have seen. She’s lucky to have been designed and built, as close as possible to the long lived VINCENT of 1852, by someone bold enough to do it and who really knows what works: as a traditional boat, and as a successful charter vessel. PELLEW has already been very well tested, and has youth, size, and volume very much on her side – as well, of course, as incredible and unique good looks.

£695,000 GBP VAT Not Paid

Lying UK

41FT SPARKMAN & STEPHENS IOR BERMUDAN SLOOP 1971/2008

This beautiful piece of mid-century, Sparkman & Stephen-designed sailing hardware in all its glossy mahogany glory, OPPOSITION, formerly Ted Heath’s second MORNING CLOUD, is as fine and as famous an example as they come from an era when racing yachts - even those built to the then quite new IOR Rule - could still look beautiful to anyone’s eye. Sixteen years on from a major rebuild undertaken at her original builders, Clare Lallow, OPPOSITION still looks just out of restoration and comes available just when interest in boats of her era is on the rise. A new class for such yachts has been inaugurated at the Mediterranean classic regattas.

£375,000 GBP

Lying UK

In our quest for the most interesting classic and vintage yachts, every now and then we are offered the chance to market a boat that has quietly existed away from the limelight, in the same ownership, almost unaltered since new. ROSALÙ is one. Her Sparkman & Stephens/Cantieri Sangermani pedigree, performance, quality of build, and finish are assured; also that aura of a yacht still happy being what she was supposed to be. You enter her world, and just know she will never disappoint. ROSALÙ has always been enjoyed by summer, and been well cared for by winter, including occasionally necessary, more extensive refits and upgrades to her equipment. Her La Spezia berth is available by separate negotiation.

€650,000 EUR

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

Lying Italy

42FT MCGRUER TWIN SCREW MOTOR YACHT 1950/2022

James McGruer drew few motor yachts. When he did, they embodied the elegance, personality and ability expected from a master of 20th Century yacht design. JORVIK was built by his yard to a high spec for a discerning owner whose grandson has rejuvenated and sympathetically modernised this characterful yacht in the skilled and experienced hands of Harbour Marine, Southwold. With all necessary structural work done, new systems and services, a delightfully conceived and executed aft cockpit re-modelling, and a reputation for superb handling, JORVIK is an attractively priced and presented classic motor yacht that’s ready to go. On the sale of this vessel, JORVIK’s owner will donate 5% of his net sale proceeds to RNLI.

£195,000 GBP

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

Lying UK

68FT LUKE POWELL FALMOUTH PILOT CUTTER

71FT SPARKMAN & STEPHENS/SANGERMANI BERMUDAN YAWL 1963

Marine Directory

Photo: Peter Chesworth

Boatbuilder’s Notes

By Robin Gates

The feel-wood factor

Since the noxious whiff of curing fibreglass first triggered alarm in a shipwright’s nose, protagonists of production boatbuilding have been dissing talk of wood’s better smell, feel or look as mere stick-in-the-mud nostalgia. But there is mounting scientific evidence that working and living with wood is actually better for our health.

Recent experiments monitoring brain activity, cardiovascular and endocrine functions have shown that volatile organic terpenes given off by resinous softwoods pass directly into

Draw filing

The best way to file a narrow metal edge is to draw the file from end to end while holding it at right angles to the work – much like using a spokeshave. Keeping the hands close together will avoid bending a small file if much pressure is applied, meanwhile beginning and ending each stroke carefully so as to avoid rounding corners. For a finer finish, wrap a strip of emery cloth around the file.

the bloodstream leading to measurable reductions in stress, even enhancing immunity through increasing lymphocyte ‘killer cells’ active against disease. The sense of well-being commonly felt among fragrant conifers and their timbers being planed up for spars or planking is real, not imagined.

Below deck, where the compartmentalised interior of even a large yacht can stir unease, natural wood’s tactile and visual qualities are especially beneficial. Finger-tip touch experiments comparing furniture materials found that wood’s minutely

1 Coastal redwood forest

2 Long straight softwood for spars and planks

3 Sawing releases beneficial terpenes

ridged and furrowed texture has a significant and lasting calming effect after only brief exposure. Wood surfaces cut glare, reduce eye fatigue under artificial light and improve cognitive performance, but if the natural material is entombed beneath a glass-smooth finish these benefits are lost.

A wooden boat’s intrinsic qualities pay forwards even to the future restorer working sympathetically with saw, plane and chisel, pausing to savour the forest fragrance built into her by a past generation.

Traditional Tool

By Robin Gates

ULMIA JOINTER

If doors, drawers, lids and flaps of yacht furniture are to operate smoothly, their long edges and those of supporting frameworks must be straight and square. The same is true of boards bonded edge to edge, while broad surfaces must be flat. Machines churn out these parts consistently, also generating noise and dust, but for workers who appreciate the quietude of a more hands-on approach, the essential plane is a jointer which in any case makes a cleaner cut. Planing high spots while riding clear of lows, the jointer’s intermittent shavings lengthen, until one unbroken shaving signals end-to-end uniformity.

Jointers can be huge – that used by a Cooper making barrel staves may be longer than the Cooper is tall and must be supported upside down on legs while staves are pushed across it. But for general yacht joinery the ideal length is around 24in (61cm) which places the hands about a shoulders-width apart, thereby lending itself to good planing technique. To avoid rounding over an edge at the beginning and ending of each pass the plane should remain parallel to the worked surface

throughout and apply even cutting pressure, otherwise a convex edge will result. Initially the pressure is weighted towards the toe of the plane by the leading hand then gradually moved towards the heel as the plane nears the end of the workpiece. Clamping the work at waist height, with support arranged so as to avoid flexing, allows for good visibility while positioning the upper body over the plane while steering a straight and steady course. When planing a narrow edge it also helps if fingers of the leading hand are curled beneath the plane, in contact with the work, acting as a fence.

1 Jointing an oak board

2 Iron, wedge and swivelling clamp

3 Ulmia founded by George Ott in 1877

Many would say the Lie-Nielsen No 8 reigns supreme among recent ironbodied jointers, priced accordingly at around £440, but aficionados of the wooden plane should consider the jointer made by Ulmia, a company founded by George Ott in Ulm, Germany in 1877. Since 2002 this plane has been manufactured by Anton Kessel in Langenenslingen, priced at around £160. Although lighter than its iron counterpart, the Ulmia jointer sails through tough hardwood grain with a grip sturdy as a handrail, meanwhile exuding the warmth of solid red beech and hornbeam. With 2 3/8in (60mm) iron, it also excels at flattening broad surfaces.

LETTER OF THE MONTH SUPPORTED BY MYLNE

YACHT DESIGN

Topping time at Oulton Week

I read with interest your coverage of Oulton Week 2024, some great photographs and writing. We were there in our 101-year-old historic British barge Misterton to support our thirteen-yearold son’s sailing. Proud parent moment: he won the all-comers ‘bloodbath’ race at the end of the regatta in his Topper. While not normal classic fare, this dinghy has introduced thousands to the joys of sailing for more than four decades. Our own classic river cruiser Beetle (Earnest Woods, 1910), which you may remember from a visit to our workshops nine years ago, was also there. My wife Mary and I are novice sailors, but with the help of parent friends from the Topper class we managed to get out for two races in the evenings. Whiskey finish both times!

Simon Sparrow, Director, Hippersons Boatyard

Honouring British and Dutch lifesavers

Thank you for helping to mark the RNLI’s 200th anniversary with your marvellous series of features in the magazine. I retired as chief executive of the RNLI in June this year, having seen the charity into its third century of lifesaving; the support and affection directed at the RNLI in this special year has been humbling and uplifting in equal measure. Classic Boat has made its own contribution to this in a very special way. In your third instalment published this month, the Dutch lifeboat service is credited with being founded in 1924. In fact, it was founded in November 1824 and, although those in the RNLI always enjoy referring to it as our “much younger sister”, this is always done in gentle jest and with great respect for the (now) 200-year-old Koninklijke Nederlandse Redding Maatschappij (KNRM).

Mark Dowie CBE, Former Chief Executive RNLI

Inspiring art of the RSMA

Being a long-serving reader of Classic Boat, I recently went through this year’s exhibitors for the 2024 RSMA. I was so impressed by “Rigging El Galeon Andalucia” by Urszula SkolmowskaGudel that I contacted the Mall Gallery and bought it the same day. Many thanks for the feature and I look forward to the 2025 exhibition. Cli Dixon

YACHTS Classic

Classic Yachts 2024 is the must-read publication for admirers of the most stunning boats afloat. We tell the incredible stories behind some of the world’s finest yachts –tales of abandonment and resurrection, with passion and ancient skills running through them all like a single vein. We delve deep into history and share the secrets of traditional shipwrights today as they recreate the magic of yesteryear. It will be a voyage like no other, and we look forward to having you on board.

Order your copy for just £9.99 (UK) $14.99 (USA) This fabulous 132-page special edition will be delivered direct to your door*

Order online www.classicboat.co.uk/ClassicYachts2024

Next month

NORFOLK FORAYS

An ex-Marine looking for an adventurous, ethical life, had the 1923 King’s Lynn smack restored for adventures on the Norfolk coast

SAILING HINCKLEY

The Maine yard of Hinckley is synonymous with high-end picnic (motor) boats, but here is a recently restored wooden yawl built by the famous yard in 1966

30 YEARS AGO

FEBRUARY 1995, CB80

FINISHING SCHOOL

Our annual update from the glossy world of varnish, and a look at how chandler Alasdair Flint keeps his bright-finished Vertue looking like this!

PLUS…

The restored Dunkirk Little Ship White Rose; a life on the charter wave on Mylne yacht The Blue Peter; the history of yacht club arguments; and more on

MARCH 2025 ISSUE ON SALE

14 February 2025

Or why not subscribe?

Firstly, if you haven’t seen the brilliant Ridley Scott-directed film The House of Gucci (2021), then you’re in for a treat. It tells the story of the Gucci family in the 80s and early 90s and, without breaking out too much of a spoiler, it’s a story of high fashion, high living, betrayal and murder. Personally, it was hugely nostalgic, with its endless scenes of the place I was brought up as a child – Milan in the late 80s and early 90s. But what the story doesn’t tell is the connection that the Gucci family had (and still has) to the classic sailing scene. Our February 1995 issue carried the story of Avel, the 1896 Charles Nicholson-designed gaff cutter of 60ft (28m), then owned by Maurizio Gucci, now owned by daughter Allegra. She also owns Creole , another Camper and Nicholson, this one a 1927 threemasted schooner which, at 214ft (65.2m), is thought to be the largest wooden sailing yacht in the world today. Also in this issue, we looked at the heyday of nautical surveying (the last decade of the 18th century and the first decade of the 19th), and how with little more than sextant, swinging lead and small boat, the great pioneering explorer-surveyors “blazed trail of chart-ink across the blank spaces of the globe,” setting a standard of hydrographic excellence that remains the envy of the world today.

IN THE FEBRUARY ISSUE

 Going solo – the latest from the Vendee Globe

 Preview of the upcoming Sail GP season

 Top cat - Lagoon’s new 43-footer on test

 Greece is the word

– Mediterranean odyssey

 Sydney-Hobart: youngest female skipper and her story

 Transatlantic tribulations: Sailing with the ARC

Available online or ordernow post-free from chelseamagazines.com/shop

Everything goes in cycles Sternpost

A

cruising sailor’s perspective on the America’s Cup by Dave Selby

Cycling has certainly captured the imagination of sailors worldwide with the wall-to-wall coverage of the competition for the world’s oldest international sporting trophy, otherwise known as the America’s Cup, which these days features “cyclors” pounding away at pedals below deck like Lycra-clad galley slaves on a Phoenician trireme. I suppose this is progress of a kind as it’s smashed the world pedallo water-speed record previously held since 1968 by a pair of rather pink Brits in Majorca who not only had forgotten their sun-block but were trying to outrun an Orca and make it back ashore before they got grilled or eaten. Though we’ve never regained the America’s Cup since we lost the first one in 1851 this kind of stirring exploit nevertheless makes one proud to be British, particularly as the plucky pair went on to be selected for the husband-and-wife tandem category in the Tour de France and finished in the top half of the bottom 500.

Latest developments in the America’s Cup are, however, not such good news for rugby players whose sailing careers as winch grinders is now a thing of the past. Moreover, even in my local pub where talk of politics is banned as it leads to fights, and conversation is mostly of Thames barges and smacks, which leads to better-quality fights, discussion of anything else including cycling has until now been frowned upon. Curiously, one controversial subject that’s always on the table is Brexit, which happens to be the name of a Rottweiler-Chihuahua cross who, as you can imagine, is pretty cross about it, and in my view really shouldn’t be allowed on the table.

Now, though, the one other thing that won’t get off the table is the America’s Cup. Is the America’s Cup sailing? Is it cycling? Then the unsayable: is it relevant? Opinion is divided, just as trenchantly as it has been for centuries past on long-standing hot-button topics such as whether wood will ever replace leather as a viable boat-building material, and on the on-going controversy over whether Shot Gun John, God bless him, was a cheat at dominoes or just exceptionally good at counting.

As far as the America’s Cup goes, racing types, who can be identified by their curiously stiff jackets made out of recycled racing sails with a bit of a number and the letters G and B on them from a losing British boat, as well as their pushiness in being first to the bar – shortly before they go aground on it –reckon these high-tech foiling flying machines represent the very pinnacle of sport. To me, as a committed sea-plodder, that only makes sense when you understand they also think that such jackets are the pinnacle of fashion, even though you have to go through doors sideways if you’re wearing the bit of a sail that’s still got battens in it. Such are the sacrifices some will make for fashion.

By contrast, cruising sailors, who can be identified by the leather elbow patches on their crumpled geography-teacher tweed jackets that provide a vital habitat for endangered moths that feed on camphor balls, as well as an aversion to anything moving faster than tectonic plates, tend to the view that the

America’s Cup is BMX on water, and has none of the nail-biting drama of televised indoor carpet bowls. A further alternative view was voiced by the owner of a Sailfish 18 who said “the America’s Cup, what’s that?” and then was told to shut up. [Editor’s note: the author of this ill-reasoned rant owns a Sailfish 18, which explains a lot].

The serious question is whether the foiling and cycling technologies will filter down into the boats we’ll all be sailing in 10 or 20 years. Formula 1 has, in part, long been justified on the grounds of the technology transfer down to road cars, but that’s not the case anymore. In fact, it’s road car technologies such as hybrid engines, ABS and KERS that have filtered up into F1. [Editor’s note: that bit was surprisingly sensible, but probably wrong too].

And in a sense that’s exactly what has happened in the America’s Cup, thanks in large part to sailing magazines like Classic Boat, which every 10 years over many decades have been publishing reviews of the top-10 best folding bicycles. This is of course of interest to cruising sailors and long-term live-aboards, who need to get around on land to pick up their groceries, diesel and pensions, as well as to the members of the magazine editorial teams who own boats and therefore cannot afford to own cars or children.

This is what’s known in marketing terms as “living the dream,” and it’s good to know that, in that sense, staff and readers are all in the same boat. As for the 10-year cycle of top-10 folding bicycle reviews there’s a neat kind of circular logic to that. Around three years in there’s generally a review of the top 10 marine padlocks –after the first bike has gone missing – followed at around the five year mark by a review of the top-nine rust treatments to apply to the remaining ones. After 10 years when theft and rust has emptied the magazine’s bicycle rack it’s time for another folding bike review. This is known as the circle of life. In other words what goes round comes around, and it’s only a question of time before the America’s Cup follows the lead of these trail-blazing magazines and takes place in boats. [Disclaimer: the views expressed by the author of this article are his own and quite clearly not those of a remotely sane person].

Norfolk Oyster Matilda sailing on Lake Geneva