Innehållsförteckning för February 2017 från Classic Boat

Bruce Thorogood, Classic Channel Regatta Is the emphasis on racing or partying? Both are important but the racing is the beating heart of it – we have six races in the week and three parties. Do you need to have done a cross-Channel passage before? No – quite a few people have chosen the Classic Channel Race as their first cross-Channel passage. The support makes it like an ARC for Channel sailing. What is the ratio of UK/French sailors? There are more Brits because we have more classic yachts here. About a quarter are French, with a few from Belgium, Holland, Germany and Ireland. Three words to describe the feel? Informal; Anglo-Breton; convivial. Do we need to bring the blazer? Most definitely not! What handicapping system do you use? The…

RM SOTHEBY’S Boat booty at mega-sale DAVE SELBY Europe’s biggest ever classic car auction was simultaneously its biggest ever classic boat auction, with 55 powerboats selling for more than half a million pounds. The £43.5m three-day sale of a mind-boggling one-owner Italian collection, including more than 400 classic cars, became a feeding frenzy as more than 3,000 bidders competed for 817 lots, covering the equivalent of 71 tennis courts in the Fiera Milano convention centre. The prospect of a bargain peaked interest further as all items were offered at ‘no reserve’ and often at inviting estimates. A 1966 Ferrari 275GTB/6C was top of the results, selling for £2.9m. Prices of some items soared as bidders battled for a ‘once in a life-time opportunity’. The must-have boat was what in car…

CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF THE CLASSIC BOAT AWARDS Welcome to the Classic Boat Awards, which we are proud to say celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2017. Over the next eight pages, you will find a shortlist of the best restorations and newly-built classic boats launched this past year. The list has been put together following many nominations sent in by you – thank you for all of them. Our task of choosing which made the shortlist has not been an easy one. 2016 turned out to be one of the most productive in recent history. As spring rolled around, a flood of new-builds, restorations and new spirit-of-tradition yachts started to feel water under their keels for the first time, each a project worthy of the highest praise. That, in short,…

During the early 1930s the well-known Norfolk boatbuilder Ernest Woods of Horning decided to build a small fleet of six unique halfdeckers. They would be similar in size to the Yare & Bure one designs, but with an attractive sheer at the bow and stern as well as an angled transom and a useful cuddy built forward of the large and comfortable cockpit. They are constructed of mahogany planks on oak ribs with copper fastenings, a fixed keel and gunter rig. The class is 23ft long with a bowsprit, with a draught of 2ft 8ins and a beam of 7ft. The wooden mast is held in a tabernacle with the foot weighted to give an ease of lowering and hoisting which is essential when dealing with the various bridges on…

No matter how many items of something you build, it will in time decrease from ‘too many’ to ‘unique’. These two boats built for Aktiebolaget Archimedes, the Motorbåten and Archimedes, were sold in their hundreds: today they are each one of a kind. There are a few more being restored, but none of them is in original condition. ARCHIMEDES TYPE A One day at the boat club, I heard a man shout to me from a passing craft: “Could you take care of an old boat I have?” Irresistible of course! A couple of days later we went to inspect it. Under an ancient linen-andcanvas tarpaulin covered in a blanket of pine needles, was a time warp, a boat lying on two trestles, just as it was left about 30…

ANDREYALE COMMUTER LAUNCHES French-built Manhattan classics This tantalizing glimpse of two commuter launches at speed comes from riverboat broker Gillian Nahum, who is offering them for sale. They are built by Latitude 46, the French builder known for the Tofinou range of sailing yachts. The original commuter yachts took wealthy businessmen from their Long Island mansions to their work in Manhattan. They were long, slim, fast and luxurious and the new range from Latitude replicates that in modern GRP with lots of wood above decks for the modern age. The Andreyales come in three sizes: 33ft (10m), 40ft (12m) and 50ft (15m). Each boat is a bespoke build with power, accommodation and lay-out to order, but the 33- and 40-footers could easily boast luxurious accommodation for four and a very…

10-13 FEBRUARY 2017 My State Australian Wooden Boat Festival Hobart, Tasmania Is it possible that this festival that started in 1994, inspired by the Dournenez and Brest festivals of France, has become the top wooden boat festival in the world? It is a serious contender, says Kathy Mansfield. There’s a wide range of boats, most of them accessible to visitors. There are countless activities and exhibitions, and it’s growing. It’s not possible to draw in the numbers of boats and people that Brest gets, on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, but I’d recommend to anyone setting their sights on Hobart for February 2017, celebrating the 375th anniversary of the Dutch landing on Van Diemans Land. australianwoodenboatfestival.com.au 21-24 JANUARY Festival of sails Geelong, Victoria, Australia Major regatta kicks o with the…

Humphrey Bogart’s weakness for beauty was well-known beyond Hollywood. His suitors, oft-speculated upon and perhaps embellished in terms of reliable reporting, were said to be blush-worthy, boasting no shortage of silver screen sirens. But conceivably the most unremitting love of his life, the one which turned heads decade after decade among a sea of beauties and the one that remained ‘till death did they part’, was Santana. Bringing the then-80-year-old boat back to her most glamorous days, however, was nothing short of a modern day marvel. “I was trying to think to myself, ‘What boat has had a better or more authentic restoration, and barring a couple of possible boats worldwide, this … this is the one,” reflects Joe Loughborough. Long before launching his refit and restoration company, Loughborough Marine…

SEXTANT Made by Henry Hughes & Son for the Royal Navy and costing the Ministry of Defence £3,725 in the 1980s, this example has been stripped of its war paint and professionally polished. Box 27cm x 29cm. Price £540 trinitymarine.co.uk BLUEBIRD IN COLOUR Half a century on from Donald Campbell’s fatal crash in Bluebird K7, on Coniston Water in January, 1967, while trying to break the magic mark of 300mph on water, comes this book with fascinating colour images from the time. Author David de Lara has made the Campbell story his life’s work. Donald Campbell: 300+ A Speed Odyssey. Price £30 thehistorypress.co.uk EUROPE’S ATLANTIC COAST Stunning images by ace snappers Peter Haefcke and Michael Pasdzior of the coasts of the British Isles, Portugal, Spain, France and Iceland. €49, or…

As many Classic Boat readers will know, the English artist and yacht designer Albert Strange was the canoe yawl’s best-known champion. As technical secretary of The Albert Strange Association, I’ve had a wonderful firsthand insight into some of his boats, so much so that I make a case, when anyone cares to listen, that the canoe yawl is simply the best type of boat for the solo or short-handed coastal cruising sailor. But there are many designers important to the story of this modest, yet seaworthy, design. 1,000 MILES IN A ROB ROY CANOE We start in 1865 with one man, one boat and one voyage. In 1865, the Scottish lawyer John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor went to boatbuilder Searles of Lambeth in London and had a 15ft (4.6m) long by…

I don’t know why it should have been such a surprise to see Cambria looking so immaculate when I came across her moored stern-to in the harbour at Cannes in September. I guess it was because she was undergoing drastic surgery in a shed at Southampton Yacht Services the previous four times I had seen her. Back then, SYS project manager Matthew Towsend said if the job was a success then when she emerged from the shed one wouldn’t notice the difference. The majority of the work was to do with deeprooted hidden structural issues and indeed stepping on deck at Cannes there was barely any visual evidence that SYS had touched her. A keen eye, however, would notice small details on deck, such as the reorientation of the teak…

OWL Seaworthy centenarian Unlike many centenarian yachts which are museum-piece thoroughbreds brought out and polished for regattas (and nothing wrong with that), Owl is a well-used boat. She was built by White Brothers of Southampton in 1909 to a design by Fred Shepherd, in pitch pine on oak. She originally measured 41ft (12.5m) on deck, but an owner in the 1920s cut her in half and extended her to her present-day 55ft (16.8m). She was found abandoned in 1990 and restored, appearing at the America’s Cup Jubilee in 2001. Since then, her owners have made e.orts to preserve her originality, particularly on deck. Below, she enjoys the signature Shepherd space – berths for 10 in four separate cabin areas. This, and her easy ga. ketch rig would make her, says…

SPOKESHAVES There are as many different spokeshaves as variations on the bowline but the limitation common to many is that the mouth can’t be adjusted. As a consequence, although you might set the blade projection to cut as thin as a coat of varnish the mouth stays fixed as though pulling up shavings as thick as mast hoops. The potential for making a mess of the work can be imagined by supposing that you had to nibble an After Eight mint with the same mouth opening you’d use for chomping into a Pink Lady. Much of the time this isn’t a problem because the spokeshave is so manoeuvrable you can turn it on a sixpence to follow changes in grain direction, keeping tear-out to a minimum, and the risk is…

After one solo circumnavigation, two transatlantic crossings, a voyage to Iceland and five years drying out in the clinically clean air of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston’s Suhaili was in need of restoration. The task of bringing her back to cruising rather than concours condition has taken three years and countless hours, by a core team of four plus friends working weekends who have been just as keen as Sir Robin to see the yacht back in good fettle again. Suhaili’s restoration took longer than it did to build her in the first place. The biggest problem the team had was to replace all the iron fastenings holding the 1¼ inch teak planking. The fastenings were exhibiting the equivalent of ‘nail rot’ in a roof, and…

“The commodore suggests that every tender should have its own designated parking spot” For two years now your columnist has harboured a secret. Having held no post higher than junior prefect he was persuaded to step into the boots of the retiring commodore of what we fondly call The (Royal) Loch Broom Sailing Club, and before they send a sniffy letter from the Palace, I hasten to add that Royal means the bar of The Royal Hotel where the real business of the club, as everyone knows, is decided. Committee meetings are not, given my record of public office, a strong point. I now know eight people will have different ideas, or at least different from mine. It is no use playing benevolent dictator when faced with three former commodores,…

Thought to be one of the oldest one design classes in the world, and introduced in an attempt to quell concern over ever-increasing expenditure in yacht racing, the Solent One Design was first built in 1895 to a design by Herbert William White, a designer now well-known for the Big Class gaff cutter Lulworth, which he drafted in 1920. According to Henry Coleman Folkard in his definitive treatise of 1906, Sailing Boats From Around the World, the Solent One Design was ‘formed under the auspices of the Solent Sailing Club…[but was] open to any member of a recognised Solent yacht club’. Ten were initially built by White Brothers at Itchen Ferry on the east bank of the River Itchen in Hampshire, and interest in the fledgling class soon proved significant…

Email: steffan@classicboat.co.uk LYMINGTON, HANTS Visit to the Contessa yard A visit to Jeremy Rogers Boatbuilding is a rare taste of continuity in this changing world. The yard, which started in the 1960s when Jeremy Rogers and David Sadler designed the Contessa 26 ‘stretched Folkboat’ in GRP, has been going ever since, looking after their own boats, performing general work on all sorts of boats, wooden and classic, and even occasionally building a new Contessa 32. Son Kit Rogers is now at the helm with wife Jessie, and like many ‘heritage brands’ (refreshingly, Jessie doesn’t recognize the term!) has diversified, in this case to carbon-fibre davits. Jeremy’s own Co26 Grayling is in the yard (as is Jeremy himself), and a 32, Minstrel Boy, which is getting a stainless steel water tank…

STEMS AND BREASTHOOKS Going wild You can tell a boatbuilder by the things he looks at first. He will ignore the shine of the varnish (that can wait); spare only a glance at the spacing of the rivets (even a trained eye would be hard pressed to spot tiny discrepancies) and head straight for the hood end fastenings, breasthook, plank run and stem. The stem is the first bit to hit the water, so important in the full scheme of things. A chance also to stamp a builder’s mark on the boat. How high will he take the horn, what shape will it be, rounded or cut straight, perhaps with a slight bevel so the water will run o., and a scallop just below the sheerstrake perhaps? Old boatbuilding manuals…