Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Classic Boat

This year’s Falmouth Classics Regatta took place in some contrasting weather conditions. Light winds and persistent rain for the two Friday races, intermittent sunshine and a cracking breeze for the Saturday race, and another fine day with light winds for the parade of sail and the small-boat parade on the Sunday. There was a total of 159 entries, 105 of which took part in the races. Five boats – the Contessa 32 l’Aquarelle, the International Folkboat Tringa, the Cornish Shrimper Sterren Vor, the 1881 St Ives lugger Barnabas and the Morbic 12 Proteus – won their classes with a clean sweep of race victories; and there were overall class wins for the Nicholson 43 Sarabande of Dart, the 1910 Jacket-designed Cynthia, the Heard 35 Alice, the Cornish Crabber 24 Tumblehome…

With the acquisition of two new yachts in late 2024, the Rahmi M Koç Museum of Istanbul has celebrated its 30th anniversary in style. The two new arrivals are a 138ft (42m) American steam yacht Cangarda, built in 1901 by Pusey & Jones of Wilmington (Delaware); and a tiny sailing yacht named Rondetto, built in England but based in Italy for most of her life, which was a life marked by shifting fortunes. Rondetto is a 25ft (7.6m) bermudan sloop built from Honduras mahogany planks on oak frames, launched in 1965 by the JG Parham & Sons shipyard in Emsworth, Hampshire. The design is based on the famed Nordic Folkboat, a Swedish design from 1942, with over 3,500 subsequently built worldwide. Unlike the standard clinker Folkboats, Rondetto is carvel-built, and…

On an early CB yard tour of New England in 2018, Hugo Segrave and I walked unannounced into the boatyard of Loughborough Marine Interests (LMI) in Bristol, Rhode Island, and met yard owner Joe Loughborough, who must count among the most welcoming people in the USA; not an easy title to win – particularly for an Englishman. Back then, Joe and the team were busy with a deep restoration of the 53ft (16.2m) Phillip Rhodes yacht Kirawan, launched in 1936 and winner of the Bermuda Race that year. Other past projects include the S&S yachts Dorade, Santana and Skylark, not to mention his own Luders 24 Belle. In the summer of 2024, we saw him again, now with his youngest son Wil on the team, and on this visit, the…

In the spring of 2023, a sales advertisement appeared on the Apollo Duck website for a boat called Juanita which had been built in Falmouth by Thomas Jacket as a Falmouth quay punt in 1896. Several people sent the link to Chris Harker, not least because he already owned a Jacket-built Falmouth Quay Punt, the 1912 Curlew (although not the Curlew made famous by the cruising exploits of Tim and Pauline Carr). Chris’s initial (and sensible) reaction was “I don’t need another wooden boat” but that evening he went to a waterfront pub in Falmouth. There he met Jon Brunyee who he has known for many years through sailing on the 1893 Bristol Channel pilot cutter Marguerite which is owned by Jon’s parents Anna and Rob. Jon had also seen…

I was sitting in my cockpit in the Swedish port of Nynäshamn enjoying an after-lunch cup of tea when a vision of beauty came to a berth on the other side of the dock. She was the brig Tre Kronor of Stockholm. The skipper brought her in purposefully and quietly, while his young crew were as smart as paint on the shorelines. Her shrouds were as they should be, turned rather than spliced at the deadeyes, and the racking seizings that held them in place had not slipped by a millimetre. As my eye wandered steadily aloft I found more and more features to delight in. The upper yards were lowered where they should be, the sails decently stowed, obviously fresh from sea, not pimped into a perfect harbour exhibition.…

Stub chisels ‘good to the last inch’ Commercially produced butt chisels that appeared around a century ago were designed specifically for cutting shallow mortises required for installing leaves of a butt hinge, where the better control arising from a short blade makes for tidier work. Well before this, shipwrights had been in the habit of preserving the stubs of work-worn chisels until the cutting edge had all but disappeared up the handle, finding many uses besides installing hinges. Functionally, the comfortable length of handle relative to the much reduced blade bears comparison with a trimming or marking knife, lending itself to shaving end grain, for example, or scribing a line guided by the try-square. Both operations are possible with a normal length chisel but gripping such a blade this close…

In 2007, Ian Gilbert, honourary vice admiral of The Association of Dunkirk Little Ships, acquired the 1911 Alfred Burgoine sloop Moonraker from the estate of the previous owner. But lying ashore at the Heybridge Basin on a corner of the Essex coast, her future was still far from certain. A move to the Thames and Classic Restoration Services near Windsor on the upper Thames was to offer salvation. Having inherited Moonraker with “nothing other than a few sails and cushions,” little of her history was known, but research has revealed a fascinating past. Moonraker, ex Dusty Miller, ex Speedwell is a 28ft (8.5m), auxiliary centreboard sloop of carvel mahogany construction, with glued splines between her planking instead of the more usual caulking, producing a very rigid, light construction, ideally suited…

The world of classic yachts is in fine fettle. That’s the message from the HSS Classic Yacht Symposium held in Helsinki, Finland for the 12th successive year. Some 350 classic boat enthusiasts gathered from across Europe and the USA for this sell-out spring weekend at the end of March to network and listen to a host of international specialists, led by serial circumnavigator Sir Robin Knox-Johnston. THE WINDS OF CHANGE Under the title ‘Timeless Winds’, this year’s gathering sponsored by Classic Boat focused on classic yachting around the globe with special emphasis on circumnavigations, most notably a return to the golden age of sailing with recent events like the Golden Globe and Ocean Globe races marking the 50th decade of the Sunday Times Golden Globe and first Whitbread round-the-world races.…

The fleet Ranging in size from a 26ft (8m) sailing yacht to a 110ft (23m) steam tug. The average boat age is around 100 years. Main fleet The biggest group, cruising speed 6 knots, 30ft to 45ft (9-13.5m) Fast fleet Vessels over 45ft and 8 knots, this group left last and arrived first. Vanguard Fleet Smaller and sailing vessels Passage plan Assembled outside the Ramsgate harbour walls at 0600hrs, the boats broke into their fleets in a vee formation, flanked by five Royal Navy patrol boats and four Nelson support vessels. At the separation zone, the fleets gathered, with the main fleet holding position to starboard, the fast fleet to port, and the vanguard fleet behind. The team Leading a flotilla of 60 century-old vessels across the sea is not for…

GENERAL PRINCIPLES A hard-working diesel is a happy diesel. Marine diesels are derived from commercial vehicles on land, like lorry or digger engines. They are tough units; what kills them is lack of use. Consider a lorry engine running eight hours a day for a decade. It might run 20,000 hours. In that time, a typical sailing yacht engine might run for 600 hours. Lack of use and the long lay-ups over winter mean things like raw water impellers and alternator belts get stuck and deformed. Too much low-rev running also causes the piston rings to polish the insides of cylinders smooth in a process called glazing. Modern oils help reduce this and so can you, by not running the engine for 10 minutes at regular intervals. You’d be killing…

DALE’S GUNBOAT CHIC Fresh from a successful owners’ rally in Salcombe, Devon, the team at Dale Nelson have told CB that hull number 3 of the Classic 37 is under construction in their workshop in Neyland, Wales. The 37 carries the iconic Nelson hull form, with its fine bow entry and extended keel, but adds a smart, gunboat-meets-gentleman’s-yacht persona above the waterline. Scheduled for handover early summer 2026, this third build looks well-progressed, the 37’s purposeful design already unmistakable, as is Dale’s high quality construction. The integral fuel tanks, built into the hull and keel structure, are now complete. The nickel-aluminium bronze (AB2) stern gear is in place and the engine exhaust outlets, carefully glassed and faired into the transom, exit through the stern quarters to reduce noise and efficiently…

KENT AXE Sophisticated modern boatbuilders see the axe as a primitive tool, almost a blunt instrument, if you will, laboriously hewing away at what workshop machinery will achieve in a twinkling of electrons. Once essential to every stage of construction from felling the tree to cutting joints, axes disappeared from the shipwright’s armoury at the close of the age of sail. An evolutionary dead-end, it would seem, for a tool which had begun with a stone age flint. Yet growing interest in traditional boats brings with it a desire for awakening those dormant hand skills once employed to build them, to silence the ear-splitting table saw, thicknesser and power plane for a moment and let whispering hand tools be heard. And there’s no better way for reconnecting with our long…

Having one Dave on a boat is confusing enough – and I mostly sail solo! – so you can imagine what it’s like with three Daves on one boat out of a total of five people. We three Daves were ‘helping’ Kate deliver her lovely Naiad 50 – a modern boat with washing machine, tumble drier, flat-screen TV with Netflix, Sky Sports, Amazon Prime and heads that aren’t buckets – to the east coast from Plymouth. There was Sea-Sick Dave, also known as ‘My Dave’ by Kate, whose partner he is. Then there was another Dave, otherwise known as Other Dave – I hope you’re following this – and me, otherwise known as lots of things, few of them even including the word Dave. And just to confuse matters there…

A brisk and building Force 3-4 westerly wind was a great start on day one, offering near-perfect conditions for all classes. The classic yachts over 12 Metres class gave a sporting start to the regatta series, followed by those under 12 metres. Both divisions were incredibly competitive with a variety of tactics deployed to make the best of conditions. The Old Gaffers made a welcome purist addition to the regatta, with two wonderful examples, the gaff cutters Ivy Green and Plymouth hooker Spinaway X going head to head. The Dragon fleet offered a mix of family fun and seriously close racing, with Bertie and Fit Chick the stand-out performers. The Daring Class was an outlier with Josh Peckham and his young team on Dauntless a class apart from the rest…

The only clue was the cryptic message “What are your shoe sizes?” Fellow Cape Horner Tapio Lehtinen had invited Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and me to arrive in the Finnish capital of Helsinki a day early for this year’s Classic Yacht Symposium in order to introduce us to more of his native Finland. Little did we know that we would finish up staying the night in a lighthouse. We were still in the dark on arrival at a disused pilot harbour, where we were met by a RIB and given thick socks, boots, woollen jumpers and hats to don under heavy oilskins. Tapio gave a running commentary as we ran out past many islands in the Porkkalanniemi archipelago into the cold waters of the Baltic. The first sight of our destination…

While searching for a copy of Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, I came across another favourite of mine, Joseph Conrad’s The Mirror of the Sea. Unlike his better known novels, this is a portrait of the sea in all its moods; a treatise on ship handling, weather, anchoring, passage making, storms, survival, injury, landfalls and departures; a reflection on human nature, and our relationship with the sea, from a writer who was first and foremost a fine seaman. “If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm.” It is the poetry, the Shakespearean choice of words that mark him out as one of our finest, and yet his first language was Polish. To my mind it is this that makes his prose so…

This year’s Fastnet Race from Cowes to the Fastnet Rock and back to Cherbourg has a lot to thank Thomas Flemming Day for. The controversial editor of the American magazine Rudder enraged the American east coast sailing establishment by instigating a series of ‘ocean’ races culminating with the inaugural 615-mile New York to Bermuda in 1906. Opposition was intense. The New York and Boston newspapers all considered the quest far too dangerous, and some critics went so far as to send memorial wreaths and undertakers’ cards to crew members planning to take part. Undaunted, Day responded: “Newspaper men ought to know better than consult a lot of grey-bearded, rum-soaked piazza scows. What do these miserable old hulks, who spend their days swigging booze on the front step of a club…

REGATTAS GALORE Next month and beyond we will endeavour to cover the best of the season’s events and races. The British Classic and Suffolk Harbour Yacht Clubs and plenty from the Old Gaffers to name but several. SARDONYX 20 years ago we featured this 40ft Fred Parker sloop, now, fresh from a full refit at Berthons, she looks back to her very best. THERA We find out why this painfully pretty yacht is also one of Australia’s most controversial classics. SEPTEMBER 2025 ISSUE ON SALE 8th August, 2025 Or why not subscribe? SAILING TODAY WITH YACHTS & YACHTING IN THE AUGUST ISSUE • On test: Sam gets to grips with Saffier’s sleek SL46 • Destination France: Five great cross-channel routes • New horizons: Yacht transport investigated • The Fastnet at…