Innehållsförteckning för November 2019 från Classic Boat

BONHAMS Italian ketch and her dolce vita years Since emerging from the renowned Italian Baglietto yard in 1928, the 29m (95ft) classic bermudan ketch now known as Sincerity has romped through the world’s most glamorous sailing playgrounds, entertained royalty, hosted film stars, and changed name more often than a retired Russian lingerie model. Originally christened Janua, then Ester VII and at one time Macua II, a long succession of racing and cruising owners have appreciated her high bulwarks, full ends and easy sailing handling, along with her three-inch teak planking on oak frames. Owned for a period from 1970 by eminent French sailor and nightclub owner Jean Castel, she provided a honeymoon afloat for Princess Caroline of Monaco’s 1978 marriage to Philippe Junot and later sailed to Fremantle, western Australia,…

Here’s a yacht that combines a healthy dash of good looks with seagoing freeboard and a doghouse for rainy days. She was designed by OM Watts and built of teak on oak and elm frames by Fife and Son in 1936 as a 39ft 1in (11.9m) bermudan cutter for a cruising owner. A contemporary issue of Yachting World paid glowing tribute, calling her “worthy of close inspection” and “fit to face any weather”, something the last owner proved in the English Channel and across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. She appears well kept, with regular refits and a good equipment level, and offers accommodation for five in three areas: saloon, forepeak and quarter berth. Asking £89,500, lying UK GREYLAG Charles Nicholson fast cruiser Boats built from the best materials can…

CHISELS Firmer favourite Most general purpose ‘bench’ chisels sold today are of the bevelled-edge variety. Their strong, light blades are suited to working in tight corners and paring across flat surfaces. But there’s a good case for keeping to hand a couple of firmer chisels – their older, square-edged cousins. In two-handed work, where one hand drives the chisel while the other guides the blade, the thin edges of a bevelled chisel are forced uncomfortably against the skin. When paring a radiused corner, for example, the chisel is threaded behind the index finger of the guiding hand. Other times, a sharp chisel is handy for scribing a line or cleaning the angles of lap joints or tenons, for which the chisel is gripped firmly by the blade. Bevelled edges are…

AMOKURA A pre-war Fred Shepherd yawl designed for cruising, restored for an owner in Cornwall ESTER The Swedish racing yacht saved from a watery grave to sail once again ALFA ROMEO HYDROPLANE Speed and glamour from a mid-1950s ‘Giulietta’-powered racer PLUS… The unknown sailing exploits of yacht designer Alfred Mylne; Sam Devlin, artist in stitch and glue; sailing with real bargemen; action from the Med and Pacific Northwest DECEMBER 2019 ON SALE Friday 2 November 2019 (or why not subscribe!)…

FROM £1529 Epropulsion Spirit: ‐ Long range 1018Wh battery ‐ Faster to charge ‐ Battery floats if dropped ‐ Foldable tiller means only one cable to connect ‐ Three shaft length options FROM £1340 Torqeedo 1003: ‐ 532 or 916Wh battery ‐ GPS data on tiller gives speed & range indication ‐ Removable tiller (more compact for storage) NEW 2019! The 1103: ‐ Direct drive, ultra quiet ‐ Improved clamp bracket ‐ More Robust In the 2-4hp category, the latest electric outboards with rechargeable lithium batteries seem to have rendered petrol motors obsolete. And the market agrees: last year we sold more electric motors than petrol ones… The many advantages of electric include: - Ease of Use. Switch on, twist the tiller handle, go. Almost anybody can do it; no…

The 12-Metre Jenetta has seen it all. A successful racing yacht in British waters in the late 1930s; a cruising yacht for many years in America; and then finally, and what to all intents and purposes should have been the end, an abandoned wreck in n Alaskan backwater. Then about 10 years ago, after her salvage and return to Europe, she was just a lead keel and some frames, a short section of her bow and stern, and some deck fittings, languishing in the grass outside the Robbe & Berking Classics boatyard in Flensburg, while inside a dozen of her sisters were being meticulously maintained or restored. Finally, her restoration began in 2017 and we have reported regularly here on the progress of this remarkable rebuild. In July 2019, just…

Simple, durable and fast: the fashion for lobster boats that has taken hold over recent decades originates in these working boats that, with their plain lines, modest free board and high bow, have created a trend that seems set to last. Alongside the many fibreglass and laminated wood replicas, some original lobster boats have survived the passage of time thanks to an incredible commitment and personal sacrifices from a few enthusiasts. One such boat is Flying Eagle. Launched in Maine in 1963, this boat today resides permanently on the opposite coast of America, at Deer Harbor in the San Juan Islands, State of Washington. The boat’s owner is Rick Strollo, a native of New Rochelle, New York, with distant roots in southern Italy and, from his mother’s side, in Ireland…

I bumped a Laurent Giles masterpiece for this… forgive me, but this series is about great designs and to limit that to sailing yachts seems remiss, so here is an inspirational and often overlooked craft: Crusader. The Vospers-built boat was designed by British high-speed craft pioneer Commander Peter du Cane for one of the original speed kings, John Cobb, to win the outright World Water Speed Record. Barry Stobart Hook’s excellent book The Last Crusader describes the whole project in wonderfully illustrated detail. Eclipsed by the more famous Bluebird K7, the launch of Crusader 15 years before Campbell’s fateful crash was one of the first steps in a long and deadly design evolution that for now has culminated in Ken Warby’s Spirit of Australia at 317.58mph. By 1952 du Cane…

One of the more innovative hand planes of the 20th century came from an unexpected maker, F Parramore & Sons of Chapeltown, Sheffield. Until the Second World War, the company made guttering and stove grates, but then C & J Hampton’s Record vices factory was bombed and Parramore stepped into the breach with its casting facilities. After 1945 it made vices and clamps under its Paramo brand, very much in the traditional mould, before surprising the world of woodwork in the early 1960s with the highly original Planemaster No 10 (Nos 1 to 9 never existed, although there was a later and larger No 12). There’d been no comparable leap in hand plane design since the mid-19th century, when Leonard Bailey’s cast-iron plane, with its skinny blade adjusted by screws…

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1989, CB17 “Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying…” How many sailors and yachtsmen alive today can trace their entire time spent on water back to that one sentence, the first line in Arthur Ransome’s 1930 classic, Swallows and Amazons? Certainly, the appeal of this, and his 11 other children’s books, has withstood the test of time, as have his boats, as we discover in this feature, written by one of his biographers, Roger Wardale. Ransome was, of course, a sailor himself. All of his adventures have taken place in fictional versions of the boats he either owned or…

CB readers will already be aware of the precarious existence experienced by many companies that try to make a living from building boats. A small amount of research provides some examples of how few once-prospering boatbuilding companies survive today: just two of the 60-odd that produced Fairmile MGB/MTBs and Harbour Defence Motor Launches in the Second World War; barely a handful of the 40 that exhibited at the first London Boat Show in 1954; and scarcely a third of the 63 that advertised in the January/February 1988 issue of this magazine. The problem has been reported in the yachting press for well over a century. In October 1891, the Yachtsman’s editor wrote about the fact that “yacht racing seems to become more expensive year by year”, but that it was…

My official job with Polly was to write an article about her, but there was a second agenda. Having authored a textbook on gaffers, I’d been buttonholed to help out with some of the practical rig detail. I joined her on the Beaulieu River one autumn morning under a cloud-swept sky with a moderate breeze blowing. There’s always a concern that the first sight of a boat will send one’s heart plummeting into the seaboots, but I needn’t have worried. The judges at CB knew their business. The mast came into view before the hull and the finer points a seaman always notices stood out loud and clear. The proportions were good. A pole-masted cutter can be a tricky design challenge. Too tall, it looks overbalanced; too short and somebody…

How many boats should a man, or for that matter woman, reasonably own in a lifetime, any one year, at one time? Maurice Griffiths, long-time editor of Yachting Monthly, would buy a boat for every season, when the price was right, and sell at a profit, or generally without loss. He would haunt the classifieds, searching for something to suit his fancy, and with each one came the potential for a wealth of experience he could channel into the pages of his magazine, and the lines of the next boat he would design. There was, in his view, no substitute for getting to know and sail as many craft as possible – cranky, balanced, shoal draught, leaky, bad mannered, sweet natured… There was little romance and a total lack of…

In the late autumn of 1938, British yachting enthusiasts were feeling both highly excited and deeply worried. They were excited because, after a blistering season for their biggest class, the 12-Metre, news had broken that the Americans were planning to send two, or maybe even three “Twelves” over the following year, for a major showdown. The acute anxiety was the result of Hitler’s outrageous expansionist politics, which were placing Europe under threat of an all-out war. Such threats usually cut off potential orders for new boats, and many of the bigger yards were going to struggle to survive if hostilities broke out. However, Britain’s almost-hero from the 1920 America’s Cup, Sir William Burton, was made of sterner stuff and had decided to defy the darkening political omens. He contacted Alfred…

For more than 500 years, travel between the 13,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago was conducted on phinisis – graceful twin-mast, seven-sail schooners forged on beaches from ironwood and sweat by boatbuilders who passed their trade from generation to generation. But the proliferation of motorboats in Indonesia after the Second World War, and the birth of commercial air travel rendered the phinisi redundant – a relic of the past, relegated to museums and books. There the handmade ships would have remained if not for the tourism boom born in Bali in the 1970s, since spreading far and wide across the archipelago. From the famed surfing breaks of Sumatra in the west, to Komodo National Marine Park, to the World Heritage-listed coral gardens of Raja Ampat in the east, phinisis have…

Cockwells, the well known Cornish yard that has done everything from new pilot cutters to sailing yacht restorations, these days focuses on its range of attractive, fast, seagoing powerboats. These are thoroughly modern beasts, with a traditional sense that goes beyond the aesthetic – they not only have a whiff of strong working boat in appearance, but the Andrew Wolstenholme design is for a semi-planing hull, which gives better fuel economy and ride than a pure planing craft, and a better attitude at speed, as they stay flatter. The sacrifice for all this is loss of top speed, but with 25+ knots on tap, no one’s going to complain on that front. This latest boat is a customisation of the popular Duchy 35. The original won its category (Wheelhouse and…

There has been a working quay at Gweek for well over 2,000 years, and it became the trading port for Helston when, in the 13th century, the natural formation of a shingle bank at Loe Bar blocked access from the west side of the Lizard peninsula. Timber, lime, slate and coal were brought in – the latter until as recently as 1970; while tin and copper (possibly as long ago as the Bronze Age), granite and farm produce were shipped out. Having been established there since the 1960s, the boatyard at Gweek was taken over by Malcolm Beaton and Mark Aichroth just over two years ago. Malcolm, a farmer who also has business interests in waste management and recycling, first came to the yard (to buy a lorry) in July…