Innehållsförteckning för October 2018 från Classic Boat

To audible sighs of relief, the hottest British summer in living memory finally gave way for the opening day of this year’s Thames Traditional Boat Festival. But there was sunshine enough to catch the varnish on a glittering array of traditional boats, many on display on the grassy bank, others parading up and down this famous part of the Thames…a group of Amphicars, a fleet of Starcraft, the Dunkirk Little Ships, Her Majesty’s rowbarge Gloriana, slipper craft, Bluebird K3, old steam boats, each having a moment in the spotlight amid snatches of approving commentary. “The kind of boat we like, and the kind of family we like,” was a favourite. Ashore, the stands of classic boats (some cars too) stretched for miles, with builders showing o. their newest (or oldest,…

What was it about the Alerion design that so took you back in 1977? She is the right size. Her shoal draught is attractive. More subtly, her midship section combines high deadrise with small cross-sectional area: she has the lightest hull shape that will not pound in a seaway, giving her not only speed, but comfort. She is the final result from the great age of sail. Further, I decided to take a chance that Herresho. knew what he was doing. It paid o. big time! What were the changes you made to Herreshoff's design? We gave her a marconi [bermudan] rig for simplicity. We modified her rudder, as Herresho.'s boat had weather helm, too large a turning radius and her rudder stalled at low angles. We improved the lift…

Victorian yachting did not really take off till the 1870s. There was too much unrest before then, with the Chartists demanding an extension of the vote to working men, and discontent at the price of bread. The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 is taken as the time when things got a bit calmer. Meanwhile the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, using steam, not water power, was creating more widespread wealth and to fill the leisure time that came with it, there was an explosion in sporting activity. Lawn tennis, badminton, field hockey, croquet, cycling, snooker, table tennis and water polo were all mid-Victorian creations, while golf was brought south from Scotland. Yachting had a masculine, muscular image, offering the companionship of likeminded men combatting the unpredictability of…

LONE FOX Colonel Whitbread’s yacht We had the pleasure of seeing the magnificent boat here, Lone Fox, at Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta in 2011. The 65ft (19.8m) ketch was designed by Briton Robert Clark for Colonel Whitbread, whose sponsorship kickstarted the eponymous round-the-world race in 1973. Lone Fox was built in Scotland in 1957 to the fabled Lloyds +100A1 standard. The Colonel kept her until 1983. She was significantly refitted in California in the late 1990s and has lived in the West Indies since 2000. She’s won everything in sight in recent years, including that 2011 edition of Antigua Classics where we saw her. She needs new decks now and is safely under cover at Rockport Marine in Maine, USA, where the Rockport team have been getting to know their…

Whereas the more recent metal-bodied spokeshave has a steeply angled bevel-down iron, clamped by a separate cap iron, its wooden predecessor has a low-angle bevel-up iron wrought in one piece with the square tangs which secure it by friction alone. The underside of the narrow iron is the sole, making the effective cutting angle extrememly low – around 23 degrees in this example, which explains why it slices through end grain so supremely well. Being so light (this one is just 81g), compact and eminently manoeuvrable, the wooden spokeshave is an excellent shaping tool. Set fine, it takes thread-like shavings (1) or with the iron extended by tapping on the tops of the tangs while supporting the stock (2) it’ll remove the waste at a rate of knots (3). The…

8 SEPTEMBER GREAT RIVER RACE River Thames. 300 amateur craft row or paddle a gruelling 22 miles from east to west through London greatriverrace.co.uk 22 SEPTEMBER MALDON TOWN REGATTA Essex. Popular and historic event for east coast sailors of smacks and classic yachts maldonregatta.co.uk 15-16 SEPTEMBER HAMBLE CLASSICS REGATTA Hamble-le-Rice. Third edition of this popular event, held at the Royal Southern YC, with racing for all classics royal-southern.co.uk 29 SEPTEMBER – 7 OCTOBER LES VOILES DE SAINT-TROPEZ France. End of the Med season… party ashore and afloat, featuring the Gstaad Yacht Club Centenary Trophy lesvoilesdesaint-tropez.fr EVENTS UPDATE Vele d’Epoca di Imperia 5-9 SEPTEMBER Italy, veledepoca.com Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 7-9 SEPTEMBER Washington State, USA woodenboat.org Dorestad Raid 12-16 SEPTEMBER Nr Amsterdam, Holland natuurlijkvaren.nl Yare Navigation Race 15 SEPTEMBER Traditional…

Restoring a classic boat can change your life. Ask the owner of Mah Jong, who hadn’t quite expected it. The choice of yacht, boatyard, restorers and project grew into not just a new project but something much more: a new family of friends, a whole new challenging area of interest and expertise, great adventures, and a fresh take on life and companionship. Pat Ilderton’s commitment to having a boat of his own came slowly, having sailed on other yachts, chartered and raced. He grew up with an interest in sailing: he had started with a humble Sunfish, growing up in North Carolina, and had raced on a Farr 70 from Charleston to Bermuda. It was over a bottle of wine in a small restaurant in Ipswich, England, with Ross and…

The restored whaling village at Mystic Seaport is, after London’s maritime Greenwich, probably the largest maritime museum complex in the world. The Museum of America and the Sea stretches out for acre upon acre, with more than 60 buildings and 15 restored historic vessels on the water, including the flagship Charles W Morgan whaling ship, still sailing today after her multi-million dollar restoration, completed five years ago. The museum is at its best during the annual WoodenBoat Show in late June, when the site comes to life as hundreds of timber yachts, motorboats, dinghies, kayaks and other craft come to line the shores and sail in the Mystic River. Boatbuilders from up and down the east coast and further, not to mention around 13,000 visitors, make the annual pilgrimage, with…

Sally’s a shapeshifter; so is the Ed Burnett-designed cutter moored nearby. To an extent also the red, Reg Freeman motor sailer and the Contessa 26 under her lee. There’s a chunky clinker workboat in the anchorage too, and a carvel-built former Leith fisheries vessel, with a big Gardner downstairs. She can change her shape when the tide or wind turns her. So can the pretty Chinese-rigged schooner, although of very different construction, and the Hillyard. All in their way just, how shall we say, right? As I walk up the steep track that leads from the shingle beach where Sally’s dinghy is kept, I always stop to catch breath and look back down over the anchorage. Sally will have caught the evening sun, her white topsides ablaze. The cutter, swinging…

The sheltered waters of the Carrick Roads make for idyllic sailing on a normal sunny day. Add 200-odd classic boats to the mix, and it’s truly a sight to behold. Boats attending this year’s Falmouth Classics ranged from the three-masted barque Kaskelot to a 14ft (4.3m) François Vivier-designed Aber, and all manner of craft in between. The area’s traditional gaffers and luggers were well represented, including two Luke Powell pilot cutters, the spectacular crowd-funded 64ft (19.5m) lugger Grayhound and a smattering of Falmouth working boats. Oldest boat in the fleet was the 1860 gaff cutter Mermaid, recently rebuilt by antique restorer Chris Gottschald, while the youngest was the Ed Burnettdesigned gaff sloop Panacea, launched two days before the regatta by local boatbuilder Ben Harris. There was also a healthy fleet…

Tom Whitfield grew up in Budleigh Salterton in Devon and was apprenticed in 1960, aged 15, at Dixon and Sons, Exmouth. When he emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, it was as a time-served boatbuilder of the old school. Tom found ready work as a boatbuilder and latterly a designer in Melbourne. He is now retired but has been involved in some of Australia’s major restoration and replica projects. For more than 10 years he has been the long-distance mentor to our columnist Adrian Morgan of Viking Boats of Ullapool, in Scotland. The following extracts from his letters to Adrian offer advice, criticism and wisdom, couched in Tom’s characteristically pithy and tongue-incheek style, reproduced here as he wrote it. Adrian says: “They can be compared in some way to CS…

PORTSMOUTH, UK Lively Lady returns Fifty years ago in July, over a quarter of a million people lined Southsea Beach, Portsmouth, to see the distinctive Fred Shepherd-designed, 36ft (11m) pale blue yawl Lively Lady sail in. The yacht and her crew of one greengrocer – Sir Alec Rose – and a teddy bear called Algy, had just sailed around the world via the clipper route, with only two stops – in Australia and NZ. She repeated the feat – with a crew of underprivileged youths – from 2006 to 2008, under the auspices of the Around and Around sailing charity and its tireless leader, Alan Priddy, a Portsmouth man like Rose. Her recent restoration, conducted by volunteers from Around and Around, saw the deck replaced, the wheelhouse reassembled, new electrics,…

One method for boarding over a large area, such as a deck or a bulkhead, is to join narrow boards edge-to-edge by tongue and groove joints to make matchboard. There are several advantages, not least that the surface can be built up in situ where it must fit around other parts of the structure. In a cockpit or cabin, the line and shadow of matchboard is more attractive than a plain surface, which is why it is often imitated using routed plywood or moulded plastic. Today tongue and groove joints are cut by machine, but originally the mating edges were planed to shape by hand. Two planes were used, one having a slotted wide iron to remove the waste around the tongue left standing, the other being a simple narrow…

There was no better place to go sailing than the Solent in July, high temperatures and easy winds making Panerai British Classic Week one of the most enjoyable editions of the regatta ever. Fifty classic yachts turned up for a six-race series organised by Royal Yacht Squadron Racing, with a programme of local cruises from Cowes for the few boats not racing. After several years of coming close, the regatta was won overall by its chairman, Sean McMillan, and the amateur crew of his Spirit 52 Flight of Ufford. The boat won the coveted Panerai watch and the Yacht of the Regatta award, which combines racing results with marks awarded in the concours d’elegance competition. Sean said: “To win such a prestigious regatta is a true honour and I couldn’t…

GOLDEN GLOBE Southern Ocean storm batters replica race A Southern Ocean storm has battered the Golden Globe Race fleet, dismasting Norwegian sailor Are Wiig after his yacht was rolled 360°. The 58-year old yacht surveyor was down below at the time with his boat lying hove-to in 35-45 knot winds and 7-8m seas. One cabin porthole was lost in the rollover, but Wiig reported to race control that he was not injured and there was no damage to the hull. He cut the mast and rig away but left the forestay, which was hanging from the bow with the sail attached, acting as a sea anchor. Wiig had not activated his EPIRB and was hoping to sail to Cape Town under jury rig. The Golden Globe Race is designed as…

It was 1955, America was thrusting into outer space and on earth, cars were beginning to sprout fins. More importantly for one British businessman in New York, the 45rpm single was also taking off. Sam Norman had just secured the licence to produce AMI jukeboxes in Europe and was in the mood to treat himself when he was stopped in his tracks outside a 5th Avenue showroom by the sight of the gold dorsal fin of the Chris Craft Cobra 21. The extravagant Cobra, V8-powered and costlier than all but the top-of-the line Cadillacs, was more than Chris-Craft’s new flagship model. It was a statement. The world’s largest boatbuilder adopted the latest automotive styling cues to show it was moving with the times, fashioning gold engine covers and a gold…

BAYCRAFT RUNABOUT Classically styled motorboat by graduates of BBA The growth in popularity of small, classically styled motorboats has been reflected in recent years in the craft built by students at the Boat Building Academy (BBA) in Lyme Regis, Dorset. The academy’s annual Launch Day often sees the inception of a fledgling company, founded with the aim of building a new model. The craft shown here, which we spotted at the Thames Traditional Boat Festival (see p16), is an ex-BBA production, this time comprising ex-students Kat Stott and Chris van Rooij with ex-instructor Steve Petford. She’s called the Scamp and one glance at the shape of the windscreen will tell you the lineage, which is that of the mid-century American utility runabout, boats like the popular Chris Craft Sea Ski..…

Ken Beashel founded Beashel’s Yacht Basin, at Elvina Bay, Pittwater, to the north of Sydney, in 1962. At that time the yard had no electricity, no water supply and no road access. Over the years most, but not all of these issues have been addressed. The site has expanded, with new sheds built at the top of the two slipways in the mid-1980s. In 1992 Ken retired and his son Colin, who had worked at the yard since 1976, took over and soon afterwards changed the company name to Colin Beashel Marine. Colin is something of a legend in Australian sailing circles. He is perhaps best known for his involvement in the 1983 America’s Cup when he was the mainsheet trimmer on Australia II, which famously ended the USA’s 132-year…