This summer’s Brest festival was a little on-the-bus – off-the-bus. Were they going to have a British Village… or no? At first the organisers of the world’s largest maritime gathering, on the North West coast of France, were keen… But then it was all off… Then there were a few maybes and then, in February, it was a defo yes! That felt a little late, given that a lot of people had already planned their summer, but Mike Smylie (the Kipperman) and I were able to get a great band of salty folk together and create a village experience representing the UK called the Celtic Sea and Channel.

But what is the Brest Festival? And why go? Well, it’s huge, with seven kilometres of quays in the protected harbour where up to a million visitors have come to see a spectacle of seaborne living history which is the most impressive on the planet. Since 1992 it’s been the largest event in Europe. And, held every four years apart from 2020, it has been a magnet for sailors as much as the enthused. Every day Tall Ships leave the quays taking the public out for a jolly on the Rade de Brest – the impressive wider harbour of France’s Brittany coast. Every night there are firework and searchlight shows and the whole thing is backed by maritime themes of living history, music and food.

And everywhere there are interesting boats from coracles to three masted sailing ships, replicas of famous vessels, restorations, Viking craft in build, pilot cutters, fishing vessels, workboats, lifeboats, yachts, dinghies, rowing gigs and strange rigs, ancient replicas, tugs and other little steam boats.

These, of course, as we all know dear reader, are manned and maintained by some of the quirkiest and most interesting men and women it might be your pleasure to meet. 

The port of Brest is home of the French naval academy, founded here in 1752. And while the town had to be rebuilt after intense allied bombing during World War II when it was the Nazis’ major anchorage and U-Boat base, it’s still the navy’s major western port. The history of the place goes back to the stone age and the castle here is based on one the Romans built, on the river Penfeld. It’s now a major maritime museum.

Our Celtic Sea village was one of five so called “ports of call”, with regional themes based on the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean and Polar sailing. All were very different in their makeup, so for instance at the Pacific you could be tattoed, either permanently or ephemerally. 

The ports of call were joined around the site with other themed villages – of tourism, safety and rescue at sea, ocean conservation, heritage skills; a space for water fun, like trying paddle boards and small dinghies and a space for children.

 It’s the Tall Ships which really dominate Brest, and the original event did much to promote the re-emergence of Tall Ship sailing as square riggers were being restored or built anew. This year the 190ft (58m) barque Belem was one of 25 Tall Ships – ten of which were square rigged. Only one was British – a sad reflection of the fortunes of our larger sailing vessels, but the 120 year old 75ft (22.7m) Bessie Ellen, run for the last 24 years by Nikki Alford is a superbly kept example of one of our coastal trading ketches. 

Some of the French Tall Ships here were British – Le Francais barque, used to be the Kaskelot famous for many films like Shackleton and Cutthroat Island. The Etoile du Roy used to be Grand Turk.

But the Tall Ship making the news this year was the Shtandart – the replica of Peter the Great’s famous frigate, which was denied entry following a European ruling in June which added replica and heritage vessels to the list of banned boats of Russia. The training vessel, which has been taking young adults of Europe to sea since she was launched in 2000, has been a star of every festival since then and she had a fleet of supporting vessels to bring her into Brest before she was stopped by the navy. 

It seemed petty, if not cruel, to many – Shtandart had changed her registry to the Cook Islands in anticipation of the legislation (fruitlessly, as it turns out). And the irony of it is that she is banned in Russia because of her captain Vladimir Martous’s opposition to the Putin regime. He needs help. At the time of writing she has been drifting at sea, denied entry to ports around the Bay of Biscay.

Another reminder of the reach of Russian aggression was witnessed by members of the British village one night when a Ukrainian captain of one of Tall Ships announced that by this time tomorrow he would be in a trench, drafted back into the army again in the ongoing fight for his homeland.

How proud were we, to be returning to this theatre of maritime living history, sneaking back through that door marked EXIT, and supported by the French with accommodation and travel to represent our corner of the Celtic peoples.

We had the Galway Hookers on one side… and before you jump to conclusions of a sailor’s salacious night in Sligo, this was the Sailing Club for those famously beautiful beamy workboats of the west – a couple of smaller versions of which they had brought down on trailers.

Mike Smylie’s daily cold-smoked kippers are a taste sensation not lost on the French – I rather suspect we were invited back mainly due to the popularity of his fare when we staged the British Village in 2016. So no surprise that his Kipperhouse (in his exhibition called Kipperland) was often obscured by queues.

The International Boatbuilding Training College of Lowestoft is well known for teaching many of our current generation of boatbuilders and restorers. Mike Tupper and his crew of expert carpentry instructors displayed and demonstrated the wide range of skills and techniques needed for wooden boat building and repair. A couple of times a day Mike would nick all the chairs for one of his impromptu but highly popular and usually hilarious lectures. These were delivered in French and English. 

Luckily in the village we had the help of a local girl, Julie Guevel, a sometime Tall Ship sailor, who volunteered on the first day and spent the week with us, translating when our own French was, ah, failing.

Our rows of campaign tents included Andy Peters – the well-known figurehead sculptor, whose constant chiselling kept a consistent crowd cheerful.

Mandy Coates and artist Lisa Carter Grist were making willow baskets, hats and coasters plus a lot of friends and fans. And next to Kipperland Len and Mandy Walters of the River Teifi Coraclers with Lorraine Burchill and Alun Lewis with their river Cleddau salmon boat and compass net showed traditional fishing techniques of Wales which pre-date the middle ages. 

Last but not least Nigel Pert and I have produced a bi-lingual photographic history book of the Brest festivals which we were showing and selling. Nigel, who lives in Normandy, has worked at every festival, often as one of its official photographers. 

A major feature at each Brest event has been the Chantier Guip, which more or less presents itself doing ‘business as usual’ with open boat sheds showing how its various current restorations are coming along. The heritage skills village was based around the site with a range of displays from the amazing historical photos of traditional local maritime life by Jacques de Thézac to Mickael Eymann’s boat drawings on a coaster, made to request. The village was presided over by Chantier du Guip’s Yann Mauffret and Marie Tabarly, fresh from her line honours win in the third leg of the Ocean Globe Race – beating her late father Eric’s record in his 73ft ketch Pen Duick VI. 

Of course it was an even better sight to see Marie sailing the original Pen Duick, her father and grandfather’s Fife cutter built in 1898. 

There was a Nuff (if I can coin a collective noun) of pilot cutters, from the French built but very British Jolie Brise of 1913; the Pill-built Marguerite of 1893 and Letty of 1905, plus two Luke Powell boats – the 2008 Tallulah and Pellew, 2020 – at 68ft (21m) LOA his latest and largest build. Unfortunately, in a manoeuvre apparently known as the “twat lap”, Pellew caught Classic Sailing’s Tallulah’s shrouds and ripped out her topmast. “We’re giving her the one from Agnes,” a rather glum Luke explained the next morning.

After long days in the village the late late nights at Brest become a bit of a challenge; we tended to find a glass of red wine at Kipperland and then a simple supper with new found friends the better option. But some of the night shows were truly spectacular. The drone show on the opening night on July 12 was a dazzling feat of engineering against the night sky as hundreds of lit drones consecutively formed the figures of a swordfish, sperm whale, bathyscape, squid and jellyfish glimmering through different colours and undulating in time to music before the astonished crowd.

There were of course fireworks on Bastille Day, and then the Nocturnal Parade on the last night – Wednesday 17th was also quite awesome as boats glid in and out of the inner harbour to music by Yann Tiersen with search lights criss-crossing the darkness of the fleet, creating theatrical pools of limelight highlighting crew or backlighting sails… All with a nod no doubt to what the sky might have looked like anticipating an air raid in World War II.

Brest ends with a parade of triumph out and down the roads hugging the famous Points of Toulinguet and Pen Hir with its famous rocky outcrops ending in the Taz de Pois (Pile of Peas). The occasion leads many of the fleet south on a day sail to Douarnenez, where another sea festival is just getting underway.

I joined the Bessie Ellen – a long held ambition, and then went into a self-muffled state of ecstasy as Captain Nikki gave me the helm and we drove out to sea in an armada of 1,000 plus boats and ships. Here was the Recouvrance; helm down a bit as she goes past in the tumbling turbulent water, and over there is the Biche, with her tunny-poles out looking like the whiskers on a lobster. But don’t gawk, you need to concentrate especially as here comes someone sailing against the fleet – like it’s just an expanded, tidal, salty version of Boulter’s Lock on a Sunday arvo. Good grief man, you must have a death wish… or maybe it’s just French insouciance. A little wave of greeting then, as he passes aft into the maelstrom of boats – the roar in the roads – for you can hardly hear yourself think against the 360° disharmony of huge gunning diesels.

So many well-known boats, often built and cared for by the coastal towns that sponsor them. It reflects a fairly new concept, known as patrimoine maritime – the caring and curation of the nation’s marine culture and artefacts. They do it so well here, in their Breton fashion. And the festival of Brest has basically led and inspired this new culture.

I hope they do it again; there has been talk they might not, with numbers down to 500,000 (330,000 of whom paid) for this eighth edition. But of course the next time we sail to France it will be under the cap of criminality, as they’ll be finger-printing us on arrival! Well there you go: carry on – this feature was brought to you with no mention of Brexit.

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The post Brest Festival 2024: Keeping the Tradition Alive appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

The yacht designer and builder George Wanhill will be relatively unknown to readers of this magazine. His grandfather, father and uncle had run a thriving company in Poole that designed and built ships and yachts, owned and operated ships, and traded in clay. But when George was a young adult in the late 1860s, huge losses on the ship-owning side drove the company into bankruptcy, and George focused on clay. But in 1889 – when Lloyd’s Register listed 38 yachts built by the family company, from the 18ft (5.5m) cutter Urchin to the 108ft (33m) schooner Shark – Thalia, probably one of just two yachts ever designed and built by George, was launched. George built Thalia for himself but sold her just two years later in 1891. She was then based in Cork and Waterford in Ireland for 21 years under six different owners. She was regularly raced during this period and had her share of success, starting with line honours at Monkstown Regatta within days of arriving in Ireland when, according to The Yachtsman, “a treacherous wind from the northwest with squalls prevailed during the day.” But in another race at Royal Munster YC about a month later, Thalia “came to grief by standing in too far on the bank, and grounded on the mud.”

In 1912 Thalia returned to England and stayed on the east coast for about 50 years, initially with several short-term owners. In 1933 she was bought by Fred Clay, a founder member of Benfleet YC and was raced keenly in the Thames Estuary until the war, winning “a lot of cups” according to Fred’s grandson Peter. Four of those, all from 1936, are now on display in Benfleet YC, while Thalia’s current owner has another, the BYC Commodore’s Cup from 1938.

Thalia spent the war deteriorating in a mud berth opposite Benfleet railway station. Although the Clay family kept her until 1963, they never sailed her after the war. “The upkeep was a struggle and she never went anywhere,” said Peter, “but we spent summer holidays and weekends on her.” Thalia was built engineless, but Peter remembers her “having an old Ford Prefect car engine,” but he never saw it running.

In 1963 Thalia was sold to AR Hale on England’s south coast then, in 1970, to Belsize Boatyard in Southampton, infamous for breaking up unwanted vessels, but Thalia was saved when she was bought by Mrs MT Tann in 1971. Her next owner, HKB Roberts, cruised Thalia in the Med and eastern Atlantic, before selling her in 1978 to Edward Willard, who brought her back to the UK. A big restoration began at Coombes Boatyard in the mid-80s but when the owners ran out of money she was abandoned without a deck.

The First Restoration

By 1993, with mounting unpaid bills, Thalia was on the verge of demolition. In the nick of time, Ivan and Fe Jefferis came to the rescue. Ivan was a boatbuilder who had served his time at Bowman Yachts and was without doubt the right man at the right time.
Over the next few years, Ivan rebuilt Thalia, replacing the stem, counter, about 80 per cent of the planking, many of the frames, and the deck. A striking aspect of Thalia’s original build that became apparent at an early stage, said Ivan, was that “great efforts had been made to build her light and strong.” While the frames were tapered towards their tops (a not uncommon practice), the planks too were tapered: the garboards, 2in-thick amidships, taper down to 1in at the stem and counter, and the higher planks are also thinner. “I’ve never seen or heard of it, on any other boat,” said Ivan, who took the trouble to replicate original scantlings throughout.

While he refitted all the original internal panels removed from the boat, he moved the galley from its original position forward of the mast (where the paid hand would have resided) to the “more practical” site by the companionway. Fe, an upholsterer, made the great contribution of all new cushions and mattresses. Ivan replaced the tiller – thought to be about 10ft (3.1m) long – with wheel steering, but later reinstated a tiller.

During this work, Ivan found evidence in the forward hull structure that Thalia may have originally had a clipper bow, and around the same time Fe found a photo that might back this up. One theory is that an early owner had a collision that necessitated rebuilding the bow, and she was given a straight stem, as clipper bows had fallen out of fashion.

After about four years’ work, Thalia was relaunched, although it was to be a while longer before she was finished. But in 2001 she was ready to sail in the spectacular America’s Cup Jubilee Regatta in the Solent – entirely apt, given that three yachts designed and built by Wanhill had competed in the 1851 £100 Cup race around the Isle of Wight from which the America’s Cup evolved. After a few years sailing along the English south coast, Ivan and Fe took Thalia to the Caribbean, taking part in the ARC along the way. They then spent a few more years sailing the Caribbean between the British Virgin Islands and Grenada. They took part in a couple of Antigua Classics regattas, at the first of which Thalia won the overall concourse d’Elegance prize. “That was quite a surprise,” said Ivan. “She wasn’t immaculate but she was as she should be, very authentic.” In 2010, they settled in Carriacou and put Thalia on the market. “We’d sailed Thalia a long way and we fancied doing something else,” said Ivan.

A New Lease of Life

At that time David Aisher – part of the Aisher family who have owned numerous boats named Yeoman over the years – was rear commodore yachting of the Royal Yacht Squadron and had a Rogers 46 and a J/109 that he raced keenly. But he was eager for something better suited to family cruising. One of his regular race crew started sending him details of boats for sale, one of which was Thalia. David told me that he had “always fancied old boats” and it’s hard to imagine he could have found one any older. After discovering she was in Carriacou, he arranged for a local surveyor to inspect her. “I just asked him if it was worth me going to look at her,” he said. “I wanted to know if the hull was good – anything else could be dealt with but I didn’t want to rebuild the hull.” The surveyor responded positively, so David went to Carriacou. After Ivan took him for a sail, David was sold, but then marooned in Carriacou for a fortnight after the Icelandic volcano eruption disrupted air travel. “I spent a lot of time drinking rum with the locals,” he said. “After a fortnight we all knew each other very well!”

David shipped Thalia across the Atlantic to the Elephant Boatyard on the Hamble River. All of the internal ballast was removed and the equivalent weight – just over a tonne – was added to the forward and aft ends of the external ballast keel. All plumbing was renewed, with new stainless-steel water and fuel tanks, calorifier and all seacocks. The wiring was replaced and the electrical systems upgraded. The Yanmar 30hp installed by Ivan was removed, serviced and refitted, and now drives an offset Kiwi feathering propeller. The rig was renewed with new Douglas fir spars by Bob Snow’s Maritime Enterprises in Yarmouth, rigging by Martin’s Rigging and sails by Ratsey & Lapthorn. More recently, the Elephant recaulked the deck, replaced some planks, and refastened all underwater planking with bronze screws.

During his ownership, David has frequently cruised and raced Thalia with family and friends, “but never enough”. From her berth at the Elephant Boatyard he has taken her on “lots of weekend trips in the Solent”, to the West Country, Isles of Scilly, Channel Islands and northern France including the Brest Festival (“it was amazing but I wouldn’t do it twice”). He has relished the chances Thalia has given him for “meeting interesting people” and he has enjoyed occasional races against other classic boats.

Racing Thalia

In June 2024, Thalia was the only 19th- century boat taking part in the second Richard Mille Cup (September issue). I was delighted to join the crew for the second inshore race in Falmouth. She had finished last in class the day before but spirits were nonetheless high among her crew, made up of David’s friends and relatives, including his cousin Caroline, whose husband Julian helmed. “I rarely drive when racing,” said David. “I know what all the bits of string do, so I can run around and keep my eye on things while someone else points the boat in the right direction.”

Whenever I race on a boat I’m writing about, I may be asked to keep out of the way or I may be given an active role. On Thalia I was pleased to be asked to help with the mainsheet and running backstays, making it a really enjoyable race. We were only able to improve on the previous result by one place, beating the 1904 pilot cutter Alpha, but again, the crew kept their good spirits.

Thalia had moments of glory later on in the regatta. She won the Falmouth to Dartmouth passage race by over 11 minutes on corrected; she may well have won the next passage race, from Dartmouth to Cowes, “if we hadn’t missed the outer distance mark at the finish,” said David. She also won the last inshore race in Cowes, a poignant victory as George Wanhill’s great, great grandson Michael Parker was crewing that day. For the bigger boats in the Black Group, the regatta continued with a race to Le Havre, but with bad weather coming, Thalia and the other smaller boats bowed out, meaning Thalia ended on a win.

Another cherished prize in 2021 was winning Centenarian of the Year in the CB Awards. In this, and other aspects of Thalia’s life, David thanks Ivan’s vital role. “He saved her,” he said. “I’ve just polished her and kept her going.”

Thalia 

design/build George Swanhill, 1889

LOD 45ft 8in (13.7m)

lwl 39ft (11.9m)

draught 6ft (1.8m)

disp 14.75 tonnes

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The post Unique Victorian Yacht Racing Again: Thalia’s Revival appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

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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Built in 2010, Atlantic is a replica of the 1903 yacht of the same name. The original Atlantic was designed by William Gardner and built by Townsend & Downey shipyard, New York for New York Yacht Club member Wilson Marshall. Although she was fitted out luxuriously, it was also obvious from the start that she was fast. In 1905 she took part in the transatlantic race from Sandy Hook to the Lizard. Her captain was the legendary Scot Charlie Barr who had already successfully defended the America’s Cup three times at the helm of American yachts. He was well-known for racing hard and, sure enough, he and Atlantic won the race – and with it the Kaiser’s Cup – in a time of 12 days, 4 hours, 1 minute and 19 seconds. Astonishingly this race record wasn’t beaten until 1998 although it is important to distinguish it from a passage record whereby yachts can set off whenever the weather looks favourable rather than on a predetermined date.  Amongst her subsequent owners was Gerard Lambert who bought her to the UK in 1935 to act as mother ship for his J Class Yankee. Atlantic served in both World Wars: having been requisitioned in 1917 she joined a patrol force on the east coast of the USA before becoming a tender to a squadron of submarine chasers; and then in 1941 she was acquired by the US Coast Guard and used for cadet training. She never sailed again after that but was used at various times as a houseboat, a restaurant, a museum and a floating dock. Suffering from neglect she sank twice before being refloated, and was eventually broken up in Newport News Boat Harbor, Virginia in 1982.

A Serial Replica Builder

Dutchman Ed Kastelein is no stranger to classic boat ownership. Not only had he owned the 1936 Mylne-designed gaff ketch Thendara and the 1939 Camper & Nicholsons’ Bermudan ketch Aile Blanche, he had also commissioned three new schooners: Borkumriff IV, Zaca a te Moana and Eleonora. The latter two were replicas – of the 1930 Zaca and the 1910 Herreshoff Westward respectively – so it was perhaps no great surprise that he would take on an even more ambitious challenge: to build a replica of Atlantic. Using exactly the same hull lines, deck styling and sail plan, the new boat’s design was bought up to date by naval architect Doug Peterson, and she was built at the Van der Graaf BV shipyard and completed in June 2010.  

Having taken part in the inaugural Richard Mille Cup in 2023, Atlantic was back again this year. The format and venues were the same again: inshore races in Falmouth, the Solent and Le Havre; and three passage races. This time Atlantic and the only other boat in her class, Elena (another replica, of a 1911 Herreshoff yacht of the same name) would only take part in the passage races but would otherwise take guests out sailing and provide a magnificent spectacle while the smaller yachts were competing in the inshore races. 

The passage race from Falmouth to Dartmouth took place on 6 June, the 80th anniversary of the D-Day Landings which marked the beginning of the liberation of Europe in the Second World War. A couple of days earlier, Atlantic had motored up the River Fal and passed two sites where tens of thousands of American soldiers had boarded vessels bound for the Normandy beaches: Tolverne (where General Eisenhower had stayed during the preparations) and Turnaware Point. In the Carrick Roads early on the morning of the race, Atlantic and the other competing yachts motored slowly in a circle around a Targa motor boat from which the race officer Charles Hall-Thompson laid a wreath in the sea. All the crews had been asked to observe a minute’s silence, but on Atlantic there wasn’t a sound for at least three minutes. The emotion was tangible. 

Silence for D-Day – Then Action

But soon afterwards Atlantic’s Dutch captain Fosse Fortuin and his crew – twelve of whom are permanent with four extras for this regatta – set to work to get ready to race. Atlantic can set twelve sails at a time – a gaff sail and topsail on each of the masts, four headsails, and two fishermen each of which is set between a pair of masts, a total of 1,850 square metres – and it had already been decided that all of them would be hoisted for this race. 

Soon afterwards, the race was started from a committee boat just south of St Anthony’s Lighthouse. The smaller boats started first – the gaff cutters Thalia, Ayesha, Cynthia and Alpha, and the gaff yawl Patna – and they were followed half an hour later by the bigger gaff cutters Moonbeam IV, Moonbeam and Mariquita, and the Bermudan staysail schooner Viveka. Then it was our turn. 

With the sun shining, the wind was off the land and initially forward of the beam, and was varying in strength from about 6 to 12 knots. We had a short burst of 13.3 knots boat speed soon after the start and while we could see Elena – which had a better start than us – pulling away, we reckoned that with the time she had to allow us we were probably about even. Somewhere south of Fowey we began to overtake the small cutters and had passed all of them by the time we reached the Eddystone Lighthouse. But by then the wind had backed significantly and while all the other boats were setting downwind sails, we didn’t have any – in fact we dropped two of the headsails as they were hanging uselessly in the shadow of the others – and we were soon suffering. We never really pulled any further away from the small class and we could see all the other big boats stretching their lead over us. 

Taking the Wheel of a Giant

I was delighted when Fosse let me have a spell on the wheel. It seemed a little daunting at first with the enormity of Atlantic’s deck stretching away in front of me, but with her long keel giving her great directional stability and with the gentle land breeze not kicking up anything of a sea, it didn’t seem particularly difficult to steer her. 

The wind had backed enough to necessitate a couple of gybes to ensure we cleared the south Devon headland, and about half way between the Eddystone Lighthouse and Bolt Head we did so for the first time. When gybing or tacking, the mizzen topsail can remain hoisted (it merely presses against the peak halyard spans on one tack or billows away from them on the other) but the triatic stays between the masts require the two other topsails to be dropped and then rehoisted with different halyards on the new leeward side. That used to also be the case with the fishermen but Fosse has recently developed a system whereby each of them has two peak halyards, one each side of the triatic stays, so that the peak can just be transferred from one to the other, just as the clew is with the sheets (although this does mean, just as with the mizzen topsail, the fishermen are pressed against the peak halyard spans on one gybe). 

All Sails Up and 14.5 Knots

About four miles south of Salcombe we gybed again and headed for Start Point. But then we saw, to seaward of us, a vessel which didn’t look quite right. It was too far away to make out exactly what the situation was but when Fosse looked through the binoculars he could see that it was Kelpie and that she had been dismasted. He made contact on the VHF to establish that the crew were safe and that she wasn’t making water, and then we turned round as quickly as we could and headed towards them. While Fosse and his crew were preparing to launch Atlantic’s RIB to go to their aid, we soon saw that one of the regatta’s official RIBs was doing so, but it was clear that Kelpie’s crew were grateful for the moral support that our contact and presence had given them.

We then headed back on course towards Dartmouth and as we came closer to the wind we had all twelve sails up again and we briefly touched 14.5 knots. As he did several times during the race, Fosse briefly left the wheel to go forward to help resolve some issue, confident that Atlantic would steer herself for a brief period. But I took the opportunity to greedily take the wheel again. It was just glorious sailing and seemingly effortless, although that shouldn’t take anything away from the crew who had made great efforts in setting this vast spread of canvas. 

Our diversion towards Kelpie had allowed Ayesha and Cynthia to catch us up and they were then able to go across the shallows just past Start Point while our greater draft determined that we should go wider. So while they were able to fetch to the finish just south of the entrance to river Dart, we had to put in two short tacks. Elena had finished just over two hours before us, and even though we were given an hour’s redress for going back to Kelpie, this wasn’t enough to beat her on corrected time. But that didn’t seem to matter particularly to me or to anyone else on board – it had simply been a wonderful sail in a magnificent yacht, the memory of which will stay with me for some time to come. 

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The post How to Race a Three-Masted Schooner: Sailing Atlantic Replica 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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Over the past few months, the AC75s of the 37th America’s Cup, and the AC40s of the inaugural Women’s and Youth America’s Cups, have been showing off their wings, foiling along the coastline of Barcelona, Spain. These complex machine-like boats, committed to speed and precision, are the culmination of a long and prestigious history in the world of racing – a history largely characterised by J-Class yachts. It was therefore fitting that the AC75s of this America’s Cup be joined on the water by three of the J-Class fleet – Velsheda, Svea, and Rainbow – as they competed in the 2024 J-Class World Championships. The timeless Velsheda, Svea and Rainbow are equipped with cutting edge technology, and the latest advancements in sails and components, yet serve as the perfect reminder of America’s Cup, and yacht racing history.

From the 7th-11th October, the days before the Italians beat the British team in the Women’s America’s Cup Final, and INEOS Britannia had similar misfortune against the Kiwis in the Men’s, the J-Class yachts took the water, with two windward-leeward races each day.

From Velsheda, lovingly maintained since her launch in 1933, to Svea and Rainbow, recent builds from original J designs, the three-strong fleet reflected the full design history of the class as they competed for the title. After some brilliant and demanding racing, not least on ‘Big Wednesday’, where Barcelona saw winds peaking at nearly 30 knots with big waves, Svea took the overall win, a clear victory – having already won the title with a race to spare! 

Final standings after seven races:

1 Svea J/S1: 1,2,1,2,2,1,1 10pts 

2 Velsheda K7: 2,1,2,1,3,3,3 15pts 

3 Rainbow J-KZ: 13,4(DNC), 3,3,1,2,2, 18pts  

Steve Hayles, Svea’s navigator, commented: “This has been a three-year project that our two owners put together a while ago, and this is the culmination of that. It has been a nerve-wracking week with all sorts of conditions and so great to come out ahead of great competition. But these are such amazing boats. I think everyone who has been involved has been blown away and everyone who has been watching has been saying lovely things about the boats.’

The Swedish flagged Svea, based on an original design by Swede Tore Holm, was not the only boat representing this Scandinavian country in Barcelona. Indeed we saw the Swedish Challenge Women’s Team powered by Artemis Technologies fighting it out in the semi-final where, out of 12 teams, they achieved 4th overall.

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The discovery of Ernest Shackleton’s ship the Endurance in 2022 revealed once again the irrepressible and determined story of one of the most charismatic leaders who in a moment of tragedy, when all seemed lost, showed how strong resolve, optimism and humanity can reign supreme in overcoming even the darkest times.

The ship was lost 109 years ago and was discovered below the surface in the Weddell Sea, at a depth of 3,000 metres, four miles south of the position originally recorded by its Captain Frank Worsley. The 144 foot ship was crushed by sea ice and sank 21 November 1915, but was found wonderfully preserved sitting in an upright position on the seabed.

Endurance22 mission’s leader, the veteran polar geographer Dr John Shears said “The discovery of the wreck is an incredible achievement,” and then added “We have successfully completed the world’s most difficult shipwreck search, battling constantly shifting sea-ice, blizzards, and temperatures down to -18C. We have achieved what many people would say was impossible.”

One could argue that all four Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions ended in a series of failures but this diminishes the man himself and says little of his immeasurable courage, determination and incomparable endurance he displayed throughout his life.

Ernest Shackleton was born in County Kildare in Ireland to an English father and an Irish mother. When he was 10 years old, the family moved back to London and was schooled at Dulwich College in south-east London. Although his father hoped his son would become a doctor, Ernest had other ideas and joined the merchant navy aged 16 in 1890 to satisfy his passion for the sea and adventure.

On the first expedition in 1901 to 1904, Captain Scott chose him as third officer for an attempt on the South Pole but Shackleton was sent home on grounds of ill health. He failed to finish the expedition much to Scott’s annoyance who made some harsh remarks about his performance. According to Scott’s unedited diary found on his body months after he perished in Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf, Shackleton wasn’t alone in being singled out, many others around Scott’s also incurred his fickle displeasure.

Five years later Shackleton led his own expedition to the South Pole but turned his party back when he was only 97 geographical miles from the South Pole, knowing that while they had sufficient food supplies to reach the pole, they did not have enough to make it back. He and his three companions set new record 88°23’S in being the most advance to the pole in exploration history at that time. They had come the closest to the South Pole in 1907, but as Shackleton later wrote; “I chose life over death for myself and my friends. For these achievements, Shackleton was knighted by King Edward VII on his return home. Roald Amundsen reached the pole in December 1911 five weeks before Scott in January 1912.

Now Shackleton looked around for a new challenge and resolved to make the first crossing of the Antarctic via the pole.The plan was to cross the vast Antarctic ice sheet to the south pole, and then keep going to the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent.

The Trans-Antarctica Expedition as it was called is perhaps one of the greatest story of exploration, peril, leadership and survival ever told. Shackleton famously lost his ship but saved his crew of 26 men. When recruiting for this expedition, Shackleton received over 5000 applicants. Among his many requirements (mostly to do with personal abilities and skills) was the ability of the candidate bizarrely to hold a tune in his head. Shackleton also recruited 69 dogs for the expedition. Macklin was one of two surgeons on Endurance and helped train the dogs. Macklin also kept a detailed record of what happened after the ship became trapped in the ice.

The Endurance set sail from South Georgia in December 1914, heading for Vahsel Bay on the eastern side of the Weddell Sea but soon encountered polar pack ice. By early January the ship had become stuck off the Caird coast and drifted for 10 months before being crushed in the pack ice. Macklin wrote in his dairy:

“Shackleton, at this time, showed one of his sparks of real greatness. He did not rage at all, or show outwardly the slightest sign of disappointment.”

“He told us, simply and calmly, that we must winter in the Pack; explained its dangers and possibilities; never lost his optimism and prepared for winter.”

The crew had to decamp on the ice after they had removed the ship’s stores and provisions and more importantly three open life boats before Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915.

The party continued to camp on the ice floes for a further five months. Even in moments of despair, Shackleton maintained spirits and nurtured a strong team ethic. He encouraged singing, seal-scouting trips, exploratory hikes and lantern slide lectures and games and for his men to look out for one another. He inspired loyalty and over came any dissent with a calm demeanour while he maintained a quiet discipline throughout the crew. Most importantly he instilled in them the belief they would survive despite being stranded on the ice for months. On Mayday, the sun disappeared entirely and was not seen again for the next four months

The following April the crew finally took to the lifeboats, rowing to the desolate and uninhabited Elephant Island. The men were exhausted, some afflicted by seasickness and others with dysentery.

After nine days of convalescence Shackleton, Worsley and four others, set forth again, sailing in one of the open life boats across 800 miles of rough seas and freezing winds to South Georgia. It took sixteen horrendous days in an open boat where they combatted huge turbulent waves and grey threatening skies.

Despite this extraordinary effort to reach South Georgia, their journey wasn’t over and Shackleton and two other of the men then crossed peaks and glaciers to reach the whaling station on the other side of the island. In recounting this experience Shackleton said:

“When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snowfields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing-place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, ‘Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’ Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech’ in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.”

In August the remaining crewmen were rescued from Elephant Island with no loss of life.

In 1922, Shackleton launched a new expedition to the Antarctic, called the Shackleton-Rowett Antarctic Expedition. The goal was to circumnavigate the continent,  but while his ship was docked at the harbour in South Georgia he died of a heart attack, 5 January aged 47 and is buried at Grytviken on the island.

One hundred years later on the anniversary of Shackleton’s death, the SA Agulhas II – a South African ice-breaking ship departed from Cape Town on 5 February, with a crew of 46 and a team of scientists, engineers, surveyors and a media unit including Dan Snow who was on board to document the Endurance II Expedition set off to find Shackleton’s Endurance. A previous attempt to find Endurance three years ago had failed. The project to find the lost ship was mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust (FMHT) and was financed to the sum of £8 million by an anonymous donor. Donald Lamont, Chairman of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, said

“Our objectives for Endurance 22 were to locate, survey and film the wreck but also to conduct important scientific research and to run an exceptional outreach programme.”

Scientific research centred on climate change and related studies, with research into ice drifts, weather conditions of the Weddell Sea and sea ice thickness. Even the mapping sea ice from space was undertaken. Meanwhile the FMHT partnered with Reach the World, the US based educational organisation, and the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) successfully connected with tens of thousand of children throughout the expedition via live streams and materials produced for classroom use through their Educational outreach programme.

The search team used advanced underwater technology to locate the wreckage. A specially built hybrid Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUVs) called Sabertooths were fitted with High-Definition cameras and side -scan imaging capability. Which can search and map huge patches of the ocean floor up to 4,000m.

Endurance was discovered by the Sabertooth-hybrid underwater search vehicles after an extensive two week search at a depth of 3,008 m. Dr John Sears mission leader described the discovery of the wreck as an “incredible achievement.” “We have successfully completed the world’s most difficult shipwreck search, battling constantly sea-ice, blizzards, and temperatures dropping down to -18. We have achieved what many said was impossible.”

The ship looks much as it did when it was photographed for the last time by Shackleton’s film-maker Frank Hurley in 1915. For the onlooker there’s damage to the bow, the rigging is tangled but the hull remains largely intact.

“We are overwhelmed by our good fortune in having located and captured images of Endurance. This is the finest wooden shipwreck I have ever seen. It is upright, well proud of the seabed, intact , and in a brilliant state of preservation. You can even see the ship’s name ENDURANCE arched across its stern directly below the taffrail. And beneath, as bold as brass, is Polaris the five pointed star, after which the ship was originally named,” says Mensun Bounds, marine archaeologist and Director of Exploration.

The timbers are extremely well preserved as the Antarctic seabed does not have any wood-eating  micro-organism and the clarity of the water is quite remarkable. The ship is, according to Dr Michelle Taylor from Essex University like a ghost ship and, “Sprinkled with an impressive diversity of deep-sea marine life-stalked sea squirts, anemones, sponges of various forms, brittlestars, crinoids (related to urchins and sea stars) all filter feeding nutrition from the cool deep waters of the Weddell Sea.”

Apart from these creatures no one is allowed to touch, or attempt to lift the Endurance or any of its artefacts from the Seabed. The search will remain non intrusive and no samples will be taken from the ship or surrounding seabed. Here it will lie as a designated monument under the international Antarctic Treaty, just as it sank to the sea bed over 100 years ago with its last movement literally freeze- framed in time.

Dr John Shears in summing up the success of the current expedition, said: “The Endurance22 has reached its goal. We have made polar history with the discovery of Endurance, and successfully completed the world’s most challenging shipwreck search. In addition, we have undertaken important research in a part of the world that directly affect the global climate and environment. We have also conducted an unprecedented educational outreach programme, with live broadcasting from on board, allowing new generations from around the world to engage with Endurance22 and become inspired by the amazing stories of polar exploration, and what human beings can achieve and the obstacles they can overcome when they work together.”

Since discovering the Endurance in 2022, the protection perimeter drawn around the wreck has been widened from a radius of 500m to 1,500m. Part of a newly published conservation management plan, this new preservation measure will protect the great shipwreck and her story.

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The post Finding the Endurance: History & Discovery of Shackleton’s Ship 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.

Show Me More:

• How D-Day Actually Worked: Operation Details 80 Years Later
• ‘True’ Vs Technology: Adrian Morgan on Sailing Gadgets
• Dave Selby’s Confession: Secret Blackwater Sloop

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.

Show Me More:

• How D-Day Actually Worked: Operation Details 80 Years Later
• ‘True’ Vs Technology: Adrian Morgan on Sailing Gadgets
• Dave Selby’s Confession: Secret Blackwater Sloop

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

The Day Every Soldier was in the Navy 

In the end I didn’t need the alarm; the gathering roar of engines coming in with the cool pre-dawn air through the open window cut me out of my dreams with an almost military sense of purpose. I rose, and plucking my camera off the elegant French dressing table, was in a few steps head and shoulders out of the fourth floor seafront window. Below me the hard sand beach, still damp from the receding tide, was swarming with D-Day re-enactors, in army green Jeeps, trucks, armoured cars, half-tracks, amphibious vehicles, motorbikes – some with side-cars, a few canvas-covered lorries… and hundreds of men and women, almost all dressed in American cotton GI uniforms or British serge battle dress. Without too much direction, it seemed, they were obeying a latent DNA-sense of being driven to behave like men in formation. 

Most of the vehicles were already parked up in lines, others driving across this 500-metre stretch of beach to join one of the various groups in front of the high 19th-century seafront houses of the enduringly popular sea spa town of Arromanches Les Bains.

It’s 6 June, 2024, and I’m here for D-Day 80 – probably the last round-figure anniversary that will see any of the original D-Day veterans return to the beaches and areas of Normandy where they first began the bloody task of liberating Europe from years of Nazi occupation and oppression. 

These re-enactment enthusiasts are playing a larger part in recreating a sense of living history at events like these. On the previous day the roads of Normandy seemed full of them – the quarter-ton 4X4 Willis jeeps being the most popular. You’d see six of them, or so, coming round a bend in a convincing little convoy of characters, khaki blousoned and helmeted, recreating, in part, those 1944 scenes.

Arromanches is very much the British centre now for remembering D-Day. The pretty town was chosen as the site of the famous Mulberry floating harbour, made up of caissons which were fitted together and anchored in place by the Royal Engineers, under overall direction by Lord Mountbatten. Much of the harbour is still here, forming a broken offshore breakwater. The town’s seafront museum is dedicated in large part to D-Day. 

Before the Mulberry harbours (the Americans had one at Omaha that was destroyed by a storm on 19 June 1944) could be assembled, the town itself had to be taken, and this was done by 7pm on D-Day by the Royal Hampshire Regiment who’d landed a mile and a half to the east at Asnelles. Arromanches had been known for centuries for its sheltered anchorage, though only when the wind was in the south, and work began in the early hours of 7 June to establish the floating harbour which consisted of an offshore floating breakwater protecting three quarters of a mile of floating caissons on which vehicles could drive ashore. It was operational by June 14.

The Hampshires, and 133,000 British, American, Commonwealth, Free French, Czech and Polish troops like them landed on a 43 mile (70km) stretch of coast between Quinnéville, just south of St Vaast in the West to Ouistreham in the East shortly after a naval bombardment of the German positions at 6.30am on June 6. During the previous four years the Germans had heavily fortified the coast, as part of their ‘Atlantic Wall’, protecting ‘Fortress Europe’. 

Five beaches were attacked with the Americans taking Utah and Omaha in the west and British taking Gold and Sword in the east with the Canadians landing on Juno in between them. A sixth beach, Band, to the east of Sword and the river Orne was abandoned at the last minute when the Germans flooded the area.

The codename for D-Day is Operation Overlord, commanded overall by American General Dwight Eisenhower with the British General Bernard Montgomery his deputy as the land force commander. By the time it was staged, the allies had nearly 3,000,000 men stationed in Great Britain. 

The Royal Navy, under Admiral Bertram Ramsay, had overall responsibility for the seaborne plan: Operation Neptune, of which nothing of its like had been seen before. Some 7,000 ships and boats were used on D-Day. Of these 1,213 were warships (958 of them British and Canadian) to protect the landing craft. Well over 150,000 men and women across the services were involved.

It was an armada that crossed the 100-mile stretch of Channel between the south coast of England and the north coast of France at 5-12 knots. Most of the shipping was British. The US Navy, heavily engaged in the Pacific, sent three battleships to D-Day: USS Nevada, Texas and Arkansas with three heavy cruisers, 40 destroyers and escorts and five troop transports. 

The British battleships HMS Nelson, Warspite, Ramilles and Rodney were joined by three heavy and 17 light cruisers, two monitors, 65 destroyers, 11 frigates, 17 corvettes, four sloops, 88 fleet minesweepers, 30 anti­submarine/escort trawlers and three headquarters ships. Polish, Free French and other allied navy ships were also involved. 

D-Day: And… action

The large ships dwarfed the thousands of small craft required to reach the beach on D-Day. These included 4,126 landing ships and craft – 3,261 of which were British, 736 auxiliary ships and craft, and 864 merchant ships of various design. 

The operation began overnight on 5 June, with some 350 minesweepers and other craft creating safe lanes of progress into the heavily mined Bay of Seine. 

Ten channels, a faster and slower for each beach, were cleared by the minesweeper fleet, with each flotilla working in a diagonal line where the sweep gear of each vessel slightly overlapped the path of the next astern. The larger minesweepers, up to the 245ft 9in (74.9 m) LOA Halcyon class, were preceded by smaller, 112ft (33m) Fairmile MLs fitted with light sweeps to clear a path for the deeper-draught minesweepers. Ahead of the Fairmiles were the 72ft (21.9m) Harbour Defence Motor Launches (HDMLs) acting as pathfinders right up to the beach approach, before the whole flotilla turned and cleared a wider way to seaward. Alongside the sweepers Dan-laying trawlers laid flag-and-light dan buoys to mark the cross-channel passage through which invasion ships would pass. These were replaced with better marks by Trinity House vessels later in the day. 

Motor gunboats and torpedo boats patrolled the perimeter of operations, known as the Mason Line, with the 12 boats of Squadron 34 also escorting the minesweepers on the night before D-Day. With the slower ships starting earlier and the main fleet now well on their way, shortly after midnight 24,000 airborne troops, from 2,395 aircraft and 867 gliders of the RAF and USAAF, landed by parachute and glider behind the beach areas. The American 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions landed in the Cotentin peninsula inland of the Utah and Omaha beaches while British and Canadians of the 6th Airborne Division were dropped in the east to protect the eastern flank of the landings and to capture two bridges over the Caen Canal and River Orne between Bénouville and Ranville in an operation codenamed Tonga.

The first successes of D-Day were the two strategic bridges, acquired with peerless panache by Major John Howard with five platoons of the 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and a party of Royal Engineer sappers who, landing by glider at 00.20hrs, overpowered the Germans in 15 minutes. Despite enemy counter attacks they were able to hold the bridges until they were relieved by the main forces. The Caen Canal bridge was famously renamed Pegasus after the Airborne’s sleeve emblem.

While these landings alerted the Germans, they remained unaware of the armada – partly due to allied deception tactics elsewhere. These included an army assembling, with inflatable rubber tanks, apparently for a landing across the Dover Strait, which had diverted German forces away from the Bay of Seine. To further confuse the Germans that night a mock ‘invasion fleet’ had headed for the coast between Boulogne and Dieppe. About 12 Harbour Defence Motor Launches, equipped with radar devices, and eight Lancaster RAF bombers flying in calculated circles dropping aluminium ‘window’ foil, showed on enemy radar as a vast fleet approaching that part of the French coast, and this was backed up with air attacks on Dunkirk and Dieppe. Furthermore the RAF dropped 500 dummy ‘parachutists’ away from the real drop zones which distracted and perplexed the already-confused Germans. The French resistance got busy as well, cutting power and telephone lines.

D-Day planning required landing at low-water springs – usually around 0630hrs in that area – to avoid craft being stuck in the various German shore defences, including steel tetrahedral spikes, mines and barbed wire, which were covered at HW. Bad weather nearly delayed the operation another two weeks (probably four, since a full moon was preferable). But one of Eisenhower’s chief meteorologists Group Captain James Stagg, of the RAF, noticed a rise in the barometric pressure reported by a single ship stationed 600 miles west of Ireland. Tracking its likely eastwards progress over the Channel, it was decided to postpone by one day and leave on the night of the 6th – which was the full moon. This small weather window likely saved thousands of lives and luckily the Germans knew nothing about it.

D-Day forces from Dartmouth, Weymouth, Southampton, Portsmouth and Shoreham, plus other ports made up five fleets which headed into a spout area before turning south with follow-up forces coming from as far away as Falmouth and Felixstowe.

While some of the landing craft crossed the Channel under their own steam, most of the smaller ones were carried across on larger ships. All night the armada voyaged south with its soldiers forced to be sailors for a day (or more). It arrived on time, and mostly in the right place for H-Hour: 06.30 in the east for the Americans and around 07:30 for the British and Canadians reflecting and depending on the later low-water times. 

Careful planning required all craft to be in close formation. Closest inshore were the Landing Craft Rocket (LCR) which fired 1,080 5in (127mm) explosive rockets in 30-second salvoes, along with SP (Self-Propelled) Artillery target craft. A little further seaward were grouped Landing Craft Support (LCS) and Landing Craft Gun (LCG) firing on German gun positions just behind the wall defences. Ranged across the width of the mission’s beachhead, between the LCG groups, was a line of many Duplex Drive (DD) amphibious Sherman tanks, the vanguard of mechanised assault. Further seaward on each wing were two groups of Hunt class destroyers. Between them was a line of larger Landing Craft Tank (LCT) carrying battle tanks, mine-clearing tanks, bulldozers, crane and bridging tanks, engineers and other specialised assault troops. Behind these were massed Landing Craft Assault (LCA) and LCVP (combined vehicle and personnel) carrying commandos and infantry with 32-40 troops in each 41ft (12.5m) craft. Most of these men had got into their craft from larger vessels, climbing down rope nets in the choppy force four conditions. The process had required three or four hours to complete.

Behind the assault craft, on each wing, were groups of Fleet destroyers and cruisers to bombard the beach and positions further inland. Abreast of these were the Landing Craft Flack (LCF) to provide powerful anti-aircraft fire in addition to the warships. Seaward of these were more groups of Landing Craft Rocket (LCR) and beyond them, on each wing, groups of Control Fairmile Motor Launches (MLs) with radar towers and communication equipment to direct the various assault small craft. Seaward again were more SP (Self Propelled) Artillery craft and, up to seven miles from the beach, the large Landing Ships Infantry (LSI) carrying up to 800 assault troops and numbers of Landing Craft Assault in gravity davits on each side.

The battleships and destroyers were from 15 to 18 miles out, in deeper waters, from where they were still capable of shelling up to 20 miles inland. Beyond them, arriving in ever greater numbers were more landing ships and craft and merchant ships carrying fuel, ammunition, and supplies plus troops. This was the scene that confronted the Germans defending each of the five chosen beaches. 

Above the assault and behind the coast allied fighters and bombers created a blanket of air cover, which together with anti-aircraft weapons kept the Luftwaffe at bay. There were 11,590 Allied aircraft available to support the landings. They flew 14,674 sorties on the day and 127 were lost. Most importantly they were bombing strategic targets inland which hampered German counter attacks.

Despite the air and sea planning and the huge numbers, the Germans mounted a stiff resistance and the assault troops ran ashore into gunfire with many thousands of casualties before the beachhead could be established. Among the many casualties who drowned before they could reach the beach were the crews of the DD “swimming” Sherman tanks, whose buoyancy depended on a large “skirt” of canvas held in a frame over which the commander could just see. Many were launched about three miles out to sea and in the F4 chop at least 42 swamped and sank. They are still there, protected as war graves.

Once troops established their beachhead, under the direction of Royal Navy beach commanders, they were often met by French resistance fighters who immediately guided them inland to German positions. In many cases this was vital information that the allies could not have discovered by aerial photography alone. 

It was not until the middle of July (having liberated it on June 27) that the allies could start using Cherbourg, the harbour city to the north end of the beachheads, and at the south of the beachheads Caen was only liberated on July 19 after horrendous bombing and civilian deaths.

Hitler ordered his army to fight to the death and the cost was huge bloodshed.

While casualties for D-Day seem horrendous, it partly reflects the numbers of servicemen involved – which totalled over 150,000. The allies took 10,250 casualties on D-Day itself with 4,441 killed. The worst casualties were taken by US troops storming Omaha beach where in some cases 90 per cent of units were killed or wounded; of 3,600 casualties, 770 were killed.

By the end of June around 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of munitions and supplies had been landed in Normandy. 

The re-enaction

Back in Arromanches this 6 June, the re-enactors’ fry up breakfasts and styling how freedom was brought to Europe on the sands, have been curtailed by two mounted policemen who want the beach cleared. No reason is needed it seems; none is given. With the beach almost clear a single Royal Marines contemporary landing craft chugs round the coast from Port en Bessin and lands with a detachment of disarmed marines who wade ashore followed by a WW2 DUKW with piper, Major Trevor Macey-Lillie, of the Scottish gunners “recreating the moment”. To be honest after all the army vehicles that had been there from the enthusiasts, this remembrance-of-a-show-of-force looked a bit pathetic. The irony was the town had been locked down the day before – no-one in or out; the nearby new beautiful British war monument at Ver sur Mer, was by invite only, as were the British war graves at Bayeaux and the Americans at Colleville sur Mer. As one old veteran said: “We came to free the place, but you can hardly move!

Arromanches beach on D-Day +80

Landing Craft Assault (LCA)

Landing Craft Mechanised (LCM)

Fairmile B Type Motor Launch (ML, plus number)

Landing Craft Flack (LCF)

Landing Craft Tank (LCT) (also affectionately called Large Slow Target by servicemen) used as hospital ships to carry wounded home

Landing Ship Infantry (LSI)

Landing Ship Tank (LST)

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