Innehållsförteckning för September 2016 från Classic Boat

Classic Boat’s address: Jubilee House, 2 Jubilee Place, London, SW3 3TQ cb@classicboat.co.uk Follow the Classic Boat team on Twitter and Facebook BARCELONA Local heroes triumph The Puig Vela Classica, held every July in the waters off the Catalonian capital, is known for its reliable winds, but this year, they were better than ever according to organisers, with the Garbi thermal wind blowing at around 13-14 knots for three days solid. It was a year for Spaniards to triumph, with Jordi Cabau, friend of CB and owner of Mercury and Sonata, to win his class, this time on Sonata, the family-owned yacht designed by John Alden. Local Damian Ribas also won his class on Alba for the hat trick. Moonbeam III won for the fifth time in a hotly contested Big…

RM SOTHEBY’S Riva Chris-Craft crossover DAVE SELBY These very different expressions on a theme have more and less in common than you might think, for just as European car and boat builders aimed for the US market, so too did the Americans’ attempt to satisfy ‘continental’ tastes. It was Carlo Riva’s experience as a Chris-Craft agent that prompted him to create ever more glamorous speed boats with American influences: US-style car-like steering wheels; American V8 power; glittering instrument-strewn dashboards; two-tone upholstery schemes; and ever more chrome garnish. He called one model Florida, but stopped short of adding fins. Meanwhile, Americans attempted to evoke European glamour with cars named Monaco, Biarritz, Royale and Continental. And that’s what this is…not a Lincoln Continental but a 21ft (6.4m), 1961 Chris-Craft Continental. The difference…

The release of the new Swallows and Amazons film this 19 August marks the end of a long journey for producer Nick Barton of Harbour Pictures, who struck upon the idea more than a decade ago. Nick, whose previous productions include Calendar Girls and Kinky Boots, read the Ransome books as a child. His own childhood in Cape Town was nearly as free as those of Ransome’s fictional characters, with whole days spent picnicking on Table Mountain and swimming in the sea (“people didn’t know about the great whites back then!”). These days, Nick is a creature of tide and mud, living as he does with his family in north Norfolk, where he sails a Norfolk Oyster out of Blakeney Harbour. He is also quite at home in London’s Groucho…

Two stunning 30ft (9.1m) gaff cutters arrived in Southwold, Suffolk, this summer, having sailed in company across the North Sea from Holland. Both sisterships were built by shipwright Peter Schouten who was skippering his own Wantij 30, Wind & Tide, in company with his friend, Thijs Viegers, who showed Dick Durham over his Wantij 30, Bever. Peter once owned a Harrison Butler, but found her too deep for the shoal-infested waters of the Low Countries and set about taking lines from many craft. These included several Maurice Griffiths-designed shoal-draught boats, the smacks of Colchester, the Leigh bawleys of the Thames Estuary, and the indigenous craft of Holland. The hybrid results are stunning. The Wantij 30 is bluff-bowed with marked sheer, beamy and yet low enough to appear sleek, and she…

Colin Messer’s yard, on a creek of the Thames in Windsor, is one of the river’s little secrets, hidden by housing development and willow trees. Colin himself, along with his team that includes brother Stephen and partner Jane Percival, is also something of a secret, compared to boatbuilders with the profile of, say, the Freebody family or Colin Henwood, both nearby. To many of his regular clients, however, he is the only person they will allow near their slipper launches, motorboats, canoes, Dunkirk little ships and every other kind of old boat nesting on the river. You might have expected to find Colin frantically busy, what with the Thames Traditional Boat Rally – ‘the Trad’ – due to start in three days, but I’ve never seen him flustered, and today…

Janet Johnson celebrates a significant birthday of Windermere’s paddle streamer In 1891, Queen Victoria celebrated her 72nd birthday, Robert Cecil, the Marquess of Salisbury, was Prime Minister, the first-ever Crufts dog show was held in the Royal Agricultural Hall in Islington and the Furness Railway Company approached Forrest and Son, boatbuilders based at Wivenhoe in Essex to build a new twin screw propeller vessel to replace the paddle steamer Rothay on Lake Windermere. The vessel was constructed in three sections in Essex and then transported by rail to the slipway at Lakeside for assembly. A team travelled from Wivenhoe to Lakeside to complete this task. The new steamer was intended to be named Swallow but there was a lastminute change of name and she was launched, by persons unknown, on…

When the three-masted schooner Xarifa was launched at Cowes in 1927 from the yard of J Samuel White & Co, it’s unlikely her build team, or anyone watching, ever imagined her one day flying a sail of 600 metres squared. It is equally unlikely they’d imagine her carrying a system by which at the touch of a button, a single person could bring in all of her massive sails quicker than the entire 1927 crew. Or that down below she’d one day carry 32.5km of wiring. A 2014 restoration of Xarifa aimed to preserve the yacht’s classic style, while equipping her with the most modern luxury amenities. It’s a task achieved plenty of times with other boats. Yet Xarifa was renowned as one of the most elegant yachts of her…

How is the Spirit of Tradition scene? Not so much of tradition and not enough spirit. Many yachts are pumped up with wood and call themselves SoT and most are rigged like modern yachts. It is just so hard to define what is SoT and what is not. There is no governing body to deal with the limitations of these yachts and define what they are. I prefer to say “modern classic yachts” and “modern vintage yachts”. A surprising number of yacht designers started in fine art, like yourself. What was your artistic style and has it helped you draw yachts? My style has always been figurative and organic. I see yachts as organic floating devices constructed out of millions of different lines. It's all about lines and composition. When…

The word ‘bystander’ has fallen on hard times. Its close relation, the passerby, embodies a vigorous, if ambiguous, quality of going places, stopping only to save damsels in distress and cats in trees; a Samaritan without the Biblical baggage. But ‘bystander’ has become a synonym for torpor flecked with viridity. Social psychologists (God help us!) now use the term ‘bystander effect’ to describe the apathy of the masses when a situation arises. The bystander is, the OED relates superciliously, “a mere spectator”. Clearly, they never clapped eyes on the J-Class tender built for Harold S ‘Mike’ Vanderbilt in 1930 that served seven America’s Cup yachts over four decades. Vanderbilt himself provides his own definition in his book Enterprise: “When the [J-Class yacht] Enterprise was under way it was Bystander’s duty…

‘Then, of course, there’s the synagogue...” and for a while I fell for it until they in turn fell about laughing; ‘they’ being my fellow boat builders at the long-lamented Ullapool yard. This was a few years back, during the early days of my so-called mid-life apprenticeship – more a mid-life crisis – and it began around the woodburner of a cold winter’s afternoon, where all good discussions originated, when I asked innocently how many churches the little village of Ullapool possessed. To date I had discovered the imposing Church of Scotland, set prominently on the main road heading north; the Free Church (Wee Frees), on Quay Street near the supermarket; the Free Presbyterian (Wee Wee Frees), an austere building in the heart of the village; the Episcopalian Church or…

Arriving in Suffolk Yacht Harbour on the floodtide from the River Blackwater on a calm Friday evening, my crew and I aboard our 1951 8-ton Gauntlet, Bardu, felt instantly welcome. We were moored up at the lovely marina at Levington on the north side of the River Orwell, where the 2016 Suffolk Yacht Harbour Classic Regatta was getting underway. The event, now in its 15th year, is run by Suffolk Yacht Harbour, in association with Haven Ports YC, and we were surrounded by 47 boats well representing the past 100 years of yachting. It was fantastic just walking round the pontoons. The good ship Bardu is more used to the cruising life than anything involving a start line, but we were looking forward to two days of racing with this…

On a chill December day in 1866, three yachts swung restlessly at their anchor chains in New York Harbour, awaiting the start of the first race across the Atlantic. A more unpromising scene could not be imagined; low clouds hurried before an icy breeze and occasionally the shore was blotted out altogether by snow flurries. Despite the conditions, a huge crowd had gathered to see them off. The race had captured the public imagination and huge wagers had been laid. Fleetwing was the favourite, followed by Vesta and Henrietta, but Samuels, prowling the deck in a huge greatcoat and barking out orders, never doubted his abilities. He knew the character of the foe, that old grey widow-maker the North Atlantic, better than anyone. THE START AND GALE The start from…

PEGGY BAWN GL Watson cutter Peggy Bawn’s restoration was so authentic that it probably broke new ground for a yacht of her size – she’s only 36ft/11m on deck. Certainly back then, seven or more years ago, it seemed like an almost radically perfectionist job for Irish owner and yachting historian Hal Sisk, assisted by naval architect and Classic Boat technical editor Theo Rye, and we devoted a series to her restoration. We spotted her sailing off Cowes this July, still looking perfect. Her low freeboard, clipper bow, low cabin trunk and big gaff rig give her that magical late-19th-century look, but she’s said to be well-mannered and easily sailed by two. The re-build was, of course, an end in itself, but attention to detail has also borne fruit in…

The purpose of the cone-shaped countersink bit is to cut a recess for a countersunk screw head so that it lies flush with the surrounding timber. More than just looking pretty, this increases the area of contact between screw head and timber making the screw more effective in pulling components together. There are several designs of countersink bit, the umbrella-shaped rose bit being the most common, but a blunt one in a power drill can do a lot of damage fast, leaving over-sized craters with ragged edges. This snail pattern bit is for use in a slow-turning brace, offering excellent control, and is a favourite among hand tool workers. Its volute structure with single cutting edge – indeed resembling a mollusc shell, more particularly a conch – gives a crisp…

The WoodenBoat Show took place at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, in June. The sun was out and the varnish was gleaming on a range of beautiful craft, from immaculate 14ft amateur kit builds through to the glamour of the 55ft S&S Santana, launched in 1935 and once owned by Humphrey Bogart. The Santana restoration has been done by Loughborough Marine Interests and East Passage Boatwrights. Among the other boats on the quay, Mink is a fascinating project overseen by local Mystic company MP&G to restore this Buzzard’s Bay 25 exactly as she was at launch, even down to the number of stitches on the cotton sails by James Lawrence Sailmakers in Essex, and the period-correct innards of the bilge pump, machined specially. The Concordia Company was showing off Javelin, Corcordia no…

It’s 1935 and, in the popular idiom, dark clouds of war are gathering over Europe. John, Susan, Tatty (yes, Tatty!) and Roger Walker are on their way by train from Portsmouth to the Lake District for the annual summer holiday at the Holly Howe farmhouse. But across the lake, an island beckons the children, and at the bottom of the lawn, a varnished clinker lug-sailed dinghy floats mothballed in a boathouse. Here begins the childhood adventure of a lifetime, in this new telling of Arthur Ransome’s classic 1930 novel. Ransome fans will already have noted the date discrepancy, the film being set six years later than the book. The reason for this is to weave in a secondary plot involving the Blacketts’ uncle Jim Turner (Captain Flint) and two Russian…

Vixen, my 34-foot (10.36m) gaff cutter, rested at anchor on the calm waters among Madagascar’s west coast islands. My wife, Tiffany, and I had just crossed the Indian Ocean with our threeyear-old daughter, Solianna, and were about to row ashore to explore the island of Nosy Be. We had been voyaging for five years – Solianna was born in New Zealand – and we were about halfway through what was to become an eleven year circumnavigation; a voyage originating and concluding in Victoria on the southern end of Vancouver Island in western Canada. There was only one other cruising boat in the anchorage: a ratty-looking 30ft glassfibre sloop with what appeared to be a singlehanded captain. As I examined his vessel I could see he was lowering a semi-deflated dingy…

‘Have you ever used a scythe, Nic?” asked Cathy Mac Aleavey when I met her at Jimmy Furey’s house on the banks of the River Shannon last summer. Now, I’ve been to dozens of sailing events around the world, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never been asked that question before. “A long time ago,” I replied. “Or it might have been a sickle…” “Good,” she said. “Come with me.” And so she led me down Jimmy’s garden and across a field, and pointed to a seemingly impenetrable bank of rushes. “We need to cut a channel through that, so Jimmy can see the boats,” she said. “If Moses can’t go to the mountain, the mountain will have to come to him.” With those words, she climbed on a paddle board…

If there is one boat that oozes elegance and style it is the Riva Aquarama. The epitome of Italian bravura, the Riva Aquarama has for 54 years captivated audiences around the world with a unique blend of good looks and impressive handling. Considered by many to be the Ferrari of the marine world, the Riva Aquarama was the pinnacle of Riva’s production of wooden runabouts, and a design that many agree was granted classic status from the very moment it was launched. Yet, while its looks are undeniably its first attraction, not to mention the exquisite craftsmanship that goes into its production, it is the Riva’s handling and performance that have set it far above the rest of its contemporaries. Capable of speeds in excess of 44 knots, the twin-engined…

This portable woodworker’s vice or ‘corner vice’ is – in terms of its construction – a hybrid of a vice and a G-cramp, and it holds the work in ways that a fixed vice would struggle to imitate. Working on or off the boat, clamped to a thwart or a bench, it’s as versatile as a third hand. The G-cramp component with screw and swivel shoe attaches to any flat surface up to 2¼in (57mm) thick, while also being the fixed jaw of the vice. The moving jaw is adjusted by the main screw and has two guide bars to prevent racking – that annoying trait in the jaws of some vices to twist out of parallel when clamping work at one end. But it’s the L-shaped jaws that make…

10-13 AUGUST Sandhamnsregattan with Baltic Classic Masters Sandhamn, Sweden sailtrust.org 3 SEPTEMBER Great River Race Docklands to Ham, London Tel: +44 (0)208 398 8141 greatriverrace.co.uk 20 AUGUST West Mersea Town Regatta Mersea Island, Essex mersearegatta.org.uk 8-12 AUGUST Clyde Raid Clyde Estuary, Scotland raidengland.org 10-11 SEPTEMBER Bosham Classic Boat Revival Bosham SC, Chichester Harbour Tel: +44 (0)1243 572341 Other sailing magazines from the publishers of Classic Boat IN THE LATEST ISSUE 􀁺 Fifteen ways to get afloat with the children this summer 􀁺 Jeanneau’s new 54ft cruiser on test 􀁺 Simon Le Bon reveals his favourite Croatian cruising IN THE LATEST ISSUE 􀁺 Your guide to Rio, the venue, the teams 􀁺 Vendée: assessing the latest IMOCA 60 foilers 􀁺 Top racing tips for the short-handed sailor Available at all good…