This year’s Royal Society of Marine Artists exhibition is the largest display of paintings and sculpture ever. From boat yards to studies of tidal fringes, historic naval battles and classic boats sailing, each is a study in detail of marine activity along the shore and out at sea. The exhibition from society members and non-members showcases the best in marine art work, each picture a record of the artist’s style with the event providing an opportunity to show their talents. There are large and small works, with prices starting from £325 up to £80,000. 

This year’s winner of the Classic Boat award is Peter Wood with his boat yard scene “Boatbuilder at Barton”, a yard based on the Humber. Peter is a prolific, well-travelled impressionist artist based in Lincolnshire and nearly every painting he does is filmed as a way of sharing the process. He has also made a short video of the wider Barton yard activity, showing different boats in the process of restoration. Peter has sailed since the age of 13 when he first went on a school trip to the Norfolk Boards, and has owned a Yorkshire Cobble and renovated an original Merlin Rocket. He clearly loves boats and sailing. To check more of his work visit Peter Wood’s Website. 

Shown here are a just a few of what was on show from some remarkable marine artists, and while the RSMA exhibition has now closed there are still 457 paintings to you can view online, many still for sale. Visit the Mall Galleries wesbite or RSMA website. 

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The post Royal Society of Marine Artists: Top Sea Inspired Painters 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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The post The Real Alan Burnard: Fairey Marine’s Misunderstood Designer appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Sailors have long had a troubled relationship with water ever since biblical times when Noah failed his Day Skipper practical on tidal heights and got extremely neaped on top of Mount Ararat, only to be abandoned there by the rest of the crew. Frankly, they behaved like animals, which is not that unusual on a flotilla holiday.

And as for Moses, the so-called miracle of parting the Red Sea did earn him a pass as it  demonstrated a better understanding of tidal calculations, but suspicions remains to this day about whether the work was really his own. Remember, he’d just come down off Mount Sinai where a very tall and imposing figure with a booming voice and luxuriant white hair gave him some kind of tip-off. I don’t know exactly what Tom Cunliffe was doing up there, but whatever it was it took Moses ages to tap it on to his tablet. What really puzzles me about that is why when they already had tablets were later versions printed on reeds?

In the event Reed’s Almanac, which today is printed on paper, only encouraged more sailing on water, mostly with calamitous and embarrassing outcomes. Take Columbus, whose “discovery” of America involved confusing Cuba with India. I made a similar mistake once when I made landfall in The Hamble and thought I’d found Monte Carlo. It wasn’t just the mooring fees, nor the traditional costume of hedge-fund haute-couture. What threw me was the strange dialect, which was nothing like the King’s proper Essex English. When I said “ow much? You’re avin a larf, mate!,” they just shrugged their shoulders and went “pfff” and “phoo” with arms outstretched and palms splayed upwards. Call it intuition, but that gave me an idea and when I tried “Çòmbîén? Vôùs êtès fóùs, mátè!” one of them stepped forward and said: “Aah indubitably, I think we have a visiting yachtsman here. As deputy vice rear second sea lord of the Royal Asterisk Yacht Club founded ages ago in the olden days it behoves me to extend to you a most cordial welcome. I’ll have a page sign you in forthwith. Of course we’ll need to see your vaccination certificates and family tree – just a formality, you understand – but once you’ve quarantined for 14 days and we’re satisfied you’re not contagious or common we very much hope you will avail yourself of our facilities and buy us all a drink at the veranda bar – it’s members only inside, as I’m sure you appreciate, but we do have an umbrella at your disposal should it come on to precipitate. If you leave a £25 deposit with the steward he will provide you with the code to the umbrella.”

My point is that none of this could have happened without water, which is why Jesus tried to turn it into wine, and that in turn led to the establishment of Royal Asterisk Yacht Clubs all over the place as a means of drowning your sorrows… in preference to just drowning. Indeed, thanks to science and amateur experiments by Classic Boat readers there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that water is the main contributing factor in 99.98% of incidents of boats sinking. In fact it’s probably even higher than that because the other 0.02% are Old Testament Gaffer’s who still insist with biblical zeal that a boat full of water is not sinking, but “taking up.” The story of Jonah is just one of countless examples, and I’m sure there’s another one.

Water for sailing on is variously categorised as short, steep, shallow, confused and mountainous, but it can also be hard. Hard water is terrible for washing machines and did even more damage to the Titanic.

As with everything else it was British ingenuity that provided the solution – by outlawing water altogether in 1655. Until then navy sailors had received a daily ration of one gallon of weak beer, but as it was diluted with water it was highly offensive to them, as well as unhealthy. 

In 1655 matters improved when the daily ration of watery beer was replaced by half a pint of rum of spectacular 95.5 proof (54.6% ABV). That’s an actual true fact, and though many sailors found it solved everything, it’s a wonder that the Royal Navy ever left dock, let alone once ruled the seas. 

An explanation of sorts was provided centuries later by solo circumnavigator Sir Francis Chichester, who countered aspersions about his aversion to having water on board by saying: “Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk.” And that’s another true fact.

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Have you tackled bad weather at sea?

When will it stop? The wind, the wind! It’s August, mid summer in the Highlands, a time of gentle breezes, moist warm days and, OK, midges, absent largely this year as only a midge capable of flying upwind in a Force 7 westerly would stand a chance here (and also the reason perhaps why the East of Scotland is no longer midge free.)

The club’s summer cruise was more like what is traditionally the end of season storm cruise. Sally and I wisely ducked out of the thrash up to the Summer Isles, despite the welcome promised by their owner. Instead she lay on a pontoon in the new harbour until the berth’s owner required it for his own use. Actually the conditions weren’t too bad, until that is Sally was moved on to a mooring outside the harbour. As if on cue, the forecasts began to show gusts of 40-50 knots, and from the South, the worst direction for Ullapool’s anchorage. 

What is it about her that she prefers to lie to a buoy in a gale than alongside a fully serviced pontoon? This time last year, with her mooring in Loggie Bay snarled and unusable, we moved her to the harbour until it could be sorted. Again, within a day the forecast was giving storm force winds from the south east, of a precise direction – the only direction – to cause mayhem in the otherwise snug haven. I woke to find a video taken at 3 am, posted in the local paper, of the scene that night. There she was, hanging to the pontoon at a crazy angle. I knew the ropes would hold, as did the pontoon. But it’s not the kind of sight you wish to wake up to. It was back to Loggie as fast as possible. She likes it there. Even in a gale.

Humphrey Barton, Laurent Giles partner, he of Vertue XXXV fame, was once asked what he advised when faced with bad weather at sea. “Avoid it.” Only lifeboats on trials go out voluntarily when it’s ‘orrible. I like the story of Pete Goss, in mid Atlantic getting knockdown beyond horizontal, cabin windows showing green, sails flat in the water. Before getting round to righting the boat, he finds his camera to record the experience, in case it ever happens again. Now that’s coolness in the face of. But then he was in Special Forces, I believe. 

It reminds me of the time I managed to reach a friend by satellite phone on a yacht in the Southern Ocean taking part in a round the world race years ago. Reefed down, storm spinnaker up, they were charging through the night en route to New Zealand. Craig was his usual self, until he stopped me with the immortal words. “Got a bit on.” And the line went dead.

I didn’t speak again until he arrived back in the UK, and one of the first things I asked was: “what was ‘on’ and was it really a ‘bit’.”? Well no, he explained. At that moment the call had come from the deck that two small icebergs, close together, had appeared on the radar, and were just emerging from the murk, and that it would be a case of threading the gap between them, for to deviate to port would mean a knockdown, to starboard, a gybe. In 40 knots. I love the understatement of “a bit on”, and occasionally employ it when I’m preparing a meal that needs maximum concentration and the juggling of precise ingredients. Well, no, that’s a lie. I’m a Heinz All Day Breakfast type of cook. Mmmm! I can just taste the beans, egg and sausage (in the form of a Scotch egg) on a blue enamel plate in the cockpit of Sally, riding (at anchor) in a secluded, Highland sea loch.

My round the world chum, by the way, is also the owner of a venerable and slightly older Harrison Butler, winner of many a classic race, driven as she was meant to be: hard by a seasoned ocean sailor. We first met on board the yacht from which he spoke that day, Intrum Justitia, trialling headsails in the Solent. It spawned a small piece in this magazine under the headline “My other boat’s a Butler”, a title that infuriated the designer’s daughter, Joan Jardine-Brown. Too late to batten the hatches I faced the storm: “She’s a HARRISON Butler, not a Butler!”

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

Classic Boats for Sale

Peggy Bawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classic Boats for Sale

Altair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

There are those who, as the saying goes, have a girl in every port and those, like Rahmi M Koç CBE, who have a boat in every city they live in. The honourary chairman of Koç Holding has dozens of yachts and many mansions, mostly built on the water or at least very near the sea. Although he’s originally from Turkey’s landlocked capital Ankara, he feels much more at ease when he is near what he calls “the most beautiful among the elements”.

Istanbul is his home, but every year he spends a few weeks in Miami, London, Lesbos, Provence and on a tiny island off the coast of Tuzla (Istanbul), the city that is home to his own RMK Marine shipyard, where the restorations of most of his floating jewels are carried out. Classic Boat has devoted articles to two boats that belong to the Turkish magnate: Lady Edith, a 1925 William Fife III 12-M yacht, and T/T Vedette, a tender that belonged to the Vanderbilt family. The latter is one of the 16,000 items on display at the Istanbul museum founded by Mr Koç and named after him.

In addition to the one in Tuzla, ‘Rahmi Bey,’ as people refer to him in Turkey, also owns the Merrill Stevens shipyard in Miami, which he took over in 2013 and renamed RMK Merrill-Stevens. “I spend at least three weeks in Miami every autumn, to swim, play golf and fish,” says Koç. “Sailing along Miami’s channels, especially in the afternoons, is great fun. After seeing several classic boats there that I liked a lot, I resolved to acquire one for myself. And after conducting much research we sourced a beautiful gentlemen’s cruiser named Cielito in Seattle; we agreed to buy her and brought her over to Miami. She underwent a thorough overhaul at my shipyard, RMK Merrill Stevens. Sadly, due to a trivial miscalculation, Cielito cannot sail under a bridge and therefore she can’t be moored outside my house; instead, we use the quay opposite, the one used during the Miami Boat Show, and we have to drive to the boat.”

Cielito: A fascinating history

Cielito is a 42ft (13m) triple-cabin, raised-deck wooden motor yacht built in 1930 by Stephens Bros of Stockton, California, a very well known builder in the United States that had started out in 1902. At the time Cielito was launched (with hull number #526), Stephens Bros was specialised in workboats and custom craft, and was soon to become known among sailors in the San Francisco Bay Area for its Farallone Clippers, with 19 examples built.

Cielito’s deck layout consists of an aft cockpit, flush side decks, and a raised flush foredeck, which is equipped with an anchor windlass. The foredeck and cabin tops are constructed with a plywood substrate installed over the original deck planking. The side decks have a solid teak plank overlay. The hull is planked with Port Orford cedar, bronze-fastened on steam-bent oak timbers. For internal reinforcement, the vessel relies upon plywood bulkheads. The decks, bridge cabin, and boat deck are teak throughout. The interior accommodations are laid out in three cabins. The forward cabin has pilot berths to port and starboard and a private head forward; the pilothouse contains the helm station and side doors port and starboard. The aft cabin is home to a galley to port and a private head to starboard.

The first owners of Cielito were the Hollywood director William A Seiter (1890-1964) and his wife, the silent movie star Laura La Plante (1904-96), who bought the yacht for $12,420 and stationed her in Los Angeles. Before the couple divorced in 1934, the yacht was sold to Wesley D Smith, owner of Sea-Dog Hardware, who subsequently ordered a 55ft (16.8m) Stephens, which he named Sea Dog.

Cielito had several owners who sailed her mostly in southern California. Eventually the name was changed to Tara and the craft had new engines installed in 1952: two Chrysler six-cylinder petrol engines. Some 30 years later, after more than half a century in the south, Tara returned to the north of the Golden State and was bought by two staunch cruising enthusiasts, Mont and Cynthia McMillen, who restored the original Cielito name and re-engined the boat in 1989 with the engines she still has today. These are two in-line, four-cylinder 4-236M Perkins diesels, providing 85hp each at 2,500 rpm. They were securely installed on wooden stringers, with the use of steel brackets, through-bolted to the stringers.

In 1997 the McMillens took Cielito to the Pacific Northwest region and cruised the Inland Passage for three months. There’s no doubt that the yacht was looked after beautifully in the McMillens’ hands: not by coincidence did Cielito win the “Best Overall Power” award the same year at the renowned Victoria Classic Yacht Festival, held annually on Vancouver Island every weekend before Labor Day.

In 1999, Cielito was loaded onto a lorry and taken to Lake Michigan for a one-year circumnavigation of the eastern United States via the so-called ‘Great Loop’. The trip took the yacht across Lake Michigan, then the Georgian Bay and Trent Severn Waterway. In August, Cielito was again acknowledged for her beauty and excellent state of conservation: she was awarded ‘Best Power Boat’ at the Antique & Classic Boat Society (ACBS) Clayton Boat Show in New York, before continuing her voyage along the St Lawrence River, down the Chambly Canal to Lake Chaplain and thence the Hudson River and the Inter Coastal Waterway to Florida, the state that would eventually become her new home. She wintered there in the Sunshine State before motoring around Florida’s west coast and up the canals and rivers to Lake Michigan again.

Excepting the long trip to the eastern states, in the McMillen era, Cielito continued to ply the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento River delta regions of California.

Back in Florida

A condition and value survey of the craft, compiled in 2012 in Seattle, stated: “Overall, Cielito has been well maintained and is in excellent condition for her age. Her current owner (Mont McMillen) is conscientious and very knowledgeable of the vessel’s systems and operation.”

Cielito’s condition was still good in 2016, when Koç commissioned a pre-purchase survey; the renovation by RMK Merrill-Stevens was to better fulfill the new owner’s needs. The refit included structural repairs, transom replacement, drive refurbishment, engine maintenance, electrical and electronics upgrades, generator replacement, the installation of air-conditioning and various interior and exterior refinishing jobs. The overhaul duly won the shipyard the Vintage Weekend 2018 award for ‘Best Restoration’, which is hardly newsworthy, because for this owner, perfection is a lifelong habit.

CIELITO

Built: Stephens Bros, California), 1930

LOA: 42ft 9in (13m)

Beam: 10ft 6in (3.2m)

Draft: 3ft 4in (1m)

Displacement: 10 tonnes

Power: 2 x 85 hp @2500 rpm

Merrill-Stevens Shipyard: Rahmi M Koç’s Renovation

After losing a fortune in the American Civil War, Captain James G Merrill moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1866, where he established a marine blacksmith and ironwork shop, the foundation of the Merrill-Stevens shipyard, which started to grow during the American-Spanish war in Cuba (1898). In the Great Jacksonville Fire of 1901, the Merrill-Stevens wharf was completely consumed by flames, but the owners quickly built a new facility and began to focus on shipbuilding. During World War One, Merrill-Stevens Co was bought by the Emergency Fleet Corporation, created by the Shipping Board to bolster the American Merchant Marine. In 1921, the company was sold back and two years later a facility in Miami, the Pilkington Boatyard on the north bank of the Miami River, was acquired. Miami was undergoing one of the greatest real estate booms in history, making the boatyard a prime opportunity for someone with experience and knowledge in the marine industry to turn the business around. The company achieved early success thanks to the prohibition.

Although business was booming, disaster struck Merrill-Stevens. In 1926, the plant was devastated by the ‘Great Hurricane’ that hit Florida in September. As the yard was in full readiness for a flood of business, hard times struck once again. Leading up to the great depression of 1929, staff at the company decreased quickly from 150 employees to 15, and work was hard to come by. Then, thanks to the dredging of the Miami River, completed in 1933, the business managed to recover once again. Larger yachts and commercial vessels now visited Miami through the inland waters, providing Merrill-Stevens with new work.

During World War Two, 3,500 military-related projects were completed at the Merrill-Stevens facilities. Among these was the conversion of recreational yachts into naval support vessels. The post-war history of the yard is little known, but it is certain that, over the years, it has gradually lost allure, prestige and, most importantly, profitability. All these caused the yard to fall victim to an unstoppable decline, with the last wooden craft built in 1974.

When Rahmi M Koç acquired the shipyard in 2013, he vowed to restore the company to its former glory, and to make Miami once again a great destination for yachts and superyachts from around the world. RMK Merrill-Stevens is composed of two yards straddling the Miami River, and are now known as the North Yard and the South Yard. An investment of over $23 million was made into the complete renovation of both facilities. Each yard provides refit services, maintenance and repair to vessels of up to 230ft (70m).

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The post Rahmi M Koç’s Wooden Motor Yacht: Merrill-Stevens Shipyard appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.

Spirit at Speed

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

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

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

Sean McMillan & Spirit 35 (F)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) Technologies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butch Dalrymple-Smith: I am a Lucky Man

“There is not doubt that I am a lucky man. I was born at the end of the second world war, which meant that mine was the first generation ever to have lived in an unbroken period without conscription or the obligation to go abroad and kill foreigners. At least, in England we escaped it. We lived through the cold war and the shadow of nuclear holocaust, but isn’t it always like that? Our distant ancestors must have felt the invention of the bow meant the end of warfare as they knew it. Bullets and shells were equally terrifying; then bombing civilians from the air. ICBMs with thermonuclear warheads were simply more of the same. Now we face terrorism, cyber warfare and robot killing machines, perhaps the scariest of the lot.  It never changes. I experienced the transition from post-war bankruptcy to a steadily improving economy, lowering prices, rising salaries and an overwhelming feeling of optimism as living standards steadily improved with every passing year. But already I can see the end of this happy state: increasing inequality, reduced purchasing power, rising unemployment, unachievable living costs. I had just left school when the birth control pill came on sale. Syphilis and gonorrhoea had been defeated by penicillin and AIDS had not yet been invented. The resultant explosion of sexual liberation was all the more exciting because it was unprecedented. And didn’t we take advantage of it!

I saw the introduction of plastics and enjoyed the convenience of cheap consumer products before anyone realised the problem of accumulating waste… a problem I leave to my children with acute embarrassment.

Throughout my life minerals of every sort have been abundant. On a geological timescale, the period when provision of finite resources was limited only by demand will be a mere blink in our planet’s history. But I was there… it was my time.

In my lifetime there has been unbelievable progress in technology. Just look at the contrast between the primitive life of my parents and the computer-enhanced, connected and convenient world of today: comfortable homes, reliable cars, electric help with the chores, free communications and cheap international travel. This trend will probably continue but for us it was all novel and amazing. We relished our new technology-enabled powers all the more because we were the first generation to see so much progress so quickly…. and I am happy to leave the challenges of dealing with artificial intelligence and genetic modification to our children. I hope they manage.

We went through various panics about the limits of growth: How long could the planet feed itself? What happens when oil runs out? How can we control pandemic diseases in an age of international travel? And yet the agrarian revolution, new oil discoveries and increasingly effective pharmaceuticals soon made our concerns ephemeral.

For almost all of my life, the problems of species extinctions, climate change and overpopulation were of no concern, and now in my dotage none of it really affects me, although once again I hand on the baton in this generational relay with a feeling of guilt.

The Golden Years of Sailing

In sport, I hit the sweet spot with a precision that was uncanny. I was there when competitive sailing was a blast, when the best of the best national teams competed just for the fun of it. Without sponsors or pay masters we enjoyed our racing in a way that is inconceivable today. The IOR may have been a flawed handicapping system but it provided unbelievable racing and wealthy, enthusiastic owners enjoyed it just as much as the rest of us. They were prepared to pay for new race boats at a rate that even today’s corporate sponsors can’t match.

Sailing was a perfect way to spend my young adulthood. We went from regatta to regatta, scratching a living as best we could between races and having a wonderful time travelling from one party to the next: Admirals’ Cup, transatlantic races, the Ton Cup regattas, Hobart, Bermuda, Maxi Worlds, Whitbreads… The boats today may go faster and know where they are with ridiculous precision, but our combination of hardware at a human scale; the responsibility of brain-based decision-making; navigation where the stars, a sense of smell and the shape of the waves played a part; the reliance on experience and gut feel for weather prognosis in the absence of accurate forecasts… it all contributed to a racing experience which today’s hotshots can only dream about.  But now the genie of overwhelming technology is well and truly out of the bottle and only classic yacht racing and the anachronistic Golden Globe revival portray a shadow of how it used to be.

Butch Dalrymple-Smith on Yacht Design

Designing yachts was more fun too. Without computer fluid dynamics we simply drew shapes that we liked and generally they worked. Compared to today, weight, balance and performance were all a bit of a lottery. The very thought of running 50 computer-created variations of the same boat around a computer-simulated race course fills me with horror. The Solent was our testing tank. Call me old-fashioned, but I loved using pencil and splines to define a shape. It was exacting work and you didn’t want to change it once it was done but there’s something very aesthetic and rewarding about completing a lines plan on Mylar, and the discipline of fairing and keeping control was part of the enjoyment. Perhaps only another veteran yacht designer will understand what I mean. Demand was buoyant and most of the boats were pretty good too. The 1970s and 80s were the best years ever to be designing boats.

“In short, the planet and society as a whole have been good to me”

Butch Dalrymple-Smith

My life was so much better than the generations before mine and I am pretty sure it will prove to be a lot better than generations to come. As I face my final years of this mortal coil I have to smile and reflect that I had the best of everything in the best of all possible worlds. How lucky is that!”

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The post Butch Dalrymple-Smith: First Whitbread & Best Years to be Alive appeared first on Classic Boat Magazine.