Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i Classic Boat

Les Voiles D’Antibes launched the Mediterranean circuit for Classic Yachts. Regulars Tuiga, Hallowe’en and Mariella were joined by Black Swan and 60 or more classics. Stretching down the race village at Port Vauban, centuries of sailing history were on display. Here the public could wander admiring beautifully varnished wood and polished brass and muse over the elegant lines. The fleet looked achingly beautiful in the summer sun. And the walkway along the 16th-century sea wall served as a bird’s eye view for visitors to soak up the racing. Focusing my lens, I felt like a kid in a sweet shop. Spectator vessels included the classic 1930s motor-sailer Atlantide, back after a two-year Royal Huisman rebuild, and the 300ft (90m) Nero, newly built in the manner of a grand 1930s motor…

The Summer Isles lie off Loch Broom in the northwest of Scotland, where the largest – Tanera Mor – was sold in 2017 to Ian Wace who has funded a sympathetic yet thorough restoration programme around the island that has remained inhabited throughout the years. In 1881 there were 118 people living on the island and much of the work was taken up by the herring curing. Built in 1788, the curing station with its red herring smokehouses employed up to 120 people at various times. As with the periodic fortunes of the herring shoals, the curing station followed the same pattern until it fell into disrepair. I remember first visiting in about 1970, anchored off overnight, and didn’t return to the island until 2002 to measure up the herring…

A record 23 countries took part in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, racing in three categories: the Twelve Foot Dinghy, the 6-Metre and the 8-Metre classes. The racing was particularly close in the 8-Metre class, where eight teams competed in seven races, some of which were more than four hours long. France fielded the only team with a female skipper: the wealthy heiress Virginie Hériot racing on her 6th and final 8-Metre yacht, L’Aile VI. The French team got off to a poor start, coming last in the first race, but did better in the following days, winning the second and sixth races. By 9 August, the competition had been whittled down to just three teams: the French, Dutch and Swedish. As the yachts gathered one the final day of…

SALLY II Adrian Morgan’s own Vertue To regular readers of this magazine, Sally II, a Laurent Giles 5-tonner, built in 1937, sail number V2, might be the most famous yacht in the world! Columnist Adrian Morgan has been describing adventures aboard her, monthly for nearly three decades in his monthly column. The Vertue name only became associated with these sturdy, record-breaking wee yachts after the war, when astonishing transatlantic and long distance feats were achieved by the likes of Humphrey Barton and others. Sally was commissioned by a Poole solicitor for local sailing, but in her time has cruised all over the UK, from Wales, across Channel to France, and now on the west coast of Scotland. Structurally in excellent condition – her tungum bronze floors, lead keel, bronze bolts…

The proprietary saw filers’ vice was a cumbersome iron affair with narrow lever-operated jaws, long made obsolete by disposable hard-point saws, and now fetching high sums as a collectors’ item. Traditional high carbon steel hand saws are still made, however, while many old saws only require a light touch of the triangular file to restore their bite. Saws with handles attached by split nuts can be dismantled for more thorough restoration, for example this 1960s tenon saw with rosewood handle made by Spear & Jackson (1). Filing saw teeth is not so mysterious as it may appear. First we need to distinguish whether we are dealing with a rip saw (teeth filed with chisel edges) or a cross-cut saw (teeth filed with bevelled edges), also paying attention to the pitch…

RETURN OF RICHARD MILLE CUP We’re bringing you all the action from the Richard Mille Cup in the Channel, back in England and France after a successful first year in 2023. WEST SOLENT IN ARGENTINA The West Solent One Design, with its pure aesthetic, is the epitome of an inter-war English racing yacht. This one was restored by a syndicate in Buenos Aires LEARNING TO FLY We take a test flight on Spirit’s outrageous new hydrofoil motor yacht PLUS… We delve deep in the Scottish Yachting Archives to learn secrets from newly-discovered artefacts from Fife III and GL Watson; cruising the Canadian wilderness; Princess Svanevit goes racing; chainsaw king and yacht collector Rudiger Stihl AUGUST 2024 ISSUE ON SALE 12 July, 2024 Or why not subscribe? SAILING TODAY WITH YACHTS…

Designed by Wally Ward in Sydney for a family friend in 1948, sisterships Caress and Camira were a development from his original very successful designs, Janaway 1937 and Jasnar 1944. Caress and Camira were the first of the CAs which hold a distinguished place in Australian yacht racing history as subsequent developments Carmen, Cadence, Calliope and Castanet all proved highly successful in ocean racing, including winning the Sydney-Hobart Race in 1966. Caress was the second of the CAs built and is identical to Camira. Launched in 1961, she was built from Wally’s original plans, 13 years after Camira by spray painter Keith Newland in a workshop in Leichhardt, Sydney. During the rebuild Simon Sadubin and his team found that the quality of the workmanship to be of an extremely high…

Lugger fest was the first traditional boat gathering to meet in Ullapool, North West Scotland, at the newly expanded harbour. Central to the event were two locally-restored, engineless luggers, the St Vincent and Clan Gordon, plus the visiting Barnabas, a 142-year-old Pilchard Driver which sailed all the way from St Ives, Cornwall. The St Vincent 49 LWL Zulu Herring Drifter had originally been built in 1910 and was restored by Ullapool’s Johnson and Loftus Boatbuilding in 2023. At the same time at Alastair Grant’s Isle Ewe Boats, Clan Gordon, built in 1911 for herring fishing in the Minches, was significantly restored. Warm May weather with light winds made for a lot of rowing using the long sweeps. Barnabas had another reason for being in Loch Broom: fitting her with new…

MECUM AUCTIONS INC Chrysler guru’s flight of fancy Virgil Exner, an art-trained stylist rather than industrial designer, transformed the American automotive landscape with his 1956 “Forward Look” Chrysler models that spearheaded the flamboyant fins and chrome era. So ahead of the curve was Exner that when his 1957 Chryslers hit the road banner ads proclaimed: “Suddenly it’s 1960.” A few years later, in 1962, the design legend produced studies for a glass-fibre power boat that predicted the shape of things to come when it went into production in 1966. The radical Buehler Turbocraft Bar Harbour 24 (7.3m) featured fastback styling that was coming into vogue for sportscars and incorporated a removable Targa top over the driving position, as Porsche would a decade later. Additionally, it featured water jet propulsion, which…

The fleet of 800 or more small, civilian vessels that sailed from England to save Allied troops from the beaches of Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo has become a central pillar of British identity. At the same time, the story of these Dunkirk little ships has become so weakened by repetition that it’s reached the point where it’s in danger of becoming just another trope in the national consciousness. It might have been, as the 2017 film put it, Britain’s darkest hour, as a ferocious German army pinned us against the edge of the sea, but the actions of those few days remain the greatest hour that a fleet of pleasure vessels has ever seen and ever will see, in terms of lives saved, and in the shaping of the fates…

DISPLACEMENT Displacement craft are the oldest of all vessels, dating back to when man first sat astride a log. The maximum speed of a displacement vessel is limited by its wave-making: at maximum displacement speed its transverse wave length will equal that of its waterline with a crest at the bow and a crest at the stern. To increase its speed it needs to increase the wave length but is unable to push the stern wave further aft and is locked in the trough between the crests. This is called hull speed. In knots, it is 1.34 times the square root of the hull length in feet. So a yacht with 25ft of waterline will top out at 6 knots. Displacement hulls can exceed hull speed by reducing weight and…

Edited by Steffan Meyric Hughes Email steffan@classicboat.co.uk NEWPORT, USA TO STAVANGER, NORWAY Riding on a giant’s back Nothing tells the story of the huge increase in ship size over millennia more than the sight of a large ship of a past era on the deck of a large ship of our current one. This photo shows the Draken Harald Hårfagre, the largest Viking ship sailing in modern times, dwarfed by Sevenstar Yacht Transport’s MV Stadiongracht. The occasion was the Viking ship’s transportation from Newport, Rhode Island, back to Stavanger in Norway. “The process involved precise calculations, custom cradle construction, and constant monitoring,” said a spokesman from Sevenstar. Draken Harald was built in 2012 with historical craftsmanship using oak, tar, hemp, iron and silk. She measures 114ft (34.7m) in length and…

Continental tool manufacturers continued making wooden planes long after their British counterparts had surrendered to the competition of mechanically adjustable cast iron planes from the USA. This simple and inexpensive smoother made by Goldenberg of Alsace, France in the 1970s shows how the wooden plane remained a viable tool across the Channel when British ‘woodies’ were seen as obsolete. The body of the plane – the stock – is of beech, the same as for the centenarian Edward Preston & Sons, Birmingham smoother in the background, but the sole is ekki, also called azobe, bongossi or ‘red ironwood’. This is an African timber even harder than greenheart and therefore ideal for the plane’s hardest-working surface. Stock and sole are joined by interlocking ridges and furrows which vastly increase the glued…

The Cowes Spring Classics weekend kicked off on a Friday afternoon in May with welcome drinks on the pontoon at Shepards Wharf Marina where Merry Maid – the 1906 Charles Sibbick linear rater, owned and newly restored by Martin Nott, co-organiser of this regatta – had recently been launched. A barbecue followed that evening at Cowes Corinthian Yacht Club, the event’s official host. With rain and virtually no wind forecast, the prospects for racing on Saturday weren’t particularly enticing, but the rain held off and a gentle but steady breeze allowed two races to be held in the western Solent. That evening the competitors enjoyed drinks and a superb dinner at the Commodore’s House, the former home of Uffa Fox. Although Sunday morning brought with it a reasonable breeze, it…

Where is Britannia? Racing alongside the revived J Class, Fifes and Herreshoffs gracing the classic circuit, a reincarnation of the most famous yacht of them all is conspicuously absent: K1, the Kings’ yacht, the remains of which lie, according to HMS Winchester’s log, 40 fathoms down in the deeps off St Catherine’s Point on the Isle of Wight, at Lat 50 34 18N, Long 1 1 0W’, swept by fierce currents for nearly 90 years. Her stemhead was recovered by a lobster fisherman, and sonar traces appeared to show a considerable portion of the hull remained intact in a natural hollow on the sea bed, but that was a long time ago. A replica, built in Russia, languishes, unfinished. Launched in 1893, in a career spanning over 40 years and…

Back in the nineteenth century the smacksmen of Essex did a lot more to turn a few pounds than dredge oysters. Crews of the larger boats turned their hands to piloting, life-saving and salvaging far away down the channels of the Thames approaches, including the Swin. This gave them the name ‘Swin Rangers’, a breed of hard-bitten sailors who delighted in doing furious customs officials out of their lawful dues. Meanwhile, even larger ketch-rigged ‘schillingers’ sailed to the Terschelling banks off Holland where rich pickings were to be had in awful winter conditions. It was against this historic background that I walked along the shingle foreshore at West Mersea with John Millgate and his crew early one morning in the high summer of 1999. We clambered into the dinghy and…

The east coast branch of OneSails (there is a Solent shop too), is not much to look at from the outside; just another of those squat, brick buildings that sit on marina hards up and down the country. It’s actually the closest possible experience to walking into a tardis. Above the standard-looking sales office on the ground floor is a huge sail loft, around 6,400sqft in fact, all warm air, supporting columns and a low ceiling. It is the den of sailmaker John Parker, who started cutting cloth in the 1970s… the ‘Dacron era’… under British sail-making legend Austin ‘Clarence’ Farrer, under the banner of Seahorse Sails. “It was like the British hi-fi industry in those days,” says John. “Everyone in the industry links back to him, or the Ratseys…

For sheer entertainment there is very little more enjoyable than watching a wooden boat sink. I know that sounds heartless, and that’s exactly what it is, because plastic boat owners like me are a soulless and heathenistic bunch. Now that I’m also a wooden boat owner, with soul, character, discernment, taste and a lot less money, I find it less amusing, particularly if the boat doing the sinking is mine and I’m on it at the time. And for the edification of you Tupperware louts – a hopeless task, I know – I would also point out that the correct nautical term for what you illiterates call “sinking” is in fact “launching.” Snipe of Maldon, my 3½-ton Blackwater Sloop, had been out of the water, being varnished and painted in…