Innehållsförteckning för September 2017 från Classic Boat

In an ideal world, every boat owner, however exalted or large his current yacht, should have a visceral memory of holding a tiller in one hand and a mainsheet in the other, feeling every tug of the wind and every droplet of spray. Tara Getty does. “The boats I grew up on were small sailing boats, which is undoubtedly the right way to start,” he remembers. “Like everyone else, it was a Mirror, then Larks, Wayfarers, Toppers and a Laser.” In fact, Tara still sails a Laser and remains seduced by the feeling of speed and immediacy that this classic one-man planing dinghy provides. Tara might be best-known for the family boat – the 247ft (75.3m), 1929-built Talitha, one of the biggest classic motor yachts in the world – and…

The Thames Traditional Boat Festival under its new management is thriving and always interesting, with a wide variety of traditional Thames boats including classic slipper launches, gentlemen’s launches, Bates Starcraft, steamboats, electric Thames canoes and launches, ski€s, punts and many others. The Dunkirk Little Ships are always a special attraction, while amphibious craft this year were there in good numbers, giving the surprising sight of a car motoring down the river. There was also a First World War torpedo boat, triplanes displaying in the skies, military vehicles on land, and vintage cars and bicycles. Surely there is something for everyone, and a wide variety of places to eat and drink well if you decided not to bring your own picnic. The event now spans three days, and on the Saturday…

The Golden Globe Race 2018, which starts from Plymouth next year, commemorating 50 years since the original, has created such interest that it has now been announced that it will run quadrennially. The premise of the event is for a Corinthian, round-the-world, solo race for skippers sailing old-fashioned yachts under 36ft (11m) and with 1960s navigation aids (VHF, sextant and paper charts) to follow in the wake of the heroes of the first race: Knox-Johnston, Moitessier, Tetley et al. The 2018 event has places for 30 boats and is heavily oversubscribed. The departure point for the 2022 Golden Globe Race has not yet been named. TEN JOSHUA REPLICAS TO BE BUILT Golden Globe Race organiser Don McIntyre has announced the building of no fewer than 10 Joshua replicas in steel…

BBC TV film-makers are preparing a new series on classic boats set to broadcast this autumn on BBC2. Entitled Floating History of Britain, it will feature a range of craft including a classic yacht on the River Mersey, a narrow boat on Midlands canals, a Welsh coracle, a Cambridge punt, a rowing eight and Thames sailing barges. Classic Boat writer Dick Durham was interviewed for the episode on spritsail barges. He spoke to the BBC team during filming of a recent Thames Sailing Barge Match, when there was a collision between the steel barge Reminder and the wooden-hulled Edith May. Dick was part of the bridge committee o.ciating on the race aboard the committee vessel X-Pilot. Fortunately no one was hurt during the incident, which occurred while the barges were…

The 21st running of the Marion to Bermuda Race started on June 9 outside of Sippican Harbor in Marion, Massachusetts. While the race began with nearly perfect sailing conditions, which allowed boats and crews to make good time south and out of Buzzards Bay, the winds began to lighten and crews found themselves looking for any breeze to close the distance to Bermuda. After a straightforward crossing of the Gulf Stream, winds faded and the fleet made slow progress, with the leaders losing ground to the back of the fleet, still sailing in good air. The race ended with an unusually compact fleet, separated by less than 20 hours from the first to last boat crossing the line o. St David's Lighthouse. The overall winner of the 2017 race was…

MYLNE CUFFLINKS Launched as a timely precursor to a forthcoming book about Mylne, these cufflinks bear the date he set up his design office 121 years ago – and it’s still in operation. They can be accompanied by a similarly decorated tie pin. You can buy them separately or it’s all yours for free if you pre-order the luxury version of the book, Alfred Mylne – the life, yachts & legacy of Scotland’s greatest yacht designer, at £195. The standard version of the book looks lavish enough, in large format with historical photos and diagrams of his life and work. mylne.com/gifts CLASSIC CIRCUMNAVIGATION Riddle of the Waves is the account of the voyage around Britain of the Spirit of Falmouth, whose every crewmember was an Armed Forces veteran. Some had…

SEPTEMBER 18, 2016, VANCOUVER It is not often that one gets the opportunity to take a 105-year-old, wooden sailing yacht over 9,000 miles through the Pacific and north Atlantic. Especially one designed as a cruiser racer, with the emphasis firmly on racer, with minimal freeboard, no modern safety contrivances and a powerful topmast rig. A quick look at modern yachts shows an emphasis on protecting the crew from the elements – very sensible, as nothing is so dangerous at sea as being cold and wet, which can lead to fatigue and poor judgement. Dodgers, full wheelhouses, a healthy beam and a high freeboard – there you have the best of modern thought on how one should go to sea. Compare this to the high, exposed steering position on Anne Marie,…

THE N-CLASS DOES NOT SEEM to have featured many of the best-known designers, nor any great numbers of boats. One of the most successful was the George Owen-designed Dorello. She was voted boat of the year in 1908 by Yachting magazine, and her innovative high aspect rig was later adopted by Nat Herresho. on the New York Yacht Club Forties and Fifties. Owen himself skippered her for three years and had an impressive record of 58 victories in 62 starts. Two of John G Alden’s schooners were converted to the N Class. Sachem was built to the Universal Rule in 1927 and converted by Alden himself in 1936; and Malabar VII, which had won the Bermuda Race in 1926 with her original rig, was converted (also in 1936) by Ted…

BOATS FLOURISHED ON BOTH US COASTS as well as the Great Lakes. In 1913 the class received a number of boosts with the presentation of new trophies. In December the New York Times reported that two clubs, the Indian Harbour Yacht Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the Corinthian Yacht Club at Marblehead, had o.ered trophies for the R-Class which “bids fair to make Class R the standard of interclub and intercity racing for the coming season”. The newspaper went on: “Many prominent yachtsmen feel that boats built in this class are best suited for interclub racing, which in many instances involves shipping the boats by rail or water. At the same time these boats are su.ciently large to be comfortable and safe, and can be easily handled without a large…

PETTERSSON DESIGN Ideal for weekend boating Anyone from Sweden, and many not, will instantly see echoes of Swedish boatbuilder CG Pettersson in this river cruiser. With her woodenframed windshield, stepped sheer and the allimportant fullwidth foredeck with sidedecks leading aft to the cockpit, she runs very close to his iconic 1930s and 1940s designs. The modern design has clearly hit the right note, with 80 already sold and 31 in build. They are built in Holland in GRP – the Dutch have long been masters at this sort of thing. “She’s ideal for weekend boating, with a small galley, a double berth that converts to a ‘dinette’, storage and a very large cockpit with a folding hood,” says Gillian Nahun, of Henley Sales and Charter, who spotted her at a…

YARD VISIT: CUSTOM YACHT WORKS Custom Yacht Works in Swanmore, in a beautiful part of Hampshire, is a hive of activity at the time of my visit. The team was busy with five Fairey powerboats with the imminent arrival of a sixth, a Huntsman 28, which will undergo a major restoration. Yard founder Mark Lewis began his career serving an apprenticeship at Kemps Quay Boatyard before moving into composite tooling for the marine and aircraft industries. Next came a role in the electronics business, dealing with printed circuit boards. Moving on again, he joined Fairlie Restorations with its worldrenowned expertise in restoring Fife-designed sailing yachts. “Increasingly, I was being commissioned to undertake private restorations,” Mark says. “The volume rose to a stage where it was interfering with my day job,…

Racing was as competitive as ever on the Solent as an impressive fleet of classics old and new gathered at Cowes for Panerai British Classic Week in July. Talk of the regatta was a new maxed-out race yacht from Spirit, a 52D called Oui Fling, but even she couldn’t beat defending regatta champion Whooper, the 1939 Laurent Giles design owned by Giovanni Belgrano, which won the event overall. At the final night’s prize-giving, Panerai’s Philippe de Saint Lager presented the crew with the BCYC Racing Trophy and a Panerai Luminor Marina Automatic Acciaio – 44mm watch. (continued page 14) The bigger boats didn’t have it all their way and it was the smallest in the fleet that was third overall, Richard Matthews’ 25ft 9in (7.84m) Stella Scorpio taking a class…

While the 35th America’s Cup was playing out in Bermuda, a stunning fleet of eleven 12-Metre yachts, the class that competed for the Cup between 1958 and 1987, gathered on the Flensburg Fjord in June and July for the Robbe & Berking 12-Metre European Championship. The oldest participant was Heti from Hamburg, built in 1912, while the youngest was Kiwi Magic, with which New Zealand made its first attempt to win the America’s Cup in 1987. She belongs to a Scandinavian syndicate. The overall regatta winner was Wings (K15, 1937), ahead of Trivia (K10, 1937) and defending European champion Vim (US 15, 1939). Among many spectators and photographers there to see one of the biggest 12-M fleets assembled, were nine painters from the North German Realists group, invited by Robbe…

Be careful what you say about a fellow’s boat. You can get away with suggesting his children could do with a little more discipline and, if especially brave, remark on a husband’s expanding girth but if you were to say, in passing, that you reckon his sheerline could do with a little more oomph, or his rig was a trifle, shall we say, stumpy, then be warned: that’s far worse. ou would not be the first to look on the profile of a yacht and think: now, why did they stick that doghouse on top of that coachroof? Or to wonder how the designer felt impelled to angle the transom quite so steeply. Invariably you will be comparing his bow, stern or sheerline to the epitome of graceful perfection you…

The race officer, I suppose, was being kind. As he concluded the morning briefing outside the Panerai lounge at Cowes Yacht Haven, he quipped: “This course should give the big boats some good sailing – and allow Snippet to finish.” Paul Spooner and I almost spat out our espressos. Allow Snippet to finish? What unmentionable cheek. Snippet might be the only gaffer in this fleet of gleaming bermudan sloops, but a venerable old lady she is, George Holmes’ own boat, no less, for the first half of the last century e made our way back down the pontoons between varnished Fifes and Mylnes, considering the day ahead. A downwind start, but then a long beat back up to the next mark, a course that would serve the bermudanrigged classics well,…

Bella, a 12ft 6in (3.8m) rowing dinghy built in 1954 by Borwick’s of Windermere is, according to her owner, of unusually high quality and in original condition. The commissioning owner’s father was a timber expert and spent a year finding the larch, oak and mahogany that would be cut into the planks, ribs and interior fit out of the boat. The legend goes that ‘old man Borwick’ pronounced her the most beautiful boat the company had ever built. She has spent the last 45 years under cover in a slightly damp barn and it seems the decades have been kind, as she was refloated this summer, took up easily and now doesn’t leak a drop. The originality seems to be 100 per cent – down to the interior varnish, stamped…

ADVICE Setting up a bench plane Having sharpened the blade, there are several steps to optimising a bench plane's performance besides using the depth and lateral adjustment controls. Test the flatness of the sole with a try square, front-to-back and side-to-side. A hollow before the mouth, especially, will cause tear-out. Restore flatness by shunting the sole back and forth on aluminium oxide abrasive. For this gritty operation the blade should be retracted but otherwise tightened normally. Next, adjust the mouth. Remove the lever cap, blade and chip breaker, then loosen the two machine screws holding the frog to the sole. Turn the adjustment screw (at the rear of the frog) to narrow or widen the mouth: a narrow mouth for fine shavings, a wider mouth for coarser work. Look for…

16-19 AUGUST Regatta Illes Balears Classic Mallorca, velaclasicamallorca.com 20 AUGUST Opera House Cup Nantucket, USA America’s leading classic yacht race operahousecup.org 19-26 AUGUST Conwy River Festival Conwy, north Wales Includes ga. er and nobby races conwyriverfestival.org 27 AUGUST & 2 SEPTEMBER Southend and Colne Barge Matches Historic Thames sailing barge racing sailingbargeassociation.co.uk 2-3 SEPTEMBER Bosham Classic Boat Revival The main event for classic dinghies classicboatrevival.co.uk NEXT MONTH PAZIENZA Sailing the magnificent Jack Laurent Giles sloop once owned by Pete Townshend of The Who DAVID BOYD From an apprentice with Fife III to designing America’s Cup 12-Metre yachts – Boyd’s life and boats MARLIN 23 A sympathetic mix of Herresho. ’s Fish and Marlin classes resulted in this attractive daysailer PLUS... Wooden boatbuilding on the beach in Indonesia, regatta reports from…

Language difficulties are often part of any sailing trip abroad, but just as important is capturing the proper nuance when communicating with a local. That fact was brought home to me during a visit to Saint-Malo. Those who have raced to Saint-Malo know that ensuring that one’s yacht is travelling at maximum speed has nothing whatever to do with the hope of winning a pot. Rather it is to ensure that one gets into the inner harbour before the lock gates close and that one gets ashore in time to book a table at the Duchesse Anne, the best seafood restaurant in town. On this particular trip I was on a Nicholson 43, ‘the last of the gentleman’s cruiser-racers’. We made good progress, but by the time we got ashore…

Barcelona’s Puig Vela Clàssica celebrated its tenth birthday in July. Not many classic regattas are held in major cultural cities, which makes the Puig Vela rather special. The thing that really makes the annual regatta tick, though, is the near-certainty of good wind, and this year was no exception. Spain has been baking this year, with the hottest sea temperatures ever recorded on all its coasts and the hottest June in half a century. On the first day of racing, temperatures over 300C created a strong sea breeze as the air above the Catalan capital started rising in earnest. This combined with a south-westerly Garbi to produce sustained wind speeds of 16-18 knots with gusts over 25. Racing the 17.1-mile coastal course on the 1937 Alden yacht Sonata with the…

“There was absolutely no link, no reference to the extreme richness of the America’s Cup. They stole the label and did not respect the content” Bruno Troublé has spoken out about the 35th America’s Cup, criticising the 2017 event in Bermuda and the plans to run the Cup on a two-year cycle as “vulgar”. He celebrated the fact that the USA had not won the event again, saying victors New Zealand would now “fix it”, adding: “They know how to do it.” Speaking about the Bermuda event, Troublé said: “We don’t want a video game kind of boat racing where the greatest sailors on earth (Sir Ben Ainslie, Jimmy Spithill or Franck Cammas) have no chance. And while they race, we want to see their faces, not robocops covered with…

There is nothing quite like a gaff cutter yacht from the late 19th century to hold the eye: think Marigold, or Partridge. Marigan, which we spotted sailing at the recent Puig Vela Clàssica in Barcelona (see p16), is no exception. She was designed by Charles Livingstone, serving at the time on the English Committee of the America’s Cup, for his own use. She was built by Bond of Birkenhead in 1898, originally named Molita, at an impressive 50ft 2in (15.3) on deck, and quite a bit more with the bowsprit. She was found in Oban in 2003 by Dr Tim Leisenhoff and taken back to Palma de Mallorca for restoration, which included reinstating her gaff cutter rig (she was re-rigged as a bermudan ketch in 1936). Re-launched in 2006, she…

Happy birthday! How does it feel to be 90? Fantastic! And as the relative new boy at Fox’s Marina & Boatyard, for me it’s a real honour. Things have changed a bit since the 1920s. Would Charlie Fox still recognise what you do? Undoubtedly he would – our projects may be larger and involve new materials and techniques, and we’ve expanded to bring in a range of dedicated departments for stainless, rigging, painting, electronics and engineering – but much of what we do remains the same. Was there a time when wooden boat building died out at Fox’s? The last new builds in timber to leave Fox’s were in 1979 – the Dubois half tonner Santa Evita and the 72ft (22m) Arethusa. Wooden boat repairs continue to this day. The…

The 2nd Annual Newport Wooden Boat Show will be held alongside the Newport International Boat Show and Newport Brokerage Boat Show from September 14-17 in Newport, Rhode Island. Building upon the success of last summer's inaugural event hosted by Bowen's Wharf, the Newport Wooden Boat Show has grown quickly with exhibitors this year including the Bristol Boat Company, First Light Boatworks, the Concordia Company, Arey's Pond, Newport Nautical Timbers and more. There will be both sail and power vessels on display, ashore and in the water, at Bowen's Landing and Bowen's Wharf Marina. For more information, visit the Bowen's Wharf website: bowenswharf.com…

No wooden mast could I see as I scanned the aluminium spears protruding from the tree-line of Suffolk’s lovely River Orwell. This irritated me: I was in no mood for walking much further, having trudged in the early summer heat, my kitbag bruising my shoulder, from the bus stop at Woolverstone village down to the water’s edge. “Is Lona III here?” I asked the young woman in marina uniform. She looked puzzled. “Only I can’t see any wooden masts,” I added. “Oh,” she said in a moment of comprehension, “you mean the little one down there?” pointing to the innermost berth alongside the manicured marina’s lawns. A sudden puff of sea-breeze released hundreds of dandelion spores which floated over the river like drifting snowflakes and as the fluffy blizzard cleared…

It may be hard for some younger readers to believe, but pilot guides did exist before Tom Cunliffe! In fact, portolan charts first appeared in Italy in the 13th century, the name deriving from portolano, ie relating to ports and harbours, and now the modern Italian term for pilot book, writes Dave Selby. An exceptional example from 1637 that had been hidden away, unseen by public or scholars for more than 70 years, created a stir when it resurfaced at Bonhams. Made by Placidus Caloiro et Oliva, it centres on Sicily, with routes around the Mediterranean and detailed place names and coastal features. Vividly illustrated and elaborately ornamented, it only omits marinas. It sold for £68,750. Tom Cunliffe’s Shell Channel Pilot, which does includes marinas, is available for £35.…

THE Q BOATS WERE THE FIRST OF the Universal Rule classes to become popular, starting with Starling Burgess’s Orestes and George Owen’s Little Rhody II in 1904. Three years later, the Owen boat was sailing in an 88-mile Bristol YC race when two crew members were swept overboard. They were recovered, alive, and the New York Times reported that they were “undaunted by their mishap and they drove the Little Rhody with undiminished canvas through the high seas and sent her home the winner”. Nat Herresho. designed four Qs. The third of these, the 1909 Tondelayo (ex-More Joy), is the oldest surviving Q and currently needs funds to restore her. Nat’s last Q was Grayling, built in 1923 by the Herresho. Manufacturing Company for JP Morgan, past Commodore of the…

When it comes to messing about in boats, you probably still remember the first time you thought – I want to do this for the rest of my life. For countless Britons – they would have to number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions over the years – that magical moment took place on the Broads. The craze started after the First World War, really took off after the second, and peaked in the 1970s, when there were well over 1,000 cabin boats plying their trade under these big East Anglian skies. Today, you might wonder if the Broads holiday has passed into anachronism; everything has its time, after all. But it seems the experience has as firm a tenure in the English imagination as Marmite and allotments,…

Edited by Ste. an Meyric Hughes: +44 (0)207 349 3758 Yard News Email: ste. an@classicboat.co.uk CHATHAM, MASS, USA New Alerion launched The latest Alerion Class Sloop (ACS) was launched by First Light Boatworks in May after a six-month build, and has joined the fleet on Nantucket Island, writes Tyler Fields. Fortuna is the 29th ACS built since the class’s start in 1977. The 26ft (7.9m) sloop is a slightly modified, cold-moulded reproduction of NG Herresho. 's Alerion III of 1913. Designed by Alfred Sanford of the Sanford Boat Company, most of the ACS fleet was built by Sanford on Nantucket. While this is the first Alerion built at First Light, the company under previous ownership built the ACS Myth in 2013. The hull is built in four layers; a 1/4in…

Working by eye with a freehand pencil is fine for rough carpentry, cajoling parts to a good enough fit, but for the show faces of fine joinery such as the restless eye might explore in a yacht’s interior, the marking out has to be spot-on. A small error at the start leads to endless fiddling with plane and chisel to restore the geometry of a piece sawn awry. Mitre joints require particular care because the 45 degree line where parts meet is not merely functional, but something you look for, where the grain turns smartly through a right angle. An error in marking out is doubled when the components are assembled. Study a cheap picture frame and the mitre joints may be found gaping like a shoal of trout. High-end…