Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i Classic Boat

It was only 18 months ago that I wandered, uninvited, into the shade of a Rhode Island boatshed to find Joe Loughborough at work on a serious restoration. Joe was instantly welcoming and likeable, and so was the boat he was working on: Kirawan, a 1930s Phillip Rhodes yacht that raced in the infamous high-winds 1936 Bermuda Race, and prevailed against the aptly named, much more famous, competition from the S&S stable: Stormy Weather. And now, the owner plans to retrace her wake through history and do it all again. Purpose is one of the least venerated aspects in all fields of restoration. Spend as long as you like inspecting a restored vessel, checking it against the designer’s drawings, even inspecting the screwheads to ensure there are no posidrives (slotted…

THE PROBLEM OF THE CRANE As a basic proposition, driving bolts through wooden masts is a bad idea. Taking timber out with a drill to make room for the metalwork weakens the spar by definition, and if the bolt is under any sideways strain, it can worry away until water begins to get in. Because the bolt is up the mast, this isn’t salty, healthy seawater. It’s the dreaded rain; fresh water, as we all know only too well, encourages rot. Studying the work of Claud Worth from over a century ago, we find that ‘back in the day’ it was not unusual for a gaff-rigged mast (they were all gaff back then) to fail at the throat crane. Readers of the bermudan persuasion may not be aware of the…

Spoiler alert – I am not going to expose why Whooper is so fast. Instead I hope to shed some light on why she is as unconventional now as she was when she was launched and why for the second time in this series, I am writing about a creation of Jack Laurent Giles’. Whooper is in fact the younger sister of a boat called Wapipi, built to the same design back in 1938, so for the purposes of this article I will predominantly be talking about the first boat, although they are very close sisters. Wapipi was launched sporting some pretty unusual design features – shoal draught (a term not usually applied to a racing yacht now, less so in the late Thirties), a centreboard and deck stepped mast…

Maurice Griffiths (MG) was a pioneer of DIY shoal draught yacht designs, and in the post war years did more than any other UK designer to bring cruising under sail to sailors of modest means. Before GRP boats took off, MG came up with numerous practical designs (starting with the Eventide 24 in 1956) that were ideal for amateur builders. Many were published in Yachting Monthly and plans sold at modest prices. Thanks to their hard-chine hulls, most of these shoal draught cruisers were ideal for plywood (and later, steel) construction, and they were built in large numbers all over the world. The lively Eventide Owners Group website (eventides.org.uk) has a host of stories and pictures of MG’s many designs, while the less active Eventide Owners Association (eventideowners.org.uk) says the…

“My career began at Kemps Quay boatyard, Southampton, where I was that annoying apprentice who always asked questions,” quips Mark Lewis, owner of Custom Yacht Works in the beautiful South Downs National Park. “From there I moved into composite tooling linked to the naval and aircraft business. Then I changed direction, becoming responsible for printed circuit board handling equipment associated with the electronics industry.” Next, came a stint at world-renowned Fairlie Restorations, where Mark gained considerable knowledge in restoring Fife sailing yachts. “Progressively, I was being commissioned to undertake ever more private restorations,” he says. “The volume of work gradually rose to the point where I left to set up Custom Yacht Works (CYW), based here at Swanmore Business Park, in 2005.” With the first Fairey powerboat, the exquisite Huntress 23,…

A slip-up in Classic Boat! In your February issue, there is Yard News from the fantastic Stirling & Son in Plymouth. I read the article and then on the company’s website it says: “No 1 Covered Slip is the oldest remaining covered slipway in the World. Built in 1763 the slip was 250 years old in 2013. The roof was added in 1814.” No doubt it is the oldest covered slipway still in use, but is it the oldest covered slipway in the world? In the southeast corner of Sweden you will find the Naval Base and World Heritage city of Karlskrona, established in 1680. On the naval yard a slipway was built in 1755 and a roof was added during the years 1758-1763. The drawing is dated 1758 and…

Is the coble an endangered species, asks Robin Gates in his feature on the distinctive, compound sheer open working boats of England’s northeastern coast, a premonition perhaps of the current revival of the fleet’s fortunes. John Leather takes a look at the Thames skiff, immortalised in Three Men in a Boat and still popular today. Ken Roe was busy restoring a pram dinghy while Peter Chesworth was busy building a new one. Stepping up a size, we had a new boat review of the Vancouver 36, following on from the Vancouver 32. The 36 is a GRP boat, but with a traditional shape and good seakeeping manner; we pegged her as “a well planned ocean cruiser”. The big yacht in this issue was Sam Crocker’s gorgeous 1930s cruising yacht Mercury,…

How are you managing with the loss of Panerai as headline sponsor? We have been running the regatta since 2002, without a title sponsor for many years, until Panerai came along, so in a sense we’re back to business as usual. The three cornerstones of the regatta – Cowes Yacht Haven, Royal Yacht Squadron running the racing and some entertainment, and Mary Scott-Jackson as organiser – will remain unchanged. Panerai allowed us the opportunity to build our regatta into what it is today. Now we can replicate that. We had a long look at the expenses and realised we could balance the books. Do you think there’s a chance of the ex-Panerai circuit returning? I’d like to see it integrated with the ex-Panerai circuit. Being the last of the Panerai…

CRYSTAL GAZING The storm glass, or weather glass, is an ancient form of weather prediction that predates the barometer and has been used aboard ships since the mid 1700s. According to the Danish manufacturer of this lovely brass example, the first properly recorded use was by Captain (later Admiral) Fitzroy aboard Darwin’s ship HMS Beagle. Fitzroy invented the term ‘forecast’ and is said to have used the storm glass throughout his illustrious career as a meteorologist. The device works using a sealed-in-glass suspension composed of ethanol, ammonium chloride and camphor, among other things. Fern or flake-like crystals generated during different atmospheric conditions may be ‘read’ to predict expected weather conditions. Instructions are included, but we recommend you keep an ear out for HM Coastguard VHF transmissions nonetheless. Prices are from £90.…

Lignia Yacht is plantation-grown radiata pine (Pinus radiata) impregnated with phenol urea formaldehyde resin, a sustainable alternative to Burmese teak for yacht decking. The tropical timber, renowned for durability and grizzled good looks, is a diminishing resource and of increasingly dubious origin. Unlike other materials made with resin, Lignia is essentially solid timber with tissue structure exactly as it grew. The resin completes a kind of molecular scaffolding inside cells. The factory is in Wales, where timber loaded into autoclaves has resin forced into it. After curing and kiln drying, it’s dimensionally stable and as hard as teak. Chromatically, I’d place it between teak and English oak, close to malt whisky (1). There’s flat-sawn Lignia, and Lignia Deck, which is quarter-sawn, and physically and aesthetically tailored to the rigours of…

I was a fresher at Strathclyde University seeking fun and frivolity, and an ad on the noticeboard in the student’s union read “Free bar and disco Saturday night – apply to the University Sailing Club.” What better enticement for an 18-year-old newly released from parental controls? Contact made, I arrived with a sleepi ing bag and change of clothes outside the union that Friday night. A small raggle-taggle army of ardent party-goers climbed aboard a waiting minibus to be whisked away from Glasgow to the countryside beyond. The Firth of Clyde came into view and on we went through Dumbarton and Helensburgh, out into the leafy wilds, and finally down a narrow highway to the university’s outdoor centre on Gareloch. The idyllic setting was marred only by the Faslane nuclear…

When young naval architect Phil Rhodes (right) designed Kirawan in 1935 on order from her owner, Robert Baruch, he was already on the fast track as a star young designer of modern racing boats, challenged only by Olin Stephens. Rhodes proved it when Kirawan (with him among her hard-driving crew) easily won the very rough, all-upwind 1936 Bermuda Race. She beat every opponent to the finish, except two much bigger boats, with her corrected time victory margin an immense 3.5 hours, and she won three of the four trophies she was eligible for. Some of Rhodes’ innovation soon became popular on other ocean sailing yachts. One of the most often copied was her novel strong, high cabin (nicknamed ‘dog-house’), which blocked the Gulf Stream’s heavy spray from attacking the helmsman…

“How many boats should a man, or for that matter a woman, reasonably own in a lifetime?” was the question posed by Adrian Morgan in this magazine a few months ago (CB377). The answer for him was just two (so far), which speaks of a high degree of commitment. I wish I could say the same. Over the past 33 years, I’ve bought and sold more boats than is really considered decent. ‘Serial boatowner’ is one of the more polite terms levelled at me. So, as I closed the deal on yet another sale and waved a fond farewell to yet another boat, I got thinking about all the boats I’ve owned over the years – what made me buy them in first place and why, ultimately, each one had…

One of my more spectacular experiences of getting stuck on a falling tide took place the day before Christmas Eve in 1969. I was a hand on a 90-ton trading ketch, recently liberated from a life of toil in the Baltic, which my shipmates and I had been fitting out in a mud berth on the Hamble River. The scenery there was spectacular because we lay between the mothballed hulks of famous J-Class racers Endeavour and Velsheda, with the mighty gaff cutter Lulworth not 30 yards away. It must be said that in such exalted company our little ship was distinctly workaday. Unlike the neighbours, however, by late December she was almost ready for a transatlantic voyage. Working on the sedge, we’d made new masts from tree trunks and had…