If Charles Lawrence were ever to enter Mastermind, his specialist subject would undoubtedly be the history of Fairey Marine. His office and garage are piled high with more than 2,000 drawings and 100,000 photos and documents which he has scanned into a database covering every powerboat built at the Company’s former aircraft factory at Hamble Point on the edge of Southampton Water.

He has also written four books tracing Fairey’s illustrious history, and nine others associated with the story of these iconic boats and their derivatives. Offshore powerboats have held a fascination for Charles since his school days; a passion finally consummated when he bought an original Ray Hunt deep-vee 23ft (7m) Huntress in 2002. And not just any Huntress. His was hull No 48, completed at Clare Lallow’s yard in Cowes with a distinctive cabin top that featured in the Bond film From Russia with Love (1963). More recently, he has also owned a Swordsman 30 – a Fairey revival boat based on a Spearfish 30 hull. “I was slowly drawn into the history of Fairey Marine, much of which appeared to be myth and legend, so I noted the actual events discovered from contemporary sources and searched for information to fill the gaps,” he says. He has been doing this ever since he took over the job as archivist of the Fairey Owners’ Club. “It seemed a worthwhile exercise to record this tiny but important piece of history before it was lost” he adds. 

The start of the history

This work was started by the late Tony Hamilton-Hunt, the first curator, together with world air speed record holder Peter Twiss, a hands-on director of Fairey Marine; Alan Burnard, the firm’s chief designer; and several long-standing Fairey boat owners. Together, they made a first attempt at creating a register of all the powerboats built by Fairey. This work was still far from complete when Charles took over the role as curator, but helped considerably when he took over Peter Twiss and Alan Burnard’s entire archives after they died, together with the access he was given to the Fairey drawings held in the Classic Boat Museum in East Cowes.

A retired architect, Charles not only has a keen eye for detail but a penchant for double referencing facts whenever possible – not so easy these days now that all the key players in Fairey’s history have passed on. New information is often apocryphal, which is what brought him to get in touch with Classic Boat to question some of the facts set out in our article Fairey Tales in the October 2023 issue. 

The Alan Burnard Legacy

Charles’s greatest criticism was that not nearly enough credit had been given to chief designer Alan Burnard who took the 23ft (7m) deep-vee open launch designed by Ray Hunt and transformed it into the iconic Huntress 23 which became the distinctive DNA for the future Fairey marque.

Fairey’s next offering was the popular Huntsman 28 – still a Hunt hull, but extended 5ft (1.5m) from the original Huntress mould and designed with a larger cabin and twin engines, which Burnard masterminded. 

Charles notes: “Although the stretch of the Hunt hull was envisaged by Fairey before Alan Burnard even arrived at Hamble, his design for the Huntsman 28 was spot on. It also demonstrated the ability to produce a variety of hull lengths and encouraged other possibilities including the Christina and Dell Quay Rangers.” 

The second generation of Fairey powerboats – The Swordsman, Super Swordsman 33 and Huntsman 31, the glassfibre- moulded Spearfish 30, Fantôme 32 and Amira 54, together with their commercial and military derivatives, were all designed by Burnard, but the initial expansion of the range came about almost by accident. “An abandoned project for a larger boat was spotted by an existing Huntsman 28 owner who saw the potential for more spacious accommodation in the larger hull, and so the successful Swordsman 33 was created.” recalls Charles. 

Over 12 years, Charles got to know Alan Burnard well and says of the designer: “He was both an exacting engineer and intuitive designer, with an eye for harmonious lines, and had a clear, distinctive drafting style. But I’ve often wondered why he seemed overshadowed and in a different social circle to other father figures like Olympic medalist Charles Currey, world speed record pilot Peter Twiss, Colin Chichester-Smith and Alan Vines. Was it because all but Twiss were keen sailors or that all but Burnard had graduated from the war as senior officers?”

Burnard’s beginnings

By contrast, Alan Burnard joined the Gosport shipbuilder John Morris in 1941 as a 16-year-old apprentice, qualified as a naval architect, and stayed there until recruited by Fairey in 1957. The son of naval architect CW Burnard who had joined Morris at the outbreak of the Second World War and was responsible for building minesweepers there until 1948, Alan was approached by Currey and Chichester-Smith to apply for a specific job working with Bruce Campbell, a wartime De Havilland test pilot and school chum of Dick Fairey (son of Fairey founder Sir Richard Fairey). The project was to develop a 15ft (4.6m) runabout and an innovative deep-vee hull design drawn by Ray Hunt, using Fairey’s hot-moulded timber construction. 

Burnard’s first task was to complete the 15ft Cinderella and Carefree runabouts before starting work on the Hunt boat, the Huntress 23, which he completed in November 1958. Fairey’s management was clearly impressed, because that same year, Alan was appointed chief designer in charge of the drawing office and all technical aspects of Fairey Marine Ltd. This included designing propellers for the marque. 

In his book, Charles Lawrence recounts how Burnard felt overshadowed by Currey and Twiss taking so much of the credit for the race successes they enjoyed in the boats he had designed. 

“Burnard claimed that by 1964 he had been feeling left out as Charles Currey and Peter Twiss were driving the official Fairey boats in the races. His response was to sketch out a pure racing boat strictly as required by the regulations, and by doing so, laid the foundation of the third generation of Fairey cruisers. 

“He was told that Fairey would build the race boat if he could find someone to place an order for one, but despite some interest, there were no takers. A frustrating year later, his solution was to build the boat himself in his garage at home.”

A pure race boat

It took another year for Alan to complete the boat, which was ready in 1967. She was named Sea Fox after the Hamble-built Fairey spotter aircraft that found the German pocket battleship, Graf Spee. Sea Fox was designed as a pure race boat powered by twin Perkins 145hp diesels, with minimal accommodation. She also had a more extreme hull shape with slightly deeper vee sections and a much less bluff bow than the Huntsman 28, together with a turtleback deck like Fairey’s Atalanta cruising yacht for simplicity and weight saving. 

The engines were set as far back as possible on straight shafts that continued out on brackets beyond the transom. This led to problems with aeration of the props, cured by the addition of cavitation plates. Perhaps remembering the difficulties with Swordsman Brown (a one-off Swordsman 33 race boat built for Sir William Piggot-Brown in 1964), Alan opted for a single rudder ahead of the props. The cockpit was set right aft, being the most comfortable position in rough water.

Perkins later uprated the T6.354 engines for him to 205hp, which made her the fastest Perkins-designed boat at the time, achieving 40 knots over the Southampton measured mile. Sea Fox raced from 1967 to 1970, retaining race No 711. She was driven by Alan Burnard, with Fairey Marine colleague Freddie Fry in the Cowes-Torquay races, and achieved third in class (13th overall) in 1967; and first in class (9th overall) the following year in 1968.

The obvious improvements to the seakeeping of Sea Fox made Burnard anxious to update the Huntsman 28, but as sales of this boat continued, it remained an uphill battle to convince the Fairey Board to make the necessary investment. This he blamed on a lack of confidence and vision displayed by a constantly changing senior management, who had to justify development funds to the main Fairey Group board.

The end of Fairey’s wooden era

The lessons Burnard learned were eventually incorporated into the Huntsman 31, the final Fairey hot-moulded powerboat launched in 1967, which marked the start of a new generation of Fairey power cruisers with a fine entry and distinctive flared bow. This made the 31 a much better and drier sea boat than the 28, and also allowed for much wider side decks, and a forward cabin that felt more spacious. These ideas were also included into the later Swordsman 33, together with the Spearfish 30, and Fantôme 32, all moulded in glassfibre.

Alan remained as Fairey’s chief designer until collecting his gold watch, marking 25 years of service in 1982. He left to set up his own design office rather than commute to Cowes after Fairey moved all production to the newly extended Groves and Guttridge yard. He continued for 30 years designing for a wide range of clients including parts for owners of Alfa Romeo, Bentley, Bugatti, ERA and Maserati cars, and in his spare time, rebuilt and raced a treasured Delage 15-S8 Grand Prix car, now on display in the Brooklands Museum in Surrey.

In 2011 Burnard fell and damaged his leg, forcing him to close his office and to retire to a nursing home, where he died a year later. He is remembered most for the many Fairey powerboats still in active service but his legacy has also been kept alive by the Supermarine Spearfish 32 launched in 2020, some 50 years after the original Spearfish 30 had been launched. Based on Burnard’s original deep-vee hull, fellow designer Stephen Jones drew a very stylish deck and superstructure that retains a strong visual reference to the timeless Fairey look that Alan instigated. 

Uffa Fox, Alan Vines, and the Atalanta

Finally, Charles Lawrence questions three other ‘facts’ within the Fairey Tales article. One, also challenged by Richard James in the letters page within the February issue of Classic Boat, is that Fairey Marine’s popular Atalanta 26 cruising yacht was designed by Uffa Fox, and not Fairey Aviation’s technical director, Alan Vines as disclosed by Gordon Currey, another student of Fairey Marine’s history. 

There is little doubt that the prototype was designed and built by Alan Vines who used aircraft principles to attach mast, rigging and keel to the main bulkhead to triangulate the forces. This 24-footer (7.3m), named Jansuewiz, merging his daughter’s forenames, was extended to 26ft (8m) in production form to allow for longer bunks and cockpit, and was simply a scaled-up version of the prototype. This is confirmed by two of Vine’s daughters, Sue Harris and Jan Leslie. 

“The fact that Uffa Fox is named as the designer was simply a marketing exercise” says Sue, adding: “My father’s name was unknown in marine design circles compared to that of Uffa’s, who already had close links with Fairey Marine.” 

Jan Leslie confirms. “Yes, my father and Uffa were close sailing friends and Uffa was a regular visitor to our home. They could well have discussed the Atalanta in some detail and Uffa may have had some input, but the concept and design was definitely down to my father. Uffa was paid a small royalty by Fairey Marine for allowing his name to be used this way”. 

The development of the Atalanta 31, also credited to Uffa Fox, is less clear, for neither daughter can recall these details.

The mosquito myth

Charles Lawrence also questions whether Fairey Aviation ever produced the legendary World War Two wooden-hulled Mosquito fighter bomber at Hamble Point. 

“I can find no direct evidence of this,” he says, although he does point apocryphally to an early Fairey Marine brochure that states: “Fairey Marine found in 1946 that by adapting and improving a method of hot-moulding wood veneers used during the war for producing such outstanding aircraft as the Mosquito, a boat hull could be produced which would fulfil these criteria better than one built by any other process.”

This was the story told to me by Charles Currey when he offered this writer, then 19 years old, a job at Fairey Marine as his assistant. But rather than manufacturing complete airframes as I had believed, Ken Merron, the son of furniture manufacturer Arthur Merron who first perfected the method of hot-moulding wood veneers into complex shapes under pressure in an autoclave, told Classic Boat shortly before his death in February:

“My father had a very close relationship with Fairey Marine, Charles Currey and Uffa Fox that began before Fairey Marine started mass-productioin of hot-moulded boats in an autoclave. Both Charles and he were boatbuilders after all and became good friends.

“My Father was the first to master a method of forming pieces of wood into compound curves. He was closely associated with Aero Research Ltd, which produced high-quality glues including Aerolite, and developed the concept of hot-moulding boats and parts for aircraft in an autoclave using a glue that set under pressure at 100 degrees Centigrade.

“He worked with Uffa Fox to develop an airborne lifeboat during World War Two which, carried under an aircraft, were dropped via parachute to stricken airmen who had ditched into the sea. Later during the war, these were also produced in the autoclave at Fairey Aviation’s plant at Hamble Point, together with complex shaped parts including the back of the fuselage, fuel tanks and parts of the rear wing for the Mosquito.”

It is also well recorded that the original Mosquito was cold- moulded using Cascamite, a Urea-formaldehyde glue that rapidly deteriorates in hot, moist, environments. This proved a problem when the planes fought in the Pacific theatre during the latter part of the war, where they suffered badly from delamination and termite infestation. The belief had been that De Havilland turned to Merron’s hot-moulding process to solve this problem.

Lost in the mists of recent history

Fact or fiction? Charles Lawrence remains unconvinced. He points to the fact that neither the Hamble Aircraft Museum nor De Havilland has any record of Mosquito parts being made at the Fairey factory, or the use of an autoclave. Even Charles Currey’s account to this writer is questionable because he was not employed at the factory until two years after the war. Ken Merron’s recollections are also circumstantial because at the time, he was a young teenager and may not have been involved directly with his father’s work. The quote in the Fairey brochure might also be viewed as misleading because it doesn’t specifically link Fairey’s Hamble factory with the building of Mosquito parts. 

The research continues with one question outstanding. If the high-tech autoclave hot-moulding system installed at Fairey’s Hamble plant during the war was not used to make parts for the Mosquito, what was it used for? Perhaps a reader can help?

Charles Lawrence is spot on when talking about the radiused centreline of the Huntress and other Hunt inspired Fairey deep-vee hulls that softened their ride and directional stability, as “not a happy accident due to the hot-moulding process” as we described, but a feature within Hunt’s original drawings that show a 21in (53cm) radius clearly dimensioned on the plans. 

From Fairey marine with love

Finally, Lawrence’s painstaking research answers another disputed question: which Fairey boats featured in the Bond film From Russia with Love?

Bond’s boat was Huntress 23 hull number 32 Rumble II powered by an Interceptor V8 petrol engine which, with a different paint scheme, appeared a few weeks later sporting race number 28 driven by Charles Currey in the 1963 Cowes-Torquay race. Its present location is unknown although there are some bogus claims going around. 

The baddies’ boats were: Huntsman 28 hull 34 Here and Now, driven by Peter Twiss. Its present location is in the Solent; Huntress 23 hull 48, then called Cockatoo, completed by Lallows of Cowes and powered by a 140hp Mermaid diesel. Its present location is also the Solent; Huntress 23 hull number 61 Gay Dolphin, powered by a Perkins S6M diesel. Its present location is probably Scotland.

Finally, the camera boat was Huntsman 28 Huntsman, hull 12, powered by twin petrol Greymarine Fireball engines, possibly driven by Charles Currey. Its present location is, once gain, the Solent.

Lawrence’s Books and Drawings on Fairey Marine history for sale

Visit the Charles Lawrence Chiswick website to purchase Lawrence’s books and drawings on Fairey Marine history.

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The post The Real Alan Burnard: Fairey Marine’s Misunderstood Designer appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

 A car and motorboat racer, an accomplished sportsman and a boatbuilder, Gonzague Olivier’s personality speaks to us of a time when a Channel crossing record was still a joyous sporting feat. In the early 1960s, he travelled from France to England in one hour and six minutes… on water skis towed by a boat of his own. At a time when anything seemed possible, it was rare to see a former Le Mans 24 Hours class winner setting up a boatyard. Such was the case with this extraordinary character, who would leave his mark on his time by producing a steady stream of quality boats, of which only a few remain today. Gonzague Olivier was born in Roubaix, in the north of France in 1921. Without the interruption of the Second World War, he would undoubtedly have climbed the ladder of fame in motor sports more quickly. French champion in an outboard class in 1950 and 1951, he made his debut the following year on four wheels in Bordeaux and then in the 12 Hours of Hyères, on the French Riviera. It didn’t take long for his talent to shine through. In 1954, he won the Spring Cup at Montlhéry near Paris and then the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the small-capacity category at the wheel of a Porsche which he shared with another unusual character, the Belgian engineer Zora Arkus-Duntov, later nicknamed the “father of the Chevrolet Corvette”. Gonzague Olivier’s record of success continued to grow, until 1956, when he decided to give up motor racing and return to his first love, motorboating. 

Two wheels, one passion

A few years later, the popular French singer Enrico Macias sang of “people from the north who have the sun in their hearts that they don’t have outside”. Some northerners, such as Gonzague Olivier, didn’t wait for this homage before heading south in search of warmth and sun light from the late 1950s onwards. While keeping his garage in Roubaix, he opened a Porsche and Evinrude dealership on Avenue d’Antibes in Cannes and, further set up a modern, small and efficient, boatyard in Cannes-La Bocca to give substance to his beloved project to create his own range of touring motorboats. 

However, his links with the automobile world would always remain very close, with Porsche loyalists from the early days and the official import of the make by Auguste Veuillet’s Sonauto company. Later, Veuillet appointed Jean-Claude Olivier, Gonzague’s son, to create from scratch the commercial and sporting base for Yamaha motorbikes in France, with a great success. Jean-Claude died in January 2013 in a road accident caused by a lorry losing control on the A1 motorway in the north of France, and Gonzague only survived him by a few days… 

But, back in the early 1960s, when Porsche was still a make for insiders and Yamaha was an unknown Japanese manufacturer in France, there was optimism about the bright future of leisure motorboating, particularly on the Mediterranean. Gonzague Olivier didn’t do things by halves, creating an entire range of up to ten models, dominated by outboards with a few Porsche and Peugeot inboards. He was personally in charge of the business, from the drawing board to sea trials and trade show promotion. The motoring press gave it a warm welcome. It’s worth pointing out here that the rare archives available on this original venture have been patiently assembled over the years by Henry-Jacques and Christine Pechdimaldjian, whose collection now bears witness to the history of French motorboating and its many now forgotten boatyards. The Gonzague Olivier yard’s approach to the market was highly professional, with a design that is not without some austerity, with some touch of Germanic functionality taking precedence over aesthetic effect. 

Gonzague Olivier’s Boatbuilding: From the drawing board to sea testing

The Port-Cros model launched in 1962, pictured here, was one of Gonzague Olivier’s first series. It was built with great care and using the same techniques as the rest of the boatyard’s production, which would end around ten years later. Its hull is made of strong mahogany marine plywood with solid mahogany frames and keel. The history of this model is perfectly clear, as its owner, Hervé Fressard, explains: “My father bought it new in 1962 and it never left the lake, where the whole family enjoyed it for a good thirty years, particularly for water-skiing. Our boat then sat in a barn for over twenty years before my children decided to take it out sailing again. Everything was still in pretty good condition and all we had to do was give our Port-Cros a new lease of life.  Only the engine is not original, as the old Johnson/Evinrude V4 was given to a friend when the boat was decommissioned. It has been replaced recently by a 50hp Mercury, which gives complete mechanical satisfaction and refines the aft silhouette of the Gonzague Olivier with a nice touch of vintage chrome. 

In terms of performance, this early Port-Cros has a flat-bottomed hull that lifts off quickly and effortlessly at speeds of over fifty kilometres an hour. This type of hull, the most common until the mid-1960s, is no more at ease in tight bends than in a heavy chop. However, this didn’t stop this Mediterranean-based boatyard from producing several dozen units, before later adopting a ‘Hunt’ deep-V hull with lateral strakes, much better suited to the sea. For this lake-based model, the question never really arose. Solidly built and restored as if it had just been delivered new from Cannes, this Gonzague Olivier will continue to raise the profile of this forgotten French brand for a long time to come.   

Many thanks to the Fressard family for their warm welcome.

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The post Gonzague Olivier’s Ski Boats: Porsche Racer Turned Boatbuilder appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Phil Cotton first dipped his toe into the world of classic boats in 2019 when he bought an 8-ton Gauntlet called Nausikaa which had been built by Berthon Boat Co in 1939. Having started sailing as a child, he soon developed a taste for racing fast dinghies such as 505s, and then multihulls including Dart 18s when he married his wife Miranda, a Formula 18 twin-wire catamaran, a Sea Cart 30 carbon fibre trimaran, and a Diam 24 trimaran (a French boat which he helped to establish as a one-design class on the Hamble River). He had always “enjoyed the look of a classic boat” but, even though he realised that Nausikaa would be “totally the other end of the spectrum” to his previous boats, he soon found that she was “too slow and too small” for the cruising and classic boat regattas that he had planned to do. 

He also found that the cost of Nausikaa’s maintenance was “a bit prohibitive” and so he decided to look for a boat that looked classic but was built of GRP, particularly bearing in mind that classic boat regattas are increasingly welcoming such boats. Then, towards the end of 2021 he saw a Cal 40 called Breeze – at that time owned by Robbie Boulter – advertised in Seahorse magazine. 

Cal 40s were built by the Jensen Marine Corporation in Costa Mesa, California. The company had been founded in 1954 by an engineer called Jack Jensen who began to work with the yacht designer Charles William “Bill” Lapworth. Their first collaboration was the Cal 24, a centreboard sloop, and this was followed by the Cal 30 and Cal 28. The first Cal 40s were built in 1963 and they soon established an impressive record in ocean races, including overall wins in two SORCs and three Transpac Races, and five of the first six places in their class in the 1966 Bermuda Race. “No great performer in light air,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Yacht Designers, “she was powerful in medium winds and unbeatable in heavy air downwind, owing to her ability to surf for long periods of time.” About 120 Cal 40s were built in total – “Cals were the Westerlys of the USA,” said Robbie – and amongst well known sailors who owned and raced them were Stan and Sally Honey, Ted Turner and Dennis Connor. 

The Honeys bought their Cal 40, Illusion, second-hand in 1988. They initially intended to go cruising “but old habits die hard so we mostly raced,” said Stan. They amassed an impressive series of results including setting the singlehanded Transpac record in 1994 (Stan), the Pacific Cup overall in 1996 (Stan and Sally sailing doublehanded), and 2nd in class in the 2005 Transpac (Sally with an all-female crew). “We’ve found that Illusion is a terrific boat to race shorthanded, mostly because the Cal 40 has such ‘nice manners’,” said Stan. After an intense period of racing (including racing to Hawaii five times) they eventually went cruising in 2014 and over the next few years they visited the Sea of Cortez, mainland Mexico, Central America, the Western Caribbean and Florida. In 2022, after taking part in the Newport Bermuda Race, they sold Illusion to Stan’s nephew. “We’re delighted that Illusion remains in our family,” he said. 

Breeze was built in 1967. Her first owners were Frank and Virginia Bedford who trucked her from her builders over to their home in Chesapeake; next, from 1971, came brothers Crosby and John Hitchcock who sailed her from Marblehead for 25 years; and her last American owners were John and Marianne Barsomian who kept her in South Bristol, Maine to which they had retired. 

Robbie (from Fareham in Hampshire) had first become aware of the Cal 40 when he took part in the Bermuda Race in 2006 and was impressed when one of them finished not far behind the Swan 46 on which he was sailing. A few years later he decided to look for one with a view to a purchase. After finding one in Greece (“a bit of a wreck”) and another in the USA (“I think she had fallen off her cradle”), he came across Breeze. He flew to the USA to look at her and found that “she was largely presented in original condition” and “a big plus was she had always been an east coast boat and hadn’t ‘baked’ in the Californian sun or indeed in the Mediterranean.” 

In June 2012, he purchased her. Concerns about her rudder bearings dissuaded him from sailing her across the Atlantic and so after he and two friends took her to Newport via the Cape Cod Canal, she was shipped to Sheerness and then sailed to the Hamble. 

Almost immediately, Robbie took Breeze to David Heritage in Cowes for an extensive refit (David had previously built a new Mills 37 for Robbie so they knew each other well). Work included significant upgrades to the deck equipment such as new Andersen stainless steel winches, Spinlock deck controls and clutches, Schaefer jib tracks and cars, Harken mainsail track and car, and Lewmar portlights and hatches. Furthermore, Breeze benefitted from a new Eurospars aluminium mast (with an increased height of about half a metre for IRC optimisation), boom, spinnaker pole and jockey pole; the deck and coachroof were repainted, and the worrisome rudder bearings were replaced by new Jefa needle bearings along with a new carbon rudder and stock. Four years later she had a new Beta 35hp engine and Maxprop. 

During his ownership Robbie raced Breeze occasionally including two Fastnet Races (a class win in 2013, and 6th in class in the windy 2019 race when she also won the RORC’s ‘Iolaire Block’ Trophy for being the oldest yacht to finish); third places in two other RORC races, to Dieppe and Guernsey; and a class victory and winner of the Concours d’Elegance for the Best Presented GRP Yacht at the inaugural Hamble Classics regatta in 2016. Robbie also regularly cruised her along the English south coast and visited the west coast of Ireland in 2015. 

Since retiring as a chartered accountant at the age of 57 in 2015, Phil Cotton has taken on various voluntary roles, including, for the past eight years, that of World Sailing’s audit committee chairman (“I get to meet my heroes,” he said). But with more time on his hands it clearly made sense for him to have another boat, after Nausikaa, that could be cruised as well as raced, so after he saw the Breeze advertisement in 2021, he agreed to buy her from Robbie. It wasn’t long before he realised that she “ticked all the boxes” not least because she “sails beautifully, is well balanced, and is a rocket ship downwind.”

Phil lives in Poole and so he used local company Traditional Shipwrights Services to do the maintenance work on Nausikaa, and he now takes Breeze there too. “I’m not sure if they look after many GRP boats,” said Phil, “but I think there is enough wood on her to keep them interested. They do a cracking job.” So far they have only really needed to carry out cosmetic work such as the hull paint and the brightwork, but a new Brookes & Gatehouse Zeus 3 system has also been installed. 

Phil has raced Breeze with various friends in the Round the Island race and several classic boat regattas including Cowes Spring Classics and Hamble Classics, and at some point in the future they hope to make their way further west to take part in similar events in Dartmouth, Fowey and Falmouth. At Cowes Spring Classics this year Breeze put in an inauspicious performance. After essential work on the rig in Poole took longer than expected she arrived too late to take part in either of the races on Saturday, and she retired from the Sunday morning race in a dying breeze when Phil decided that exiting the Needles Channel with a favourable tide to allow a more enjoyable return to Poole was a priority. 

But with the British Classic Yacht Club now welcoming selected GRP boats to its regatta, Breeze was back in Cowes again in July. Although her results were, again unspectacular, Phil and his crew had a great time. After breaking their spinnaker pole in the second race they received several offers of help from fellow competitors and were up and running the next day. “It was an amazing experience to be amongst such beautiful and cherished yachts both on the race course and on the dock for the various pontoon parties,” said Phil. “The racing was close and competitive but ashore there is tremendous camaraderie and support. If the BCYC continue to invite classic GRP yachts we’ll definitely be back next year.”

Stats

LOA 39ft 4”

LWL 30ft 4”

Beam 11ft

Draft 5ft 7”

Displacement 7 tonnes 

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The post Finding a Low Maintenance Classic Boat: Phil Cotton’s Cal 40 appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The first, the Fife-designed schooner Altair, is among the world’s most famous and beautiful classic yachts; some would say Altair was the first authentic ‘big boat’ restoration back in the 1987 and the pivotal project that started the whole classic boat movement. The other is the 36ft (11m) GL Watson-designed gaff cutter Peggy Bawn from 1894. We would say that it triggered the second phase of the classic sailing yacht restoration movement, being among the first small yachts to be restored to the very highest standard, something we covered in a long series of articles in 2007. Both boats come from the boards of two of the world’s most celebrated designers: Wm Fife III and GL Watson, both Scottish. Both yachts were the best of their sort in their day, and both must be considered today as among the crème de la crème of the world classics fleet. There, though, the similarities end.

Classic Boats for Sale

Peggy Bawn

Design GL Watson
Build Hilditch of Carrickfergus, 1894
LOD 36ft (11m)
Beam 7ft 11in
Draught 6ft 2in
Disp 5.2 tonnes
Sail Area 715 sqft
Lying UK, Asking E300,000, sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

“The number of surviving vessels from George Lennox Watson’s lifetime (1851-1904) can be counted on a careless carpenter’s fingers,” as broker Iain MacAllister, who was also project manager behind Peggy’s refit, puts it. “Long gone are his huge America’s Cup challengers and ‘Big Class’ racing yachts, and only two of the fleet of palatial steam yachts from his Glasgow drawing boards are known to survive. It is left to Peggy Bawn to carry the flame for Watson’s ground-breaking mid-1890s work in setting the standard for moderation in sailing yacht design, work that has never been challenged; only endorsed by those who followed his lead through the 20th century, especially Olin Stephens, who was a self-confessed Watson fan.”

“Peggy Bawn’s gilded fiddle bow was anachronistic even in 1894, partly a past fad, partly practical, undoubtedly beautiful – an interim stage in the development of extending immersed waterlines for faster sailing when heeled with a more buoyant hull. But it conceals the fact that when her award-winning restoration team began assessing what they’d found in a County Waterford hay barn in 2003, they quickly realised that the numbers were a scaled-down version of Watson’s famous royal racing cutter Britannia launched just the year before Peggy Bawn in 1893. Her name gave rise to the so-called “Britannia Ideal”, considered the epitome of sea kindliness. Peggy Bawn‘s present owner can vouch for that after 14 seasons of racing and cruising her in northern and Mediterranean Europe, and the east coast of the USA.”

After a lifetime of mostly light use, Peggy Bawn was bought by her current owner, the Irish sailor and yacht historian Hal Sisk, in the winter of 2002/3 for restoration and formed a dream team made up of project manager Iain McAllister, who had known Peggy since the early 80s, boatbuilder Michael Kennedy, the late naval architect Theo Rye and marine engineer Harry Hannon. The two-year rebuild started in April 2003 in a workshop in Ireland’s County Waterford. At the end, Peggy Bawn emerged as a completely new hull and deck atop the original lead keel. Internally, about 90 per cent of the yacht is still original, as are other visually important elements like the fore hatch, skylight, companionway hatch, cockpit seating, tiller, rudder head and most of the rig. Since restoration she has continued to be professionally maintained. This has included replacement of the batteries powering her motor in 2019, reducing battery weight by a third, with the result that the yacht sits on her true waterline again. Back in 2005, she featured on the cover of Classic Boat and in nine successive issues outlining the restoration process, and on the cover of WoodenBoat. Today she is competitive under CIM and Baltic Racing Rules.

The custom-built articulated king-pin trailer, incorporating a removeable cradle, was made in 2007 by leading German boat trailer specialist Harbeck. It’s very much part of the package and adds several dimensions to her security, in transit and in storage, and makes her suitable for attending events worldwide. The trailer allows roll-on roll-off transportation, avoiding the dreaded crane dangle, and includes a Brenderup Cargo box trailer under the stern overhang, giving as a secure, dry store in transit, especially for her cotton sails. Peggy Bawn winters on her own substantial cradle which is incorporated into the trailer but removable. 

“It is apparent that Watson was already fully in control of all the aspects of hull design that later designers would come to regard as important,” said project naval architect Theo Rye. “Engineless for much of her life, this fairly generous sail plan allows her to make progress in just about any conditions; it is really only the most complex of marina berths that prompts use of her electric motor these days. Her prismatic coefficient, an indicator of her distribution of underwater body, is 0.53, pretty well exactly where most textbooks would place it; it is a sweet-spot for low-resistance at the usual speeds of a displacement hull. Olin Stephens came to regard the prismatic as probably the most important single factor in hull design; some 40 years before, it is pretty clear that Watson already understood that fact. In fact, the more you go into Peggy Bawn’s hydrostatics, the more she seems to sit in a sweet spot, often hitting ‘ideals’ set in textbooks many years if not decades after Watson’s untimely death. Mr Watson, we salute you.”

Classic Boats for Sale

Altair

Design and build Wm Fife III, 1931
LOD 107ft 7in (32.8m)
Beam 20ft 6in (6.23m)
Draught 13ft 9in (4.2m)
Disp 155 tonnes
Aux Gardner 6LXDT 275hp turbo diesel
Lying Spain, Asking E6.5 million, sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk

By 1930, Fife III had reached the age of 70 and the world was in its first great financial crisis. These are hardly the most conducive elements to receiving instruction for a 107ft schooner, but it didn’t stop a 45-year-old retired cavalry officer called Captain Guy Hardy MacCaw from placing the order, and Altair was launched the year after from the Fife yard. His desire, recorded for posterity in a letter to William Fife that is on board, was for a boat “capable of sailing to the South Sea Islands with no anxiety.” He held onto the boat for just two years and never reached those islands. Fast forward to 1985 and the Swiss inventor, businessman and car collector Albert Obrist, known for his purist Ferrari collection, was on a charter aboard the Fife ketch Belle Aventure in Sardinian in the mid-180s. Captain Paul Goss had Fife evangelists Donn Costanzo and Jeffrey Law in his crew, all three of whom knew that Altair was by that point, available for restoration. 

After an epic voyage from Barcelona to Southampton that revealed much of what Altair urgently needed, she hauled out at Shamrock Quay for a major 18-month restoration led by Captain Paul Goss that set a new bar in authenticity carefully married to keeping Altair practical and comfortable by modern standards.

After re-launch in the summer of 1987 Altair‘s life changed forever, with a sailing programme far removed from her gentle first half century, but nothing more than William Fife designed and built her for. Apart from, of course, looking like new, the most noticeable feature was her suit of “Altair Cream” Dacron sails by her original sailmakers, Ratsey & Lapthorn of Cowes – made to look like the original cotton suit. She became a regular at the growing number of Classic yacht regattas on both North Atlantic coasts.

In 1993 ALTAIR returned to Spanish ownership with highly successful businessman Alberto Cortina. Through the mid to late 1990s she gained a reputation as an incredibly efficient sailing machine, with Mediterranean duels against the Alfred Mylne ketch THENDARA and the Herreshoff gaff schooner MARIETTE becoming the stuff of legend.

Under later ownership, and a major refit at Fairlie Restorations in 2008, she carried on winning, and her bullets include the 2008 Fife Regatta, countless wins at the Mediterranean and Caribbean classic events, even the 2015 Panerai Transat Classique – on line honours and corrected time, covering the 3,000 miles from Lanzarote to Fort de France in Martinique in 13 days 3 hours and 13 minutes, at an average of 8.8 knots. During the past seven years she finally accomplished Guy MacCaw’s dream, sailing all the way down to New Zealand. New Zealand’s strict handling of the Covid pandemic put paid to further voyaging, and she was shipped back to Europe in 2022.

“The original French-polished walnut interior of Altair is considered one of the most beautiful and authentic in any yacht,” says the broker. Much of it has been recently refinished, and below this lustre is every comfort you might expect aboard a modern superyacht. Altair offers accommodation for eight guests in five cabins, and accommodation for eight crew. She’ll win races and concours, turn heads, or take you around the world. She’s long been the favourite yacht of broker Barney Sandeman who put it: “Altair is the ultimate vintage yacht – and surely one of the world’s most beautiful works of mind and hand.”

Classic Boats for Sale

In the market for a wooden boat? Here’s some more classic boats for sale…

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The post Classic Boats for Sale: GL Watson & William Fife III on the Market appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Is it a seabird? Is it a hydroplane? No, it’s Tiny Giant! For the past few months the inhabitants of Stoke Gabriel on the River Dart in Devon have been scratching their heads trying to figure out an unusual new craft that has appeared on a mooring off the village. Clearly made of wood, the proa it looks nothing like any of the usual local boats, such as the indigenous salmon boats and trawlers once built on the river. Neither is it one of those plastic cruising yachts that seem to find favour among so many modern sailors. 

Yet, given half a breeze this strangely-shaped craft can be seen flying down the river at speeds in excess of eight knots, looking like some crazy giant moth. What’s more, it never tacks but simply flips the sail from one end of the boat to the other and heads off in the opposite direction (called ‘shunting’). Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say, and you might well think you’ve stepped into a Boating Wonderland.

The boat is of course a proa: one of the fastest boats you can build for its size and cost – or a pointless exercise in exotic boatbuilding, depending on your point of view. The owner of this unconventional craft is none other than William Lewis, commodore of the Stoke Gabriel Boat Association. He was converted to proas after hearing multihull pioneers Jim and Russel Brown speak while he was attending a course at the WoodenBoat school in Maine. William was working as a corporate layer in Johannesburg at the time, but the arrival of covid forced him to reconsider his priorities. He decided to return to the UK and take a sabbatical year off work.

“I thought of all the sensible things I could do, and didn’t do any of them,” he says. Instead, he signed up for a 40-week boatbuilding course at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis, UK. “Which was a bit of a stupid thing to do, as I’m not very good with my hands and have no particular talent with tools.”

Students on the BBA course are invited to ‘sponsor’ up to six new-builds, which means they have to pay for the materials but get to keep the boat at the end. There were countless sensible small boat designs William could have chosen which he could have then sold quite easily at the end of the course, but the former corporate lawyer had no doubt had enough of being sensible. Instead, William decided to follow his whimsy and build that seemingly most impractical of craft: a ‘shunting’ proa.

“The attraction of a proa, once you’ve made the intellectual shift, is that it’s got a lot of waterline, a lot of stability, and is very nice aesthetically,” he explains. “In the right hands, this boat can reach 14 knots. But the value for me was as a potential cruising dinghy. Most cruising dinghies are a compromise of beam, weight, draft and transportability. If it’s beamy, it’s too heavy; if it’s narrow, it’s too tender. With a proa, you can transport it easily and you can do fun things like sail on and off a beach without worrying about the centreboard or the rudder.” 

Uncompromising Design

Put like that, it makes an awful lot of sense. And it’s hard to argue with a 17ft 9in homebuilt boat you can put on a roofrack and which is capable of 14 knots. Yet to most western sailors there’s something instinctively ‘wrong’ about a boat that is asymmetric from side to side yet symmetric from end to end – indeed, there is no bow or stern on a shunting proa, as the front and back switch with every tack. 

Proas themselves feel no need to justify their existence. They have been around, happily carrying people across the Pacific Ocean, for thousands of years – far longer than any of the Johnny-come-lately boats most western sailors seem to espouse. 

Multihull design in the Pacific – of both the shunting and tacking variety – varied from island to island. Catamarans were favoured for carrying heavy cargo, while a single outrigger canoe was faster for chasing fish and impressing the girls. The hulls could also be swapped round, using two canoes to make a catamaran or a single canoe with a float (or ama) to make an outrigger canoe. Both types were rigged either as shunting or tacking configuration. Double outrigger canoes (ie trimarans) were rarely built in Polynesia and Micronesia, though they were used in Indonesia and the Philippines.

When Western explorers arrived in the Pacific, they were amazed by these nimble, lightweight craft that sailed rings around even their fastest boats. 

“Their outrigger boats passed by our ship very quickly even though we were under full sail,” wrote Antonio Pigefeta, while sailing around the world with Magellan in 1521. “There is no difference between the bow and the stern of these boats and they are like dolphins bounding from wave to wave.” 

And this from William Dampier sailing on the British ship Cygnet in 1686: “I do believe they sail the best of any Boats in the World. I did here for my own satisfaction try the swiftness of one of them, sailing by our Log, we had 12 Knots on our Reel […] but I do believe she would have run 24 mile an hour. […] By report, they will go from hence to another of the Ladrone Islands about 30 Leagues off [ie 90 nautical miles], and there do their Business, and return again in less than 12 Hours. I was told that one of these Boats was sent Express to Manila, which is above 400 Leagues [1,200nm], and performed the Voyage in 4 Days time.”

It wasn’t long before western yachts designers started playing around with the idea. Nat Herreshoff, always way ahead of the game, designed several catamarans from 1876 onwards. But it was Captain Ralph Munroe who focused specifically on the shunting variety, designing in 1898 a proa capable of 18 knots – the first of several proas the good Captain would design and built. Even President Roosevelt’s uncle, Robert B Roosevelt, was at it, building a 50ft proa at about the same time. 

Proas in the 20th Century

In the modern era, the cause was first taken up by multihull designer Dick Newick, who designed the 36ft ‘Atlantic proa’ Cheers in 1967. Unlike a traditional Pacific proa, which has the outrigger (or ama) on the windward side, the Atlantic proa has the outrigger on the leeward side. The boat’s styling was absolutely in keeping with the times, looking both futuristic and timelessly elegant. With Tom Follett at the helm, Cheers won third place in the 1968 OSTAR, becoming the first American boat to complete the race.

The potential of the type was spotted by British yachtsman (and mustard millionaire) Timothy Colman, who set a new world speed record of 26.3 knots with his 56ft proa Crossbow in 1972. He stretched that to 31.2 knots three years later, and went even further in 1980 with his proa/catamaran Crossbow II, setting a new record of 36 knots. Since then, proas have consistently claimed the world sailing speed record (when not being challenged by windsurfers and kite surfers), the most recent being Paul Larsen on his carbon fibre proa Sailrocket 2, which set a record of 65.45 knots in 2012.

One of the biggest names in the proa world is Russel Brown (son of multihull pioneer Jim Brown) who built the 36ft Jzerro, weighing just 3,200lb and capable of 22 knots, and sailed her across the Pacific from San Francisco to New Zealand in 2000. More recently, Jzerro was acquired by New Orleanian sailor Ryan Finn who in 2022 sailed her singlehanded 13,500 miles from New York to San Francisco, making her the smallest craft to achieve this feat. 

Another proa design which has acquired a devoted following in recent years is the 31ft Madness designed by John C Harris and available in kit form from his company Chesapeake Light Craft. Better known for designing easily-built canoes and dinghies, Harris conceived Madness as a ‘pocket cruiser’ for exploring the Chesapeake Bay and the Bahamas. He soon clocked up 20 knots in the boat, with average speeds of eight to ten knots. Five more boats have been built to the design, and a stretched version is currently being built in aluminium.

“The point is not to be weird,” says Harris. “I can’t afford to build something like this just to be weird. The point is that Pacific proas have a list of really compelling advantages. The main advantage is that, because of the asymmetry, you get to leave half the boat ashore. And the balance of forces is so perfect that the structure can be light and simple. It’s the fastest boat for the money.”

Back in Devon

Back in Devon, the proa William chose was the T2, designed by Gary Dierking and described in his book Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes as a “sport canoe for one or two people”. Although based on the traditional craft of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific, the T2 has been updated in a number of ways for modern construction. For a start, the main hull (or waka) is strip-plank and sheathed with fibreglass and epoxy. It has sealed buoyancy tanks at either end and a self-draining cockpit with buoyancy underneath, making it virtually unsinkable.

William used 6mm Alaskan yellow cedar for the planking, cut and moulded into strips by him and his team at the Boatbuilding Academy. To strengthen the hull – and to turn the whole process into a useful teaching exercise – they added two layers of cold-moulded 2.5mm sapele planking, laid diagonally at 90 degrees to each other. Slightly less fibreglass was used to compensate for the extra weight of the sapele, though the boat still ended up overweight and slightly bigger all round. The stems were laminated from sapele, and William was persuaded to add an inner and an outer keel, also laminated from sapele.

The instructions specify three gallons of epoxy resin for the T2 and, as the team took turns planking up and laminating the hull, William soon discovered an inconvenient truth: “Using epoxy there’s two types of workmen: the one who’s paying and the one who’s not.”

Dierking’s design caters for all types of builders, and his instructions for the ama suggest it can be built from two pieces of Styrofoam, sheathed in fibreglass and epoxy, while the outrigger booms (or akas) can be made from two pieces of aluminium tubing. For William, the whole point of doing a boatbuilding course was to improve his boatbuilding skills so, rather than go down the cheap ‘n’ dirty route, he chose to build the ama from strip-plank cedar (also sheathed in fibreglass and epoxy), and made the akas from laminated spruce. The actual shape of the akas was the result of hours of R&D culminating in a further session of lofting – all part of the learning process.

For the rig, Dierking offers two options: the traditional Oceanic lateen rig (ie crab claw), or his own modern windsurfer type rig with a cut-off clew. William chose the traditional option, though made using modern methods, including the hollow spruce birds-mouth mast and yard and a solid laminated boom. Even the sail was made inhouse by BBA students as part of the course. 

I joined William on the River Dart while he was still trialing his remarkable new boat – named Tiny Giant after his wife Priya “who is tiny and hyperactive”. My first impression when I climbed on board was how stable she was, side to side, thanks to that 9ft overall beam. My second impression was how tippy she was fore and aft, when I creeped out to the ends to get my on-board shots, thanks to that 16in main hull beam. It is of course this narrow beam, combine with a relatively long waterline which makes the boat so fast, while the deep-V hull shape allows the boat to grip the water without need for any foils. 

“I’ve had her out in a Force 4-6. She’s not as fast as a planning dinghy, but faster than a normal 30ft cruising yacht,” says William. “She has quite a big wetted surface area so it takes a bit of wind to unstick her, but she comes alive with a Force 3 (7-10 knots) and will get up to 9 knots quite easily. The Force 6 brought serious problems because the tack started thrashing around wildly and bashing the hull. That’s why it’s important to have the halyard handy, so you can dump the sail in an emergency.” 

In many ways, trimming the boat is similar to a gaff-rigged yacht: you need to ease the sheets and don’t expect to sail too close to the wind. With the wind forward of the beam and the sail set to get the centre of effort in just the right place, she should sail herself in a straight line, though William and I didn’t quite achieve that on our trial run. The sail trim can also be adjusted by angling the mast to leeward to produce a better sail shape in light airs, or to windward in a strong blow like a windsurfer sail. Getting even more fancy, the windward brail line can be tightened to give the sail a fuller shape – similar to the ‘tunnel’ effect used on the lateen rig – though again William hasn’t reached that level of proa prowess just yet.

Steering with an oar takes quite a bit of getting used to. William made it look easy, but I struggled with it, especially off the wind. As Chris Grill, who sailed his extended T2 Desesperado from Mexico to Panama in 2011-12, wrote in his blog (grillabongquixotic.wordpress.com):

“My dream is to steer with one foot whilst playing the fiddle and drinking gin and tonics, and steering oars are incompatible with that ideal.” He eventually fitted rudders, hinged so the one at the ‘bow’ can be raised and the one at the ‘stern’ lowered during each shunt.

Strangely, one of the biggest challenges William has faced is getting on and off the boat’s mooring. The one thing you want to avoid with a proa is going aback, so heading into the wind to pick up a mooring simply isn’t an option. Instead, William usually drops the sail before he reaches it and paddles the rest of the way if necessary – something which is easier said than done when the current is running at 4 knots, as it often does on this part of the Dart. Good sculling skills are an essential part of sailing a proa.

It’s been a steep learning curve for William and his exotic craft, and his dream of creating a light but fast cruising dinghy for coastal hopping is still a work in progress. The next step is to take the boat out on Start Bay to test it in a seaway, and then the real adventures will begin.

“The challenge is to travel very light,” he says. “The idea is to walk out of my front door with a rucksack, walk down to the water, get on the boat, pop the rucksack in the well, and off we go. That’s the type of dinghy cruising I want to do. I might fashion a bivouac for the boat so that I can stay on board for a night or two. Small-scale adventures is what it’s about.”

And there’s nothing weird about that.

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The post Flying Proas: The History of these Weird & Speedy ‘Shunting’ Boats appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The first of the big yacht replicas

In April 1903, two almost identical new yachts were launched on consecutive days: Evelyn having been built by Ramage & Ferguson in Leith, and Adela by Fay & Co in Southampton. They had been designed by WC Storey; both were of composite construction with English elm keels, 3½in (89mm)- thick yellow pine decking, and most other major components – including the 3¼in-thick (82mm) hull planking, stem, sternpost, rudder, stanchions and bulwarks – in teak; and neither had an engine. 

Adela had been commissioned by Claud Cayley – who was rear commodore of the Royal London YC and would later become vice commodore and eventually commodore – and was named after his oldest daughter. Although Adela was built primarily for cruising, Cayley regularly raced her around the coast of British Isles as well as on the continent. In 1904 she came second in a race from Kiel to Eckernforde for which she was awarded a trophy which, it is thought, was presented to Cayley by Kaiser Wilhelm II on board the 117m (382ft) imperial royal yacht Hohenzollern. While it is known that Cayley cruised Adela as far afield as Sweden, it is also possible that she visited the Mediterranean and crossed the Atlantic to Canada where Cayley had spent some of his early years.

At the end of 1913, Adela was sold to AFB Cresswell, who had little chance to use her before war broke out the following year. In 1916 she was requisitioned by the Royal Navy who used her for mine-hunting off the south coast of England, then soon after the war she was bought by Sven Hansen, a Welsh ship owner and builder. It was Hansen who had Adela’s first engine installed in her, a Bergen petrol paraffin motor.

Her next owner, from 1924, was Sir Henry Seymour King MP who made a number of changes. He renamed her Heartsease; he significantly modified her rig by reducing the sail plan from around 13,000sqft to about 9,000 for ease of handling, and converted her to a topsail schooner by adding a square sail to the foremast; he replaced her dark mahogany saloon joinery with the much lighter timber sycamore, combined with fabric panelling; a few years later he replaced the petrol paraffin engine with an 87hp Gardner diesel. He spent the remaining years of his life cruising on Heartsease, often with his niece as his companion, visiting the Mediterranean and also Norway several times.

After Seymour King died in 1933, Heartsease was bought by Viscount Eyres Monsell, the First Lord of the Admiralty. He frequently cruised between the naval ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth, and each time he departed from either port, a six-gun salute was fired from the shore; and he often arranged for a destroyer to escort Heartsease to allow messages to be relayed to and from the Admiralty. 

It was probably in 1936 that Heartsease sailed for the very last time because soon after then, Monsell sold her, and with her next four owners she was laid up in various east coast mud berths and mostly used as a houseboat, and at some point during that period her rig and ballast keel were removed. In 1971, by which time she was in Lowestoft, she was bought by Australians Wing Commander Waller and his wife. They moved on board and soon began the work which they hoped would allow them to get Heartsease back into commission, with a view to sailing her back to Australia. 

Adela Enters the Modern World

American couple George and Frayda Lindemann had owned the 92ft yawl Gitana IV – designed and built by Sangermani in Italy in 1962 – since 1987. It wasn’t long before the Lindemanns starting discussing with Gitana’s captain Steve Carson the possibility of acquiring a bigger boat. After considering various large classic yachts such as Lulworth, Mariette, Cambria and Candida, Steve heard that the Wallers had abandoned their plans for Heartsease and put her on the market, so he went to look at her. Two years later, the deal was done. Steve and the Lindemanns had formed a fruitful relationship with Pendennis Shipyard in Falmouth, where they had taken Gitana IV for a couple of refits, so in December 1992 Heartsease was towed there – with 27 air bags inside her to ensure she remained afloat – with a view to restoring her. 

However, as the dismantling of the hull progressed, it became increasingly apparent that not only was the steel framework in appalling condition and would pretty much all need replacing, very little of the teak planking would be reusable. So, amid no little controversy – much of it expressed in the pages of this magazine, perhaps in part by people who could not have been aware of the true condition of the hull – it was decided to build a new boat with an all-steel hull, incorporating as much as could be saved from the old boat. The Dutch naval architect Gerard Dykstra was asked to produce designs for the new boat which would be known as K2 during her construction.

An absolute priority for K2 was that she should have the same styling as the original boat, maintaining, in particular, the appearance of the profile, the sheer line and the deck furniture. Gerard was all too aware that he would have to allow for the weight and space of a great deal of machinery and equipment which would never have been fitted on an early-20th-century yacht but which, in the modern era, was now considered essential. So, using the original lines plan as a starting point, he gave K2 rounder bilges, a metre more beam (primarily to provide buoyancy to compensate for the machinery weight, but also for additional stability) and replaced the long keel and keel-hung rudder with a more modern fin-and-skeg profile. 

Throughout the boat, the style of the original joinery – the panelling, deck beams, overheads, even down to the detail of the pin rails, dado rails and the curved bulkhead sections in the passageway at the bottom of the stairs, was replicated. While almost all of the interior was built with new Brazilian mahogany and utile, some of the original joinery from various parts of the old boat was reused in the port aft guest cabin, although memories vary as to just how much. Fittings such as door handles and door knobs, drawer pulls, hinges and overhead glass-domed lights were replicated from original or existing items and nickel silver-plated. The 5.5m (18ft) long trail-boards each side of the bow at the sheer, and the stanchions and capping rail around the fluted stern were all saved from the original boat and reused. Thirty-five new Lewmar winches – 17 of them hydraulically powered – were fitted, along with two Muir hydraulic windlasses, and much of the deck hardware was made by Ian Terry Engineering. A Lugger 640hp diesel engine was fitted, driving a Hundested variable pitch, four-blade propellor, while other mechanical equipment included two Northern Lights generators, an HEM watermaker, Marine Air Systems air-conditioning, and Hein & Hopman refrigeration.

While acknowledging that, in an ideal world, it would have been wonderful for the original rig to be replicated on K2, Steve felt that it just wasn’t practical, at least certainly not with the 10 permanent crew planned. So it was decided that K2 would have a bermudan rig, but with masts significantly higher than those of the original. The new spars were built by Carbospars in carbon fibre, and the main mast was, at the time, easily the longest spar yet to be built in that material. The sails were supplied by North Sails UK, the upwind sails from the company’s own Gatorback Spectra-785TX cloth which had a Spectra content significantly stronger than any previously produced by the company. The 471 m2 (5,070 sft) mainsail, according to North’s own newsletter, was “one of largest triangular mainsails ever built by North, if not the largest”.

Adela on Fire

In October 1994, about a month before K2 was due to be launched, a devastating fire swept through the shed in which she was being built. While two other boats – one aluminium, the other GRP composite – were destroyed, K2’s steel hull saved her. But she was catastrophically damaged, and an enormous amount of work lay ahead to put everything right. Among other things, all of the exterior hull paint and filler had to be removed and reapplied; virtually all of the exterior timber work had to be replaced (the timber work from the original boat which had been fitted around the stern was too badly damaged to be reused, but happily the original trail-boards survived); all of the interior joinery work had to be carefully removed so that it could be refinished and also to allow replacement of the hull insulation (not least for fear of a lingering smell); and the engine and generators were sent back to the manufacturers in the USA to be thoroughly inspected to ensure the warranty conditions would be honoured. Thanks to the extraordinary hard work and positive attitude of all the Pendennis staff, as well as the support and understanding of their contractors and suppliers, somehow they managed to launch the new boat the following April. She was christened Adela and a few weeks later she was on her way to the Mediterranean.   

Sailing Once Again

This marked the beginning of an ambitious programme of world-wide cruising and racing for the Lindemanns. During their ownership Adela cruised extensively in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean as well as the Baltic, Alaska and east coast of the USA. In October 1997 she began a circumnavigation which took her from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, to San Francisco and then via various islands across the Pacific, to Darwin, Singapore and then across the Indian Ocean and via the Suez Canal back into the Mediterranean. On the race course she had her share of success in regattas throughout the Caribbean and Mediterranean, in San Francisco, New England and Cowes, and she also won line honours in the 1997 Transatlantic race from New York to the Lizard. While she didn’t easily fit into the format of classic boat regattas initially, she was at the forefront of the creation of Spirit of Tradition classes which have been included in such regattas ever since. Although a relatively casual attitude was taken to racing in the early years (for instance the tenders were left on deck, and she was often raced by barely more than the permanent crew and using just “white sails”), as time went by it was taken more seriously with increasing numbers of professional race crew and with the acquisition of specialist North 3Di racing sails, including a square top mainsail and foresail. 

Adela has returned to Pendennis Shipyard many times for refits and modifications, the biggest of which was in 2000 when she was literally cut in half to allow her length to be extended by 3.6 metres, primarily to provide better crew quarters but that did, of course, improve her sailing performance by increasing the waterline length and by separating the rigs. Other significant modifications have included two keel modifications, the second of which also incorporated a daggerboard; a retractable bow thruster to replace the tunnel thruster, and the addition of a stern thruster; and a Caterpillar 873 HP C18 engine replacing the Lugger. 

Tony Blair and Eric Clapton Come Aboard Adela

During the Lindemanns’ ownership, a number of well-known people came aboard Adela at various times. These included Tony Blair when he visited Pendennis Shipyard as the UK’s Leader of The Opposition while K2 was being constructed, Prince Philip soon after she was launched, the King of Spain and the Aga Kahn in Porto Cervo, Gianni Agnelli in Corsica, Leonardo de Caprio and some of the production crew from the Hollywood film The Beach in Phuket, Eric Clapton at the Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta, and the America’s Cup sailor Dennis Connor who took Adela’s helm in several regattas. 

After 14 years as Adela’s captain, Steve retired in 2009, but his successor was an obvious choice. Greg Perkins had briefly been Gitana IV’s captain when Steve’s attention initially switched to Adela, and was then Adela’s mate for a couple of years. He took over when Steve retired and is still on board today. 

Aboard Adela in the Caribbean

In June 2018, George Lindemann died, and the following year Adela was sold to Brazilian Benjamin Steinbruch who had never previously owned a boat of any kind. Since then, he and his family and friends have spent about three months on board each year. They have continued the Lindemanns’ tradition of cruising in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and have also spent time on the west coast of Scotland, in Northern Ireland and Norway.  

Benajmin’s first racing experience had to wait a bit longer, however. After covid scuppered plans to take part in the Antigua Superyacht Challenge in 2020, he and Adela at last did so in 2024 when I was lucky enough to be on board myself. Things didn’t initially go entirely to plan, however. On the first of two crew practice days, the racing mainsail showed signs of damage and had to be replaced by the cruising mainsail (all of the racing sails were ageing and had been spent the last five years in an inhospitably hot container in Antigua); the next day the 1,000m2 Code 4 asymmetric “big red” spinnaker was severely damage as a result of a less than perfect hoist (in fact, part of it was left in the sea and when we returned to it, a crew member had to take a swim to help retrieve it); and just before the start of the first race the No 1 jib, with no warning at all, ripped itself from leach to luff (any debate as to its repairability would have been futile). The race results weren’t too impressive either, with the might ketch Hetairos – the only other boat in our class – consistently getting the better of us. But none of that takes anything away from the fact that the whole crew – about 30 of us in total – got an enormous amount of pleasure out of the whole event; and most importantly, so did Benjamin.

For me, it was some of the most wonderful sailing of my life. And just for good measure, Adela was awarded the prestigious Gosnell Trophy which is presented to the yacht which competes “in the spirit of the regatta, both afloat and ashore”, as voted – unanimously in this case – by each competing boat and each member of the race committee.

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The post Yacht Replica that Inspired Spirit of Tradition: Adela’s Steel Rebuild appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Tom Cunliffe Admiring Boats Design

Right now my boat is lying in Kalmar, halfway up the sound inside the long, long island of Öland in eastern Sweden. We’re in the marina basin and it’s such a pleasant respite from banging against a wall for two nights in Bornholm that Roz and I have opted to stay an extra day. It’s fun having a drink in the cockpit in the evening, watching the yachts arrive as we quietly award points out of ten for tidy berthing and whether or not they please the eye. 

Beauty of course is in the eye of the beholder, but for my money, the only yachts that can claim necessity for having a flat sheer or a shapeless boot-top line are today’s more extreme race boats. Their creators at least have the excuse that such things come well down their list of priorities, with speed and rule-cheating at the top. Designers and builders of ugly cruising boats, on the other hand, cannot hide behind the rationalisation that their boat does the job better than a lovely one. 

Back in the 1930s, Uffa Fox observed that the best offshore racing yachts made the most satisfactory cruising boats. There was much in what he said. In his day, race boats were often  a delight to the eye. By contrast, some of the offerings from today’s manufacturers of cruising yachts are aesthetically inexcusable and looking around the harbour last evening provided the usual dreary prospect until, as the shadows lengthened on the endless Swedish summer evening, a blue yacht came slipping quietly in to lie alongside me. Clearly dating from the days when sterns first went ‘retroussé’, her reverse counter was exquisite, the rake of the delicate transom mirroring the angle of her stem as it rose from the still water thirty-five feet away. Nothing disturbed the sweet flow of her lines. The coachroof blended in; so did the forehatch. The cockpit gave her away as a sometime race boat with its helmsman’s section and a crew pit between the boss and the companionway, all faultlessly varnished, glowing in the dying of the day. The rig was classic masthead with single spreaders, fore and aft lowers and stout cap shrouds. As simple as it gets, and as strong. Her German ensign flew gently at the correct angle, its bottom corner a few inches above the water.

When his crew were settled, the skipper called over to me to enquire if my own boat was an American Hinckley. He’d got it right on provenance, but actually she’s a Mason. The resemblance is inescapable, and the understandable mistake is often made by switched-on sailors. Like a Hinckley, to anyone with an eye for detail, Constance is as Yankee as ‘Old Glory’. Now it was my turn. I resisted the temptation to speculate; I just asked. 

Karena it turned out, is a Holman and Pye design from the late 1960s, built by Pye’s brother in Brixham. I might have guessed. Closer examination suggested something of the Twister in her sheer, but instead of the well-balanced transom of her smaller sister, Kim Holman had drawn out Karena’s lines to a perfect conclusion.

The joy of all this was more than simply appreciating a fine yacht at close quarters, it was about a meeting of minds. We two skippers had admired one another’s boats, but our understanding of what they are went beyond the ‘ooh ahh!’ of the casual observer. We didn’t say much, but we didn’t need to. We both knew we had found a friend.  

Identifying Another’s Boat Design

Boat design recognition doesn’t always go like this. I’ll never forget cruising around the town anchorage off Dartmouth one evening searching for space to anchor my 50-foot pilot cutter. Over her spars, she was all of sixty feet, so with the usual wind-against-tide potential of this challenging berth, I was taking extra care. At the upstream end of the assembled boats I passed close by a disreputable-looking vessel of no discernible purpose lying to a length of chain that can only have been reclaimed from the council after they scrapped their traditional high-tank toilets for modern low-level units. As his vessel careered around at the end of this precarious tether, her sole crew tossed his cigarette butt into the flooding tide and opened a mouth obscured by a haystack of a beard. Obviously not given to garrulity, his communiqué was brief but clear enough:

‘Brixham boat?’ he enquired gruffly.

I explained politely that the boat was a pilot cutter from the Bristol Channel, omitting that she bore no more resemblance to a Brixham trawler than a Land Rover does to a 1928 Bentley.  Both do a fine job, but they were never remotely the same thing. Still, I thought, it’s good that he’s taken notice. 

I left him enjoying a swig from a rum bottle and found my spot. I dug in the 112lb fisherman, laid a sensible scope of half-inch chain and went to bed. Shortly before midnight, I was awakened by a bloodcurdling scream apparently from under my bowsprit. In those days I slept naked and in the heat of the moment, imagining death and mayhem between me and my anchor, I shot up on deck clad as nature intended. In the ambient light from the town I found my erstwhile interlocutor wrapped around my cable, having dragged through the anchorage hitherto unscathed. I was just casting him off when a smart Hallberg Rassy came dragging by. On deck was a lady aiming a torch directly at me, her face a mask of horror in the glow of her spreader lights.

From the boat under my bows came the pithy comment,

‘It’s a good job we’re both sailin’ men, skipper…’  

I last saw him disappearing downstream, still clutching the rum bottle.

Tom Cunliffe’s Podcast

You can listen to Tom Cunliffe’s Podcast on our sister brand, Sailing Today’s, website.

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The post Boat Design & No Need for Ugly Boats: Tom Cunliffe’s Column appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Spirit at Speed

It wasn’t the first time I’d ridden on a speedboat at over 20 knots. As a yachting journalist, I’ve spent untold hours in RIBs chasing classic yachts around the course at regattas from Ajaccio to Langkawi. It’s at once exhilarating, often uncomfortable and occasionally scary. So when I was invited to ride on board the new electric foiler (Spirit 35 F) from Spirit Yachts, with its top speed of 32 knots, I was quite prepared for a thrilling white-knuckle ride across the Solent. After all, just a few days before she had beaten the speed record for an electric boat going around the Isle of Wight, slashing four hours off the previous record holder by completing the 51-mile course in just 1 hour 56 minutes. I had butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it.

What I got was actually surprisingly sedate. For a start, the 35ft Spirit foiler looks every bit like a vintage speedboat from the 1920s, with its long, pointy bow, its slipper launch-style stern, and its curvaceous hull and deck – all varnished to stunning effect. Inside the boat, the cockpit is luxuriously fitted out with cream upholstery, varnished trim and retro-looking analogue instruments. It’s also unnervingly quiet. There’s no deafening roar or clouds of smoke as we leave the dock; just the quiet whirr of an electric motor. 

Once out on the Medina River, the boat gathers speed, rises 3ft in the air and flies off across the Solent at over 20 knots. Sure, the water is rushing past in a blur, the wind fussing our hair, the hull vibrating and twitching slightly as the ‘flight control’ adjusts the angle of the boat to the shape of the waves. But aside from that, it’s smooth, comfortable and really quite unremarkable. The question that keeps popping into my head is: why aren’t all motor boats like this? The answer might have something to do with the boat’s £1.8m (ex VAT) price tag, but once the development costs have been recouped and boats like this can be produced at a reasonable cost, there’s no doubt in my mind that the majority of speed boats in the future will be just this: electric foilers. It just makes so much sense.

Sean McMillan & Spirit 35 (F)

Back at the Spirit Yacht offices, the boat’s designer (and company founder) Sean McMillan shows me a photo that makes the point succinctly, the way only a photo can: the new foiler is powering across Lake Como in Italy alongside a replica of her aesthetic inspiration, the 1920s runabout Baby Bootlegger. The photo shows the huge wash left behind by Baby Bootlegger, which is fitted with a traditional petrol engine and propeller drive, while the electric foiler leaves no wake at all. You don’t ned to be a naval architect to understand that it requires a huge expenditure of energy to create all that wash, while the electric foiler requires a fraction of the power. I later find out the actual figure is 15%: ie the foiler consumes 15% as much energy as a conventional speedboat going at the same speed. 

But perhaps the most important point about the Spirit 35 (F) is that it overturns all our preconceived ideas about electric boats. For decades, electric boats have struggled to provide the kind of performance most sailors really need, generally offering a range of 50 miles or so, at around 5 or 6 knots. That’s fine for pottering around inland waters but not nearly beefy enough for coastal passages. Technology has improved, but you still have to choose between speed and range. For example, the Optima e10 offers the best range, an impressive 200 miles, but at a measly 6 knots. The nearest equivalent to the Spirit 35EF is the all-carbon fibre Candela C8 foiler, which blasts along at 24 knots, but for a mere 51 miles. 

By contrast, the Spirit foiler will cruise at 20 knots for 100 miles on a single charge. That’s the distance from Cowes to Cherbourg (easily) or Dartmouth to Jersey (just), which suddenly sounds a whole lot more interesting. At a stroke, the Spirit foiler makes electric propulsion a seriously viable option. Not only that, but it does so while looking supremely classy. Only the Riva-style Boesch 750 comes near it for aesthetic appeal, and that only offers a range of 14 miles at 20 knots.

So, how did they do it? How did the builders of lightweight ‘modern classic’ sailboats (with a few displacement and semi- displacement motor boats thrown in for good measure) come to produce the best-performing electric boat currently on the market?

The idea for the Spirit 35 (F) came from one of the company’s most loyal customers: the man who loved his Spirit 52 so much that he commissioned an even bigger one: the 111ft Geist, the biggest boat built by the yard to date. The owner wanted a chase boat that was in keeping with the retro style of his sailing boats, was electric-powered (like his 111-footer), and yet would provide a fun, fast ride for all the family. It was a challenge that Sean took on with enthusiasm. After all, this is the man who has made a career out of designing ultra-lightweight sailing boats that look classic above the water while clocking up remarkable turns of speed. It was just a matter of applying this “visual joke” to a motor launch. 

Wood might not seem the obvious choice to build a lightweight hull, but Spirit Yachts are adept at doing just that. As Sean put it: “It was a slightly more extreme version of what we do on a daily basis.” Indeed, the yard used much the same approach as it does on all its boats, starting with a layer of 12mm douglas fir planking. The hull sides and deck were then stiffened with “judicious” use of carbon fibre, before being covered in a 6mm layer of sipo veneers, and then varnished to great effect. The bottom of the boat, which would be subject to the most pounding, was strengthened with a layer of hemp saturated in epoxy on the outside, and a layer of carbon fibre on the inside.

“The carbon fibre is there mainly just to stiffen the timber,” says Sean. “We find that if we take the timber scantlings down to where they’re absolutely strong enough, they then get a little too flexible, so we sandwich them with a little bit of carbon to stiffen everything.”

The finished bare hull of the Spirit 35, without any of the propulsion system or fit-out, weighed just 595kg.

Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) Technologies

But, while Spirit Yachts had plenty of expertise building beautiful lightweight hulls, they weren’t so well qualified in the mechanics of how to make a boat fly. For that, they teamed up with BAR Technologies, the company created by Ben Ainslie for his America’s Cup bid in 2017 (BAR is an acronym for Ben Ainslie Racing). Thanks to this alchemy, the project benefitted instantly from years of research and development, which gave it a huge head start. And there’s little doubt that foiling was key to the project’s success.

“Foiling inherently reduces your engine requirements massively,” says Simon Schofield, chief technology officer at BAR Technologies. “Once the boat is up and flying, the engine requirements is about 85% less than a similar boat going at the same speed without foils. And getting there is not as hard as you might think. We use about same energy at take-off as we do at 30 knots foiling.”

Unlike a planing hull, which requires a large amount of energy to get it on the plane in the first place, it doesn’t take much effort to get a foiler to fly, providing the hull is at the correct ‘angle of attack’ (a phrase that comes up a lot when you’re talking about foilers). The other key factor is weight – especially on an electric boat.

“Batteries have very limited power so the challenge is getting range,” says Simon. “You can quickly get yourself into a negative spiral where you end up making something less efficient, which means need more batteries, which means it gets heavier. It’s a compounding problem. You’ve got to get that design spiral going in a positive direction and making things more efficient which means you get lighter so you can reduce batteries.”

To achieve that ”positive spiral”, BAR designed a stepped underwater hull optimised for foiling. Thus, while the above-water shape designed by Sean might be redolent of another era, the underwater shape is “as modern as you can get”, according to Simon. 

To make it fly, the Spirit 35 (F) has three retractable foils, all made from titanium. A T-foil rudder aft controls the pitch and yaw (or ‘angle of attack’) while the two forward foils are joined by a fixed bar with trim tabs at either end to control the roll. An ultra-compact 80kW electric motor, made by the pioneering British electrics company Equipmake, is imbedded in the bottom of the rudder to maximise drive. That in turn is powered by a custom-made 120kW battery pack. 

The whole emphasis is on keeping things compact, light and ultra-efficient to provide the maximum output for the least weight. The boat’s finished displacement, including coolbox and waterski attachment, comes to 2.4 tonnes – not bad for a 35-footer. 

But getting the Spirit 35 to fly is one thing; controlling it while it’s up is the really tricky bit.

“A boat that’s foiling is inherently unstable. It’s like an upside-down pendulum,” says Simon. “It’s like balancing a broom on your finger and you have to keep moving your hand to keep the broom up. That’s effectively what we have to do the whole time to make the boat fly. It doesn’t want to fly; it wants to fall over because the centre of gravity is all the way up in the air.”

To stop the boat ‘falling over’, BAR have developed a flight control system – its so-called Foil Optimization and Stability System (FOSS) – which can read the state of the sea and adjust the foils accordingly. Although this isn’t allowed in the America’s Cup, where the foils have to be controlled by the crew, the technology was originally developed for the British America’s Cup campaign for simulation and testing purposes.

The Spirit 35 (F) is fitted with five sensors, which determine how high the hull is off the water, as well some monitoring equipment to calculate the boat’s inertia and acceleration. Between those sensors, the on-board computer develops a mathematical picture of what the boat is doing and what the sea surface is doing around it. From that information, it adjusts the foils to correct for roll and pitch movements according to the size of the waves. If it’s just a bit of chop, it just skips pass them, but if it’s a longer wave it will follow it.

What’s more, all that clever technology means that there’s only one control more than there would be on a non-foiling powerboat: the up and down lever. The rest is all done by the BAR program. Choosing how high to fly is a matter of judgement which is left to the driver.

“It’s a trade-off between efficiency and manoeuvrability,” says Simon. “The higher you fly, the less foil there is in the water so there’s less drag. But, if there are waves and you’re turning sharply, you’ve got less margin before that foil starts reaching the surface. So if it’s rougher or you’re doing lots of aggressive turning, you tend to fly a little deeper in the water. If it’s silky calm and you are going in a straight line, you can fly higher and minimise drag.”

An unexpected development when they were testing the Spirit 35 prototype was the discovery of what they call ‘skimming mode’. In really rough conditions (usually above a Force 6) when it’s too uncomfortable to fly, the foils are used to ‘lighten’ the boat, reducing its displacement to a minimum without actually rising out of the water. Thus the boat remains in displacement mode but just skims from crest to crest, without absorbing the full brunt of the waves.

Only once, right at the very beginning, when Simon accidentally tried to turn the boat too sharply, the system simply refused and dumped us back at sea level, before resuming what it considered a safe trajectory. As ever, human error is more likely to get you into trouble than the machine itself, something Simon is acutely aware of.

“This project was technically more complicated than an America’s Cup boats,” he says. “The flight control system is much more developed. The America’s Cup boats are driven by experts who know what they are getting into. If something goes wrong, they have engineers around to fix it. But this boat is being driven by general public, and you’ve got to keep them safe, so there are layers of safety added in.”

Despite the boisterous sea conditions, the prototype Sprit 35 (F) Moquai was in full flying mode when she set a new round-the-Isle-of-Wight record, yet she still proved more comfortable than the RIBs trying to keep up with her, which had to retire in ignominy. The main difference for this run was that the aft part of the cockpit was covered over with purpose-made wooden cowlings, to turn her into a two-person ‘spider’ mode. In family mode, the cowlings turn into seats and a table with seating for six people, thanks to some typical McMillan design ingenuity. 

It might seem a pointless exercise – or deliberately contrary – to build a boat with such a modern provenance out of wood, but Simon reckons it only added 15-20 per cent extra weight, something their highly-developed foiling system could accommodate quite easily. Certainly her owner would have it no other way, and nor would Sean. Not surprisingly, however, BAR Technologies are developing the idea for a more mainstream clientele, with a carbon composite hull, which will no doubt fly even faster. They are also applying the technology to commercial projects, such as a flying catamaran which will be used to service wind turbines in the North Sea. 

For make no mistake about it, the Spirit 35 F represents a quantum shift in the potential of electric boats – something which will eventually before the norm. The future starts here.

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The post Spirit Yachts New Electric Foiler: Ben Ainslie’s Tech in Spirit 35(F) appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Model Making in Mauritius

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 industry would perhaps be excessive. Still, it is surprising to note that there are numerous manufacturers for model making in Mauritius. Thanks to competition and cheap labour, they create models sold worldwide at much lower prices than European or North American manufacturers. 

The area with the greatest density of ateliers is Curepipe, in the interior, half an hour’s drive from the capital city of Port Louis (on the west coast) and the international airport in the southeast of the island. In this very spot many manufacturers survive, among these, Bobato, Pride of the Island, and Le Port. The key commercial activity in that area is represented by the latter, established in 1988, whose showroom and workshop are a regular destination for visitors looking for a handmade souvenir.

“The Le Port company,” says manager Krisen Pareanen, “produces up to 500 naval models of different sizes yearly, at about half a model per week. We buy the wood, generally of Indonesian origin, from local distributors. Over the years, we have had customers from all over the world. In the 1990s, they were mainly European until the Covid pandemic and we had important Chinese customers. In recent years, however, we have been working extensively with important Indian customers, but we basically sell products all over the world.”

Prices vary considerably based on size, ranging from around £60 (GBP) for a miniature vessel to over £3,000 for a three or four-foot model, while half hulls cost between £35 and £85. The models are built by a variable number of workers – 10 are permanent employees, while another 20 or so are part-time. Each project takes up to four months to build based on size, complexity, and customer urgency. Some may require a much greater commitment: “The largest product we have made,” added Krisen, “is a model of the HMS Victory of almost 13ft (4m) loa which remains here in Mauritius. Such a piece, obviously, required a lot of time.”

Due to a strategic choice dictated by the rising cost of materials used (teak, mahogany, iroko, and various metals), the Le Port company no longer creates reproductions of yachts or other ships upon customer request. Instead, it limits itself to producing famous sailing ships, taking advantage of templates that allow for economy. The Amerigo Vespucci (1931) is one of the most requested, like the evergreen Victory (1765), the Bounty (1784), the Soleil Royal (1669), the Wasa (1627) and even Disney’s Black Pearl. 

Meanwhile, this expertise has become the ‘house specialty’ of another Mauritius company located on the north of the island, in the Grand Baie area – Historic Marine. Founded in 1982 by Charles Edouard Piat, this factory is now run by his son Serge, a former skipper who, in 2008, when the global economic crisis put the family business to the test, causing the closure of dozens of other model manufacturers in Mauritius, decided to invest time and money in it. “We build between 150 and 200 models yearly in our workshop,” said Serge, “depending on the complexity, while the half hulls do not exceed 25-30 pieces yearly. Approximately 45 per cent of our orders are for models of a particular vessel requested by boat owners, perhaps their own miniature boat. The remaining 55 per cent are products visitors purchase from among the many pieces in our catalogue. These include famous vessels, yachts from the history of sailing or motor boating, or traditional workboats. The prices range from approximately £200 to £2,000 pounds for a model made from one of our templates to £700-£3,800 for a one-off model based on the customer’s drawings.”

The showroom is a bright environment full of wooden and glass display cases. In addition to the usual ships, like the Victory and the Vespucci, one can spot a French rowing galley, Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso, ocean liners, Riva and Chris-Craft runabouts, and many gaff-rigged sailboats. Here, too, as Serge confirms, expensive imported woods are used. He, however, has an important advantage over the competition because also being the owner of a carpentry business that works with luxury hotels and other important clients, Piat has privileged access to quality waste wood, generally teak or other essences of Southeast Asia. Marine plywood and meranti are also widely used.

Historic Marine employs 24 people, mostly of Indian origin. As in the most experienced shipyards, some workers are specialised in a particular task. During our visit, for example, we noticed a welder who was meticulously creating a stern railing; another craftsman showed us how to apply a copper sheathing to a vessel’s hull. Among the employees are several women, who generally specialise in rigging and painting the models.

A Final Tip

Anyone with an interest in beautifully crafted naval models visiting Mauritius should not miss the Mahébourg Historical Naval Museum. Due to lack of funds, the venue is somewhat neglected, but it houses what are, in all likelihood, the most beautiful models on the island: mainly square riggers linked to the history of Mauritius. Some of them were manufactured by the Comajora company, founded in 1967, but since closed down, like many other companies in the sector over recent years. The proximity of this museum to the international airport makes it a very convenient and worthwhile port of call to the nautically inclined.

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The post Model Making in Mauritius: Crafting Miniature Naval Ships appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Planing

A planing craft is a far more recent development, than displacement or semi-displacement boats. A flat or vee-bottomed hull with the bottom lines running straight and parallel create hydrodynamic lift, letting the boat skim, or plane, easily over the surface of water. These are the fastest of all powered vessels, but that speed comes with many limitations, the first being size. As the planing surface increases, the weight of the craft it must lift into the air increases arithmetically, so for large craft, planing becomes increasingly difficult. Fuel economy is the worst of the three main types, particularly at low speed, when the large immersed transom is dragged through the water. Then there is the slamming: any waves take on the feel of concrete as a boat jumps over waves and slams down into troughs, placing a strain on vessel and passengers alike. It’s fun for a short blast, but not feasible for cruising. In short, the planing craft sacrifices almost everything for speed. The extreme trade-off makes sense more often than you might assume. On lakes and sheltered waters, planing boats can be supremely elegant and smooth-riding and various larger, offshore planing craft have proven their seaworthiness in racing.

Planing Craft: CMB4R

Design John Thornycroft
Build Volunteers at Boathouse 4
LOD 40ft (12.2m)
Power Single 430hp diesel
historicdockyard.co.uk

It’s hardly the sort of thing you’re going to buy, but it would be remiss not to include one of the most stunning and interesting boats built since our last guide. CMB4R is a replica of the Coastal Motorboat 4, one of a series of fast torpedo boats built in wood for the First World War. What makes CMB4R interesting (other than the fact she exists at all), is the fact she has been engined not just to look original, but to perform as original. This replica antique will hit 34 knots.

Spirit P35EF

Design Sean McMillan
Build Spirit Yachts
LOD 35ft (10.7m)
Power Electric
spirityachts.com

It’s possible that you are looking at the future here and if you are, you read it in CB first. Spirit’s 35ft timber-built foiler, built in association with BAR technologies to a ‘rum runner’ style, foils at speeds of over 30 knots with an unprecedented range of 100 miles at 20 knots. This planing craft recently slashed the electric record for rounding the Isle of Wight (51 miles) to just under two hours. It had been about eight hours.

Fairey Huntsman

Design Alan Burnard
Build Fairey Marine
LOD: 28ft (8.5m)
Power: Twin 200hp Perkins diesels

syharbour.co.uk

Much has been written about the legend of Fairey Marine over the years, not least in this magazine. Their racing success and appearance in the chase scene in From Russia with Love have made them true icons of post-war Britain. These days, Fairey motorboats (particularly the 28ft Huntsman) have exploded back into popularity, and Suffolk Yacht Harbour has become the restoration hub. Owners enjoy the near-40kt top speed and seaworthiness.

Hood 42LM

Design CW Hood Yacht Design
Build Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding
LOD 38ft 8in (11.8m)
Power Twin Volvo Penta D6 (440hp each)
lymanmorse.com, cwhoodyachts.com

It’s just a drawing – so far. But hull number one is now in build in cold-moulded timber at the Lyman Morse yard in Maine. If the previous two have been anything to go by, this will be worth waiting for. The 57 was one of the most stunning looking motor yachts of recent years (like this one but with a bright finished hull), and the 35 was a technical marvel. This will do 39 knots flat out and cruise at 30. Going that fast rarely looks so good.

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The post Planing Craft Buyer’s Guide: The Motorboat Market appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.