Innehållsförteckning för July 2024 från Classic Boat

As we went to press, Sweden’s great 12-M yacht Princess Svanevit (1930), our recent award winner (Restored Sailing Vessel over 40ft), had just finished the Raymarine 2 Star, one of the toughest shorthanded races of the year, which started on 26 May. Her meticulous restoration between 2017 and 2022 brought the yacht back to mint 1930 condition and appearance, but, says Charlotte Hellman, chair of the foundation that owns the boat, “She is not a museum piece. She was built for racing. Competing in races is a way to honour her history and showcase her and the cultural heritage she represents to a wider audience.” The Raymarine 2 Star has been running since 2008 and is considered one of the most demanding ocean races in the Nordic region. The 300-mile…

HMS Medusa, a 1943 Royal Navy Harbour Defence Motor Launch and the first Allied warship to arrive off the Normandy coast for D-Day, is ready to retrace her steps to the landing beaches with the 80th anniversary flotilla on 4 June. She will form part of a flotilla of serving and retired vessels and vintage planes in the skies above, that will escort veterans on the Brittany Ferry Mont St Michel across the channel to partake in anniversary events on the shores of Normandy. Medusa is a 70ft (22m), 1943-built wooden vessel that played one of the most vital roles in D Day. Of the 464 vessels in her class, she is now the last in original and seagoing condition. Medusa played a number of roles, including convoy escort, offensive…

History was re-written in April when Marie Tabarly stepped out from the shadow cast by her famous father by taking line honours in 2023/4 Ocean Globe Race celebrating the 50th anniversary of that first Whitbread. Racing Eric Tabarly’s 73ft (22.25m) French ketch-rigged yacht Pen Duick VI designed and built specifically to win that first race, Marie was jumping for joy at the finish of this circle of the globe back at Cowes, shouting: “We did it…We have won in real time… No one can beat us…This was always our aim.” By contrast, her father had five attempts at winning the Whitbread Round the World Race without achieving victory – three in this 33 ton, now venerable maxi, and in two more modern maxis in the ’90s. All lacked the planning…

At the time when Rolls Royce and Bentley cars were comparable, Carlo Riva said: “If my boats are Rolls, the Arcangeli are Bentleys.” It was a great tribute to a less famous boatyard that was nonetheless passionate about quality. Despite reasonable ambitions that were led with intelligence and courage by a wise entrepreneur, Giuliano Arcangeli’s career as a fully-fledged builder lasted only a decade. The Arcangeli catalogue of 1960 reveals the whole philosophy of the new boatyard in Sarnico on the southern tip of Italy’s Lake Iseo: a casual salesman, very sure of his product, with the tendency to speak plainly to his customers. Arcangeli’s archives as a builder are relatively rare because the firm moved to Lake Garda in the 1970s, where it still operates a major maintenance and…

Since the earliest lifeboats in the late 1700s, up until the 1920s, most ‘service boats’ of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution were sail-and-oar designs. The use of sails extended the range of a lifeboat and made for a less exhausted crew once they reached a casualty. From shore-based companies of salvage men who saved lives… but who also claimed money when they rescued property as well… the more honourable and heroic tradition of the lifeboatman was established when the Royal National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, later the RNLI, was founded in 1824. The standard lifeboat was a double-ended design, broader and deeper than a whaleboat, and with prominent buoyancy chambers fore and aft designed to make it unsinkable, even when full to the gunwales with water.…

The Centaur is a remarkable 26-footer and has garnered a following of owners and admirers who appreciate its practicality, versatility and charm. Its twin keels allow for drying out on tidal moorings, or for a day out on the beach. It offers a full height cabin with five berths and a good-sized head all within its tidy 26ft (8m). But it’s not just its practicality that endears the Centaur to us but how it makes us feel. We all remember fondly the halcyon days of summer when, as a child, the days felt warmer, and school holidays lasted an eternity. This is how we remember the youthful carefree days of our childhood and also how we remember our first sailing adventures on a Westerly, most likely a Centaur. Whether it…

PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON, USA Tally Ho finally splashes In 2017, the young English boatbuilder Leo Goolden bought, for the price of one Dollar, the 1910, Albert Strange-designed gaff cutter Tally Ho. The 48ft (14.7m) yacht is famous for winning the Fastnet in 1927, but by the time Leo found her in a field in Washington, she was in a terrible state. Leo spent seven years restoring the boat under a self-built shelter on land belonging to Raul and Darlene Marmol, friends in Sequim, Washington; then at Port Townsend, the state’s hub for classic boats. This April, Tally Ho was finally launched. Leo addressed the watching crowd, thanking the many sponsors he’s had along the way. He dedicated the launch to Darlene, the friend who lent him the land where most…

If your choice of persuasive striking tools is limited to a steel sledge then you may wish to consider a less severe alternative from the range of the centenarian Thor Hammer Company of Solihull, West Midlands. Thor’s first hammers were fitted with rawhide faces, a material then used by the firm’s founding Stephens family in the manufacture of flexible drive belts required for distributing power around cotton mills. The resilient hide hammer face remains a popular choice for Thor hammers today and continues to be made as it was originally, using coiled water buffalo hide that’s glued and nailed for stability before being compressed into the distinctive black cast iron head. Soft-faced lead, copper or hide hammers are generally useful tools for marine engineers and are standard engine room kit…

In the winter of 1907, when Alden was 23, he made a voyage that would define his yacht designs. The schooner Fame, owned by the Eastern Fishing company, had to be returned to Boston when her crew of 23 men went down with smallpox and there was no one left to sail her. Alden put together a crew of four inexperienced young men and one old salt to undertake the journey. During the weeks that followed, they experienced extreme winter storms with over 50kt winds turning salt spray to ice. The boat and the crew completed the voyage and it’s said that as a result of this, Alden learned what was important when a vessel was short-handed, and learned how to design a boat that would be resilient in heavy…

One of the world’s most iconic racing yachts returns to the water after historic multi-year restoration. The 1930 America’s Cup challenger Shamrock V, known as ‘The Queen of the J Class’, was relaunched in May at Saxon Wharf, Southampton, Hampshire, after the most comprehensive restoration and rebuild of her storied 94-year history. Racing at the America’s Cup J-Class regatta in Bermuda in 2017, Shamrock V sustained significant structural damage and was laid up ashore. Seven years later, following a change of owner and a complete strip down, literally to the last bolt, the work of some of the industry’s best shipwrights, engineers and project teams has restored Shamrock V to concours condition. Paul Spooner, who led the project team alongside Feargus Bryan, commented: "It has been a massive undertaking and…

GOODING Bugatti’s bijou boat The gargantuan Type 41 Royale limousine, of which just six were built, is considered to be Ettore Bugatti’s great white elephant. Rather rarer is the Bugatti Type 75 You-You, a yacht tender produced in Paris in the early post-WW2 years as the once pre-eminent marque of luxury struggled to survive in a changed world. Ettore, a keen yachtsman and part-time naval architect, was-known as “the high priest of unorthodox notions,” and the quirky, wheel-steered, front-engined 3.3m (11ft) You-You certainly bears his stamp. It’s thought just three and half You-Yous survive (the half one, which is also the only You-You with a complete original Bugatti engine, is a sectioned cut-away example) and thus is something of a holy grail for “Bugattistes.” If a Type 41 came on…

A tourist may encounter many surprises when visiting Mauritius. Yet the greatest, in all likelihood, is the local cuisine: the massive presence of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent (70 per cent), who live alongside Africans, Creoles, and other minorities making up the remaining 30 per cent, makes for a cuisine representative of all these cultures, and with truly excellent results. Another surprise comes from the size of the island: the collective imagination has it that Mauritius is a kind of Peter Pan’s Neverland. In reality, the island is large enough to require a two-hour drive from the northern to the southern end and not less than an hour from west to east. Then, there is an activity that few would expect, the production of naval models. Considering it a flourishing…

Over the last 20 years at the No 1 Covered Slipway in Plymouth, Stirling and Son have built 57 new clinker dinghies alongside the longer back to back restoration projects on their big slipways. Yard experience shows that, if you can build a dinghy you can build a bigger boat. Dinghy building tolerances are so fine and the twists happening over such compressed distances that shipwrights find any work on a larger scale easier. Perhaps heavier but nonetheless easier. The commission for dinghy No 57, to be built on the standard specification of mahogany on oak, copper and bronze fastened, included the initially unresolved challenge of incorporating an electric inboard engine. With no specified name for the dinghy, throughout the build she was simply known as No 57. We selected…

There I was,” begins the club bore taking a stiff slug from his gin, “doing 10kts in through the Needles Channel…” I’m sure that, like me, you’d be too kind to burst his bubble as he goes on to describe further wonders performed by his 35ft (10.7m) modern sloop, but listening does get tedious when you could be putting the time to greater profit by discussing the price of beer. The problem, of course, is the chap’s reliance on GPS, delivering as it does the aggregate of boat speed, tide, current and any additional additives from short-range surfing. Unless you’re driving a race boat where an eighth of a knot over the ground can make the difference between collecting the silverware and life among the dead men, the only speed…

Since our last visit here four years ago, Luke and Joanna Powell’s Rhoda Mary Shipyard in Truro (which operates under the umbrella of Working Sail) has continued to be extremely busy. The yard was established just over a decade ago with a view to restoring the 1868 Cornish trading schooner Rhoda Mary which has been lying derelict for almost a century on the River Medway, and named accordingly. Although that project came to nothing, the yard then undertook a new-build of equivalent magnitude: Pellew, the ninth and very much the largest of the pilot cutters to be built by Luke. She was completed in 2020 and since then – or at least as soon as Covid restrictions allowed – she has been busy doing charter work with Luke as skipper…

Antigua’s Classic Yacht Regatta celebrated its 35th running in April, serving up a tonne of weather and entertaining happy hours. An international fleet of 43 vessels ranged in size from the 29ft (8.8m) Jaberwock to two 157ft (47.9m) Klaus Röder tall ships, Chronos and Rhea. In between was a medley of size, design, and age, each seeped in history. The 70ft (21.3m) Galatea (1899) regally wore the crown of matriarch, along with coats of fresh varnish. The week kicked off with the Concours d’Elegance as judges combed vessels for character, nuance, and a well-worn story. Overall winner was the 1939, 85ft (26m) Nordwind. Pageantry continued at a party welcoming hundreds of sailors to Nelson’s Dockyard, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Race one took place in freakishly flat seas with wind…

At least a dozen of the world’s most famous classic yachts will return to Channel this June, in the second holding of the Richard Mille Cup. This series begins in Falmouth, Cornwall on 2 June, where the fleet will race and party, before heading east to Dartmouth in Devon, then Cowes on the Isle of Wight, and finally Le Havre, on France’s Atlantic coast, on 15 June. The cup itself is a metre-high trophy, commissioned from Garrard, jewellers to the British royal family and designers of the America’s Cup more than 170 years ago. See richardmillecup.com…

On 1 May sailing lost one of its more colourful characters, Don Street, pilot of the Caribbean, engineless sailor and an endless source of stories. Don was 93, and died at home in Glandore, Ireland, unexpectedly but naturally. Still sailing, he had been working on Gypsy, his 1933 Anker & Jensen Dragon, the day before. Don wrote 300 feature articles for magazines and several books, on the Caribbean and bluewater sailing. His Cruising Guide to the Lesser Antilles (1965) opened up cruising in the area and his compendium The Ocean Sailing Yacht (1973) sold 100,000 copies. Don’s famous Iolaire Imray Caribbean charts, published over the last 45 years, are named after his famous 48ft (14.6m) Harris Brothers 1905 engineless gaff yawl Iolaire. He was born in New York in 1930,…

I knew two boatbuilders, designers both. One lived in the piney woods of South Georgia, Thomasville, close by the Florida border, the other in a tiny croft house at Bernisdale on the Isle of Skye. Robb was an American, whose idiosyncratic method of building in epoxy-infused tulip poplar will never be emulated, whereas Iain was an Australian who felt such an affinity with Scotland from his mother’s side that he emigrated, there to forge a reputation for clinker plywood dinghies, built in their hundreds the world over. Robb White was a polymath with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the flora, fauna, fish and the fishing thereof on the west coast of Florida. His classic, How to Build a Tin Canoe, is much more than a treatise simply on building a tin…

MERITA Canoe-sterned motor cruiser “She was a beautiful design but a devil to build.” These were the words of 97-year-old Arthur Frazier when he stepped aboard a newly-restored Merita in 2019, a boat that he’d helped to build 83 years ago as an apprentice to the family boatyard, Frazier, in 1936. The 39ft (11m) Merita is built of pitch pine planks on oak frames as a private motor yacht, although much of the yard’s output was destined for the fishing industry. She’s notable for her pretty canoe stern, with a wheelhouse added in the 1960s. The new millennium saw the addition of an external helm position, added during her thorough rebuild at Dennetts on the upper Thames, which has made her into a modern, comfortable vessel below decks. The hull,…

INSIDE JOB Our award-winning yacht, the 1930s Dunkirk little ship Breda, shows just how far you can go with an art deco interior LITTLE BEAUTY Caress was the second of the ‘CA’ or Carmen Class of Australian yachts with their stepped sheers and canoe sterns, and this 1961 example has just been rebuilt SEEING DOUBLE Century-old fishing boats restored to engineless originals are rare, but St Vincent and Clan Gordon were restored simultaneously in Scotland last year PLUS… Schooner Adventuress; Marie Tabarly; Antigua Classics; Models in Mauritius; RNLI history part 2; Inside the Fife and Watson archives; the Rhoda Mary yard; and more AUGUST 2024 ISSUE ON SALE 12 July, 2024 Or why not subscribe? 30 YEARS AGO JULY 1994, CB73 The editorial this month was on a forthcoming National…

The first golden rule when considering buying a wooden boat is… don’t. The second golden rule is that if someone offers to give you a wooden boat for free it will cost you even more. The third golden rule is that when you’ve fallen in love with that beautiful sheer line and honey-coloured varnish and hand-crafted cabinetry there really is no point in getting a survey, because you know that unless the marine surveyor says it’s planked in low-grade kitchen-carcass chipboard you’re going to buy it anywaay. And that’s exactly what happened to me. Yep, I actually paid money for my wooden boat and the process has turned this cynic into a romantic, and so it can for you too if you closely observe one more golden rule. It’s been…