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AUGUST 2022
T H E W O R L D’ S M O S T B E A U T I F U L B O A T S
WINNING WAYS Unique schooner rebuilt
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POLE POSITION The 1930 schooner Viveka was a sleeper in California for half a century. Now she’s winning in the Med WORDS STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES PHOTOS JAMES ROBINSON TAYLOR
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tepping off the plane onto the deck of Viveka this late May, everything seemed new. At Voiles d’Antibes there was a sensation of waking from a bad dream, with bare feet on teak, sunny skies, hard shadow lines, laughter, cold beer and groups of friends hugging each other for maybe the first time in two or three years. The sky was washed pure blue and it seemed the planet had rebooted for Antibes, back in its rightful early summer slot as the opener of the classic yacht-racing season in the Mediterranean. Also new was the staysail schooner Viveka, winner of our 2022 award for the best restored sailing vessel over 40ft. Actually, she’s 92 years old, but her near-complete rebuild at Rutherford’s Boatshop in California, her unusual staysail schooner rig, and the fact she’s never raced on the Med circuit before, made her the boat to watch. On deck, skipper Gery Atkins is giving a quick briefing. “New boat, new crew” he says at one point, making it clear he expects neither breakages nor miracles. Despite a low-key showing at the Palma Vela in October 2021, this is really a boat still shaking down for a new chapter of her life, and nobody would expect a good result right now. Amid the heady summer holiday scent of sun cream, we head out for a day of sail-changes before the big race, the engine in the bows almost silent. Frank Paine is not the most lauded name in 20thcentury yacht design, which is still largely terra incognita, such is the overbearing prevalence of the big three (Fife, Herreshoff and S&S). Frank Paine (1890 – 1952) was
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Above left: Off Antibes in June Above right: Racing in San Francisco Bay pre-restoration, under Merl Peterson Below: Each of the 76 bronze frames is new and cast to a unique pattern. Note the laminations on frames and ribs Facing page: Typical upwind sails: genoa, main and fisherman Inset: Crew at Antibes. Skipper Gery is second from left, front row. Owner’s son Alex, race helm at Antibes, is third from left, back row
one of a band of brilliant east coast American designers in the first half of that century. Chief among them was of course the godfather, Nathanael Herreshoff, but the next generation coming through included L Francis Herreshoff, the inestimably diverse and brilliant W Starling Burgess (who designed everything from cars to typefaces to America’s Cup yachts) and, of course, Paine. The one thing all these designers had in common, other than sailing, was aeroplanes. In 1912, Paine joined Burgess’s aeronautical business in Marblehead Mass, and after World War One, he and Burgess founded the yacht design firm of Burgess and Paine, employing among others L Francis Herreshoff and Norman L Skene. Flight was in its infancy. Speed records on land, air and sea were falling all over the world, and hydrodynamic and aerodynamic lift were on the mind of every automotive designer. In the same office, under Paine’s mentorship, was Raymond Hunt, who would go on to design the deep-vee hull and the world’s most popular outboard boat – the Boston Whaler. What an unbelievably heady time that must have been, as these brilliant, brave young designers breathed the heady air of unlimited possibility, and looked to a future defined by their ideas. This was this crucible that created Viveka. Paine, unusually, split his attention between the International and Universal classes, drawing a number of successful 6-Ms, 8-Ms, R and Q-Class yachts. He is best known for the J-Class Yankee, which he designed in 1929 to defend the America’s Cup the following year.
Also in 1929, Paine, showing the breadth of his practice, drew Thebaud, the last American fishing schooner to vie for the International Fishermen’s Cup, the race for the Grand Banks fishing schooners. There was a third boat designed that year too. She was a 72ft staysail schooner built to racing yacht lines. It’s said she measures to the 12-M rule, but it’s not been ratified. Either way, in 1930, Viveka (originally named Joan II) was launched from the Fred Lawley yard in Quincy, Massachusetts for an owner who wanted a fast cruiser. That owner was none less tan JP Morgan Jr. Not a lot else is yet known about Viveka’s early history, but it’s thought that she served in the war, by then named Seaweed, as part of the so-called Hooligan Navy, a government-requisitioned fleet of yachts used as spotter patrols on both coasts of the USA.
VIVEKA THE CRUISING LIVEABOARD Fast-forward to 2012. The Olympics had come to London, making it the first city in the world to hold the games three times. Great Britain was, pound for pound, taking more medals than any other nation, and nearly a billion people around the world watched on. Around this time, British sailor Rob Gray was looking at the magnificent, restored steam yacht Cangarda with its saviour, boatbuilder Jeff Rutherford, when he saw two masts in the distance. Soon he was crunching over mussel shells in a graveyard marina to have a look. “That’s always fatal”, says Rob now. It was, of course, Viveka. He knocked on the companion and was answered by a living legend, a man known to you or me as Merl Peterson, but to those who knew his feats, as the President of the Pacific. “Merl was an incredible man and it is a privilege to have known him,” remembers Rob. The late Merl Peterson, then in his 80s, had by that point owned Viveka for 57 years, the latter
20 or so as a liveaboard. He had kept the boat going on a modest budget, the old-fashioned way that included a recipe that came to be known as ‘Merlcrete’, an impregnable mix of epoxy and other bits. Merl had sailed Viveka far and wide, including at least one circumnavigation. Much of this was single-handed, which speaks volumes for the handiness of a staysail schooner rig. Rob agreed a sum for Viveka with Merl, but not wishing to harry him from his home, lodged the money with a lawyer and asked Merl to call him if and when the time came. When that call came, Jeff Rutherford was ready to start work. A familiar story now played out. What started in 2013 as a partial restoration became a complete rebuild. Planking that had looked good turned out to be brittle. In the end, all the frames and planking were replaced and that’s no joke on a boat this size and of this sort of build. Also, Jeff recounts, Rob was an owner who settled for nothing less than the best. Viveka, in common with many quality-built American yachts of this era, is doubleskinned in two layers of fore-and-aft planking, in this case with a mahogany outer layer of 1 1/4in (32mm) and an inner layer of 5/8in (16mm) in yellow cedar. The original build featured a conventional framing pattern of steamed timbers of 1 3/4in (44.5mm) by 2 1/4in (57mm) with every third time a sawn frame of more substance; 3 1/2in (89mm) by 3 1/4in (83mm). The hull planking was replaced like for like, but eliminating any butt joins with long scarphs. “Butt joins are where the problems begin” says Jeff. “They are also not so good for the paint finish, which is far more important these days than it used to be.” One particularly fine touch is in the deck beams, which are laminated, then capped and chamfered in solid timber to avoid ‘the laminated look’ that is so out of place on a yacht like this. CLASSIC BOAT AUGUST 2022
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Naval architect Jim Antrim, who had been on the team since Viveka came ashore, had worked out a new general arrangement. The thinking here was to preserve authenticity and originality where practicable, but not at the expense of making the boat unusable. There would not, for instance, be a half-tonne iron cooking range in the bows, but Jim thought the boat had the buoyancy up there to take an engine. “She had a lorry engine with a sidewinder at that time” remembers Rob. “With a metre-like yacht, volume is a precious resource. And it would have been sacrilege to cut out an aperture in her original teak rudder and post for a single propeller.” The eventual solution was a single 130hp Nanni diesel in the bows with a hydraulic transmission to two bronze sail drives mounted on each stern quarter. This unconventional arrangement means the diesel is in its own spacious engine room, the living quarters are left undisturbed, and noise in the cockpit is minimal. The deck was built entirely off site at Teak Decking Systems in Florida. “I thought at first – you can’t pre-fab a deck!” said Jeff, who’s now used this solution several times. Amazingly though, you can, after carefully making a pattern in pattern ply and shipping it to the company. The deck comes back in roughly eight pieces, with 8ft (2.6m) finger joints making the seams invisible. “It doesn’t save a whole load of money – but it saves a couple of weeks over the six or so to do it the usual way.” In 2019, Rob, with other commitments, sold the boat to a new owner, his friend Sir Keith Mills. If his name rings a bell, it will be because of his role as CEO of the Olympic bid, which brought the 2012 Olympics to London, and then running the show with Sebastian Coe. Keith has raced modern boats, including a TP52 and Farr 40 over the years, having got the racing bug after winning the 1998 Clipper round-the-world race with a young Alex Thompson skippering. He set up a yachtracing business with Alex after that race, and went on to be heavily involved with Team Origin then Land Rover BAR for Ben Ainslie. “Racing GP boats is a challenge as I grow older” said Keith. “When I looked at Viveka, I could see by the hull lines she was going to be quick.” The project continued, now under Keith, and with future skipper Gery Atkins 8
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This page: The interior features two heads (owner and crew), both unusually large for comfortable showering. The saloon (above) and galley (below), and rest of the interior, is predominantly in mahogany with black walnut detailing. The laminated deck beams are capped in solid timber and chamfered for the traditional look
and his girlfriend (now wife), Maria moving to California for a year to oversee and help on the project. The other attraction for Keith is that the yacht was in development. “You never know what you’re buying if it’s already done. And I really enjoyed the million decisions that had to be made. With wooden boats, if it’s not wood, it must be cast in a foundry! There’s part of me in the boat now.” The year 2020 began with the pandemic and ended with a controversial presidential election that would lead to the storming of the Capitol. In the late summer, it must have seemed as though California was ablaze, as the state saw its biggest forest fires on record. Work on Viveka continued in an atmosphere that was sometimes politically heated, and on one occasion the real heat of nearby fires caused a wind that blew a tent down, nearly destroying a mast. Mark Niall, a 25-year-old boatbuilder from Australia currently serving on Viveka as sailing first mate, takes up the story: “I’ve never been involved in such a dynamic group of people than at Rutherford.” There were, at one point, craftsmen of 13 nationalities and nearly every continent at work on the yacht. “The talent – Jeff’s reach – is just huge.” One early morning in October 2020, traffic stopped, as two new bird’s-mouth spruce masts built in-house made their way the one mile down the street from Rutherfords to the sea, where Viveka was waiting afloat, having made a similar journey herself. Soon after that, she sailed away from the smouldering landscape of fire and pestilence, and under the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for Mexico, there to travel as deck cargo through the Panama Canal, and onto Palma in Spain, her new home port. Viveka’s rig was kept largely original. Merl had raised both masts by a foot (30cm) under his long ownership, to gain headroom under the mainmast and a little more sail area on the foremast. These changes were retained, and the boom was shortened, negating the need for a bumpkin. “I don’t think that sail area low down does a whole lot of good for you apart from give you weather helm anyway,” says Jeff. Bar a thousand smaller jobs to finish during the summer of 2021, Viveka was back to her original form and learning to fly again.
LAK II
Clockwise from top left: Period wheel on original bronze pedestal and steering gear; Short bowsprit, foredeck showing unvarnished teak capping rail; Engine controls – throttle and port and starboard drive levers; Merl’s compass refurbished with original patina; Rebuilt bronze rope and chain capstan; Companionway detail showing understated inset bronze portholes CLASSIC BOAT AUGUST 2022
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VIVEKA THE RACE-WINNER As soon as we are out in the bay of Antibes, Gery announces tacking practice: six tacks, one every two minutes. The number two is hanked on to practise peels. Croatian helm Stjepan says Viveka will sail as close to 500 in flat water, 520 in the rough. Now we bear away under twin headsails, staysail and fisherman, but there’s only 5-6 knots of wind by this point. The staysail and fisherman come down and the golliwobbler goes up. The golli immediately fills and pulls, unlike the staysail, that has seemed so dead this morning. We are now making 5.8 knots through the water at 680 off true. Looking around the cockpit, it’s apparent that the staysail schooner is not only closer-winded than the magnificent gaff schooners, but far easier to understand. The mainsheet goes on purchases to the horse, then down to the aft-quarter winches. There are cockpit winches for the jib and runners. Staysail and halyard winches at the mast complete the picture. We tack. The main is almost centred. The stay and jib are fuller, outside the bulwarks. “We need to keeps things soft” mutters Gery, an experienced schooner man. We spot a pod of dolphins breaching erratically. “They are fishing,” laughs Stjepan. The big ‘kite’ (jib) goes up instead of the dying golliwobbler. The wind has dropped to three knots. We’ve been out a few hours, switching to lighter and bigger sails, but it looks as though fun is finally over for the day. We are virtually becalmed on a flat sea set rolling by the wakes of the big motor yachts in the bay. The soundtrack now is of the kite pulling with the rippling sound of thin sailcloth, while a steady procession of helicopters thump by overhead, bound for nearby Monaco. We gybe and run downwind and notice that there are two small rips in the kite. We take the sails down and motor for home. Viveka has proved to be a fast, easy boat, making for a relaxed atmosphere on board as her crew learn her ways. Over the next few days, Keith’s son Alex, a capable yachtsman and enthusiastic racer in his own right, helmed Viveka around the cans. The result? First in class. The Mediterranean has a vigorous new campaigner in its fleet, one that will be gunning for more silver at Mahon, Cannes and Saint-Tropez this year. 10
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VIVEKA DESIGNED: Frank
C Paine BUILT: Fred Lawley, 1930 LOA: 72ft 9in (22.2m) LWL: 48ft (14.6m) BEAM: 14ft (4.3m)
c9ft (2.7m) DISPLACEMENT: 36.6 tonnes PRISMATIC CO-EFFICIENT: 0.54 CONTSTRUCTION: Doubleplanked, laminated frames DRAUGHT:
GOING IT ALONE How a couple in their 70s built a modern classic in strip-plank with almost no help WORDS AND PHOTOS NIGEL SHARP