Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2021 i Classic Boat

Peace CK171 The National Historic Ships UK photography competition, run with Classic Boat, attracted many strong images. This year, for the first time, entries were divided into the four seasons of the year, to support the National Historic Ships’ promotional calendar. The overall winner was Dan Jones of Glasgow, for his original, reflective shot of the tall ship Glenlee outside Glasgow’s Riverside Museum. Head judge Christian Topf commented on the juxtaposition of traditional and modern, and noted that the scene, “devoid of any people, seems to echo the unusual circumstances we all find ourselves during these strange days of Covid-19.” Regular CB snapper Sandy Miller took ‘highly commended’ overall for his runner-up overall for The Sallie and Cambria and in our category too, for his shot of three Norfolk dinghies.…

WOOD-COVERED NOTEBOOK A range of wooden-covered notebooks and journals is available from Bark & Rock. The family company sources sustainable woods from around the world as well as from its local environs in the south of England. Each notebook arrives beautifully presented in a luxury package. It is hand-crafted with fine details throughout, yet is designed for life, with the pages refillable. Special editions include silver and 24-Carat gold personalisation and wood inlaying. Priced from £190. barkandrock.com WATCH SUPPORTS THE RNLI Elliot Brown is giving £35 to the RNLI for each Kimmeridge watch sold. The Kimmeridge is decorated with the RNLI rope-and-anchor logo and has small white and blue circular dial indices outside the hour batons, a reference to the white and blue boat hooks carried on all RNLI off…

The people of Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelagic nation, have developed a diverse range of wooden boats throughout history. From one-man outrigger canoes hewn from a single tree, to sleek racing sampans with diamond-shaped paddles and houseboats of up to 120ft (37m) long, the country’s fleet of watercraft come in a fascinating array of shapes, styles and rigs. For the past five years, I’ve travelled from my home in Bali to remote corners of Indonesia to learn about one of its most famous and beautiful vessels: the phinisi. Twin-masted schooners with seven sails that for centuries were used for raiding and trade in the archipelago, the phinisis have been brought back from the dead to cater to Indonesia’s burgeoning live-a-board cruising industry. Built by hand on remote beaches in Borneo…

Protractor head uses The revolving protractor head of a machinist’s combination set (also consisting of the blade, square head and centre head) is also a useful tool for the woodworker. You can lock it at any angle for laying out joints accurately, and also measure from or set other tools by it, such as the sliding bevel. Typically built to tight engineering tolerances, with precision-ground reference faces, the head is clamped to the blade by a screw-operated bolt sliding in a groove, while the turret is locked at the desired angle by a pair of thumb nuts. This example was made by Brown & Sharpe of Rhode Island, USA around 80 years ago. Stop cuts and chisel Woodworking jobs can often be carried out in different ways but one will…

Throughout my yachting career, the adulation of the crowd has always eluded me – although the carping of critics has not. That sense of failure exhibited itself quite earlier on. It was a nice bright, breezy day on the Firth of Forth and I had persuaded my good friend Pebbles to try the heady delights of sailing a Loch Long. The weather was warm and the prospects were promising for a fine day out on the water. It is fair to say that the briny was not Pebbles’ natural element. Show him a golf course, or better yet, a well provisioned dinner table and he will be up and running like a beagle who has caught the scent of a fox. The concept of mother nature throwing buckets of cold…

In late 19th and early 20th century Sweden, many sailing clubs had an annual lottery boat. It was a way to bring money to the club through ticket sales, while at the same time helping local boatbuilders by commissioning them. The finished boats were often exhibited in a central town square. They would draw the crowds there and on the water too, when racing started each summer. Albert Andersson designed many of these lottery boats, but Bel’Rose, said to be inspired by the lines of Nat Herreshoff’s celebrated Gloriana, and built in Gothenburg in 1894, was different. She marked the end of an era. Today the clipper-bowed Bel’Rose, one of the most beautiful boats in Sweden, is sailing again. After nearly two years of restoration she is born anew, 126…

The Sydney Harbour 18-Footers and their development are probably well known throughout most of the sailing world: always seemingly over-canvassed, developing from relatively heavy 19th-century, centreboard boats with lots of crew (some of which, supposedly, had to jump overboard and swim for it at the beginning of a last downwind leg or when the wind went light) to lightning-fast skiffs with just three trapezing crew, in the latter part of the 20th century. But what is much less known is that there is still a fleet of traditional 18-Footers actively racing from the wonderfully-named Sydney Flying Squadron on the north shores of Sydney Harbour. Sailing races were first held on Sydney Harbour at the very beginning of the 1800s and by the middle of the century boats from 6ft (1.8m)…

This season I have mostly been sailing a classic yacht, which is hardly surprising. What did you expect; that I’d been seduced to the dark side, and have been having more fun that I can remember on a jetski? Contrary to many people’s memories of 2021, ours will mostly be positive. It helps living beyond reach – almost but not, alas, totally – of the nasty, little spiky thing we’ve all been worried about. Truth is the old (Royal, because decisions used to be all taken in the Royal Hotel until Covid 19) Loch Broom Sailing Club had a bumper year, with 26 races sailed, something of a record, as well as a regatta and a trophy race in memory of a lost member. Now the old LBSC is not…

‘Family means a lot to me and this boat brings back to life what my ancestors did.’ Wes Wheeler, New York born in 1956 and now a leading manager in the pharmaceutical industry is talking about the passion behind his latest entrepreneurial venture: to build and market a boat based on the Playmate 38, a very successful motorboat produced in the 1930s by the shipyard founded by Howard E Wheeler, one of Wes’ ancestors. Specifically, the boat in question is a modern reinterpretation of the legendary Pilar, the fishing boat bought in 1934 by Ernest Hemingway. The Pulitzer and Nobel Prize laureate was famously a great fishing enthusiast, and particularly active between Key West, the Bimini archipelago and Cuba. A TRENDSETTER Pilar was a particularly innovative boat. It is believed…

The classic boat scene has evolved massively in the past 20 years, but the area that has been through the most intense development is the trailer-sailer category. Quite simply, there is no other type of boat that allows you to do so much for so little. Some are little more than dinghies, yet have made extraordinary voyages. Think of Ernest Shackleton and his crew sailing 800 miles to South Georgia in a 22ft open boat. Think of Frank Dye sailing from Scotland to Iceland in a Wayfarer. And then think of the proliferation of ‘raids’ around the world, small boats sailing in company in coastal waters. This is where adventure sailing thrives. The grandfather of modern small-boat cruising has to be the oft-maligned Drascombe Lugger. Designed by John Watkinson in…

WEST SUSSEX Baba Black Sheep The giveaway is the superior boat tent in the Dell Quay Yacht Yard, solid and obviously made by a craftsman. Inside, Tim Newson is doing a major refit on his 1981 Baba 35 Black Sheep. Tim, 40, a shipwright and sailing instructor, had bought his Baba 35 in 2014 for his sailing school, before learning about the 2018 Golden Globe Race and entering. After renouncing the race in early 2017, he returned to work as a sailing instructor, while building the shelter over the Bob Perry-designed and Taiwanese-built GRP Baba. Since lockdown, he and his partner Colette have restarted restoration work and have also been busy establishing their ‘Practical Sea School’. They plan to launch both in 2021 but for now you can follow their…

MECUM, USA Hack actor’s top-of-the-bill Hacker From pushing pens as a Detroit bookkeeper, a night school course in naval architecture propelled John Ludwig Hacker to push the limits of speed and style on water with pioneering vee-hull planing racers that evolved into the glamorous high-speed runabouts that were a defining statement of the heady and frantic glamour of the Gatsby era. The company he founded in 1908 exists to this day as the world’s largest builder of classic mahogany power boats. Back in 1930 a hard-working American character actor named Edward Everett Horton, who later recalled “I do the scavenger parts no one else wants and I get well paid for it” had amassed enough money to buy a new top-of-the-line, triple-cockpit 30ft Hacker-Craft. With its sumptuous leather-upholstered accommodation for…

SORELLA 27ft Itchen Ferry from 1858 Sorella is a 27ft (8.2m) Itchen Ferry built by Dan Hatcher in Southampton in 1858. She raced successfully in the Solent classes until 1891. She was owned by four generations of the Warsah family for 90 years from about 1890 and during that time was used for commercial fishing. She has only every had three other owners, including the Italian family who took her to Italy in 1989 and raced her in many regattas there since then. She was restored in Southampton in 1981 and then had a major refit at the Cantiere Alto Adriatico boatyard soon after she arrived in Italy. But now her owners feel that they can no longer take care of her in the way that she deserves and they…

July 2020 was a momentous month for Cox’s as it marks 25 years since a consortium of eight people, one manager and a team of workers rescued the business from disrepair and potential liquidation, and began the process of transforming it into the modern, thriving Broads boatyard it is today. The last quarter of a century has seen gradual development and expansion, to the point that today, the yard has more than 400 regular customers. It has been a long haul to get to this place, with a huge amount of development of the site required. These have included the installation of a new shower and loo block and the design and installation of a rainwater-harvesting boat wash-down facility. The work has also included the replacement of more than half…

It’s cause for celebration that the launch of a new wooden boat isn’t the rare event that it was 30 years ago, when Classic Boat began, but it’s still nowhere near so frequent as before fibreglass reduced wood’s presence to the near nothingness of a balsa core to plastic. I may be peering at the past through rose-tinted portholes but my childhood memory of Chichester Harbour recalls the launch day bunting being aflutter at some yard or other on almost every spring day while new one-designs, dayboats and yachts waited their turn on the slipway. Every wooden boat develops character and needs of her own from the day the keel is laid but the repetition in general procedures does offer scope for improvements in efficiency, not least with the fitting…

JUST A BIT OF HISTORY REPEATED S&S inboard yawls are yachts of such legend that the new builds are picking up pace. This one, a new Avanti, was built by one man, his second of the type Classic Boat Awards AWARDS 2021 Restorations, traditional new builds, spirit-of-tradition yachts, power boats and people. We reveal the shortlist – the rest is up to you. Last year’s winner in the Best Restoration Over 40ft category was Fred Shepherd’s Heron II, restored by Abbie and Aaron Ashton and pictured above LOCKDOWN STAYCATION As it’s our Awards issue, we caught up with the 2019 Classic Boater of the Year, Max Campbell, and hear what he’d been up to: a Scillonian summer cruise with friends PLUS… The gorgeous San Marco runabouts; a visit to Irons…