Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2016 i Classic Boat

Simon Winter of Simon Winter Marine Do you employ classics specialists? I grew up sailing family-owned wooden boats in the Thames Estuary, East Coast fishing smacks and since the early 1990s the Bristol Channel pilot cutters Mascotte and Cornubia. Can you really insure an irreplaceable wooden yacht? Yes, many of the classic yachts and traditional boats we arrange insurances for are one of a kind. These can range from a 21ft canoe yawl to 100ft Fife schooners. How do you value a classic yacht? Factors taken into account will be the general condition, the nature of any refits, location (demand in Europe is greater than in the Caribbean or USA), rarity, cost of major damage repair and replacement cost (this figure will often be many times higher than the market…

“He’s been working on his own for far too long. One roove short of a rivet” What do I think about when working alone in my cold workshop, nobody for company, icicles clinging to my nose, hands numb and feet frozen? Well, strange things come to mind, believe me, whether it’s cold or not. Foreign names, mainly. Yes, I know what you’re thinking... I went through a President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani phase a while ago, then there was Muqtada al-Sadr, goodness only knows why, and for a long time I could not get Mahmoud Ahmadinejad out of my head, although I had to look up the spelling as it sounded like “Ach ma dinner Jack”. There was a period of Camilla Batman Jelly too, for a while... The longest reign…

From 6-13 August, the Solent will be teeming with yachts and keelboats racing in this year’s Cowes Week, the 190th anniversary of the regatta. My first Cowes Week was in 1957 and I didn’t miss a year till I finally hung up my cameras in 1971. Unlike some photographers, I was never interested in chasing the Royals. I was more interested in making good pictures. The Royal Yacht Britannia, however, provided a great backdrop for photographing other boats and I would work the angles to picture yachts crossing her bows. During the late 1950s, the focus at Cowes Week was on the 12-M yachts and their crews, who were gearing up for the first post-war America’s Cup challenge in 1958. The Royal Yacht Squadron was at the centre of the…

Francis Sweisguth is best known for his design of the 22ft 7in (6.9m) International Star – a keelboat design that has proved one of the most enduring and successful racing classes of the past 100 years, having competed at 18 Olympic Games since 1932. However, he is also well known on America’s east coast for the design of its sibling, the 18ft (5.5m) Interlake of 1933. Originally known as the SC2, the Interlake was designed after the Sandusky Sailing Club at Sandusky, Ohio, commissioned Sweisguth to produce their own class for local racing and family sailing. Sweisguth, who was based at Rochester, New York, and working as a partner at the firm of Ford, Payne and Sweisguth, responded with that of a 22ft 6in (6.9m) keelboat. Although pleased with the…

Edited by Steffan Meyric Hughes: +44 (0)207 349 3758 Email: steffan@classicboat.co.uk The onset of summer is enough to bring a touch of lyricism even to the Yard News editor, usually content with a world of Frog tape, orbital sanders and stoic frustration, all to the theme of rain on a tin roof. But if the carpets of bluebells and twinkling sea aren’t enough to elicit a sigh, then the glut of newly restored classics kissing water after months in the shed definitely are. This time a year ago was relatively quiet, but this spring seems to have seen an upsurge in launches. So across the land (and around the world), boatbuilders have been looking on apprehensively as the fruits of their labours have been slowly lowered into the sea once…

If cold beers and drinkable milk are what you want on board, then this portable 21-litre thermoelectric Tropicool cool box is the answer. I’ve fitted one into my 8-ton Gauntlet and it perfectly fits a space once occupied by a heater. It is powered by both 12 volts and 240 volts, which helps to avoid draining the boat’s battery. The cool box can be reduced to 25C below ambient temperature at home, or in the car on the way to the boat at weekends, while drawing 5 amps. Once plugged in onboard, it draws only 0.5 amps to maintain the low temperature. The box is available in a range of capacities, all using a robust and well-insulated structure with a detachable lid, magnetic lock and foldaway handle. The 21-litre version…

If there is a drearier place than coastal Maine in late spring, I don’t know it. Driving into Belfast, I’m greeted by a low fog, with precipitation that wavers between sleet and rain, and the occasional tin-walled, abandoned chicken house left over from a once-fruitful poultry industry. But on the outskirts of the hilly town, a bald eagle leaps from a branch, flies 60 feet above the road and disappears. That moment, that brightness, was duplicated in many forms on the visit to French and Webb that day while touring the Herreshoff NY40 yacht Marilee. The French and Webb buildings at the base of the hill in town are likely best known for housing the restoration of three Herreshoff Buzzards Bay 30s in the early 2000s. Though the shop has…

The name Chris Craft conjures up notions of iconic, sleekly styled, fast, teak-accented, open motor boats, ferrying the likes of Frank Sinatra, John F Kennedy and Katharine Hepburn. It’s a name with a history, stretching back to the 19th century. Having survived choppy commercial conditions in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, the firm is navigating calmer waters these days. At the helm is entrepreneur Dr Stephen Julius, chairman of West London management organisation Stellican, together with president and chief executive Stephen Heese, based in Sarasota, Florida. Julius was born in a military hospital in October 1959, the son of an army officer. After reading classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, he studied for a degree at Harvard Business School. “It did me no harm at all that I was a Brit…

Friendship Yacht Company has been around since 2004, when it launched its first 40, the boat that has become the most popular, with a healthy 20 of them kissing the water since then. The 53 followed, with two built. Now, we have the first 36, launched in 2014, and the first 75. Here are a few details on those new models, the littlest and largest in the range. 36 The 36 was for a repeat client – the owner of a 40 who needed slightly less draught for his new mooring. She’s a strip-built wooden boat with a centerboard, moderate hull type and low displacement (6.8 tonnes). When you put this stiff hull form together with a near-50% ballast ratio, decent beam (11ft 4in/3.5m), and carbon fibre mast, you can…

YARD VISIT IBTC PORTSMOUTH “Make sure you do the thigh straps up tightly,” said Jim, the softly spoken yard manager at the new International Boatbuilding Training College (IBTC) Portsmouth facility. “We had to watch a really nasty video showing what happens if you don’t.” Jim was taking no chances as we scaled a vertical ladder to look at four cranes that run along gantries at ceiling level. And, staggering along after him, so tightly trussed I could barely walk, neither was I. From this height, the scale of the place is apparent; walking out on a gantry is enough to induce a little of the reeling giddiness familiar from nightmares. Above is the saw-tooth roof, its silhouette an icon of heavy industry. The seven ridges form a metal massif of…

Spring callipers turn a simple measurement into a performance of captivating precision. They are are the most shapely of measuring tools, with modes of operation that encourage careful use, being cradled in the palm and eased into position. They are used one-handed to measure distances between or across surfaces, and to make comparisons with known standards. An outside calliper is bow-legged and has tips turned in, while an inside calliper has straight legs and tips turned out, for making outside and inside measurements respectively. Sometimes the tips are fined down to a chisel end to work in threads. The particular advantage of a calliper lies in capturing a dimension where access would be awkward with another tool – inside this Stuart sea cock, for example, which requires a new filter.…

Suff olk Yacht Harbour Classic Regatta 11-12 JUNE Orwell and Stour rivers Popular mixed regatta of gaffers and bermudan classics Tel: +44 (0)1473 659465, syharbour.co.uk 14-19 JUNE Argentario Sailing Week Porto Santo Stefano, Italy, argentariosailingweek.it Glamorous event set in a beautiful Tuscan hill town on the coast, but with boats of all sizes. A favourite of the late Olin Stephens 17-19 JUNE Falmouth Classics Cornwall, falmouthclassics.org.uk Big regatta, now its own event, and with free mooring 2 JULY JP Morgan Asset Management Round the Island Race IoW, roundtheisland.org.uk The biggest participation sailing event in the world – and this year we’re proud media sponsors Other sailing magazines from the publishers of Classic Boat IN THE LATEST ISSUE • Contessa 26, the 50th anniversary of a GRP legend • Cruising the…

Binker – what I call him – is a secret of my own, And Binker is the reason why I never feel alone. Lines written in 1927 by AA Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh, perhaps hold the clue as to why in 1934 Boyd Donaldson, a yacht broker working out of an office at 366 Madison Avenue, New York, decided to have a yacht built. The poem is Binker, from AA Milne’s book Now We Are Six, and it speaks of a having, as many children do, an imaginary secret companion, a close friend to whom nobody else has access. It doesn’t take too much imagination to suggest that Donaldson wanted Binker, the name he gave to his chosen yacht, to be his secret sailing companion – his very own yacht,…

A viola da gamba may not seem a compelling reason for choosing a particular type of boat, but there’s no doubt that it played at least a small part in the decision of Marcy and Michael Brenner to choose a motorsailer. Michael is a dyed-in-thewool yachtsman, having grown up sailing on a lake before he progressed to ocean yachting, and it was through him that Marcy was introduced to the joys of cruising. Michael also owns a beautiful 59ft 1in (18m) Bombigher schooner called Hollander, which he restored with a team of ten professionals over four winters. Marcy and Michael sailed Hollander in the Baltic for five years; in fact the yacht is still there, albeit about to set sail for the Mediterranean. Cruising Scandinavian archipelagos is undoubtedly fabulous, but…

At an auction in 1913, my great-grandfather, Edward Sycamore, bought White Lodge in Brightlingsea. It was an imposing house on the main road into town as befitted his position as the country’s leading professional yacht skipper. Three generations of the family lived there until it was sold in 2014. I had been vaguely aware that some of his papers had survived with a view to writing an autobiography, but was staggered at just what appeared as the house was prepared for sale. Little, if anything, seemed to have been discarded. Syc, as he was often known, died long before I was born, but his widow lived to be 100 and as a teenager I knew her well. Curiously, he was not much mentioned on my regular visits to White Lodge…

SEE MORE Classic Boat ONLINE BONAVENTURE New traditional yacht Bonaventure is that very rare thing – a full-sized yacht built in wood the traditional way but in modern times. She was designed and built by Ashley Butler in 2013 and for a while served as his home, sailing to the Mediterranean and back during his ownership. She featured on the cover of our November issue when we visited Ashley to hear about the boat and her sistership, both of the ‘Mayflower 50’ class, named after their length on deck. Bonaventure is a proper bluewater family cruising yacht fit to go anywhere, with sturdy 1.5in iroko planking on her oak frames. Internally, she offers accommodation for up to seven in three cabins, and a decent galley and wide saloon. The deckhouse…

Historically, the style of interior decoration aboard yachts has followed that in buildings ashore. One example is the ovolo moulding commonly seen as a relieving detail for the hard corners of beams in timber-framed ceilings and which finds its echo in the deck beams of yacht saloons and state rooms up to the present day. A moulding creates shadows that add visual interest. In the restricted vertical space of a yacht’s interior it is also more craniumfriendly should you bash your head against a beam. In cross-section, the ovolo approximates to a quadrant bounded by a pair of fillets at 90 degrees. More precisely, the arc of the Roman variety is a true quarter-circle while a Grecian ovolo is elliptical, but either one makes a pleasant change to the bogstandard…

Helensburgh Dunbartonshire 9 Nov 1987 The Racing Rules Secretary Royal Yachting Asociation Dear Sir The Gareloch One Design Class is a fleet of 16 dayboats built in 1924, which have since enjoyed lively one design racing on the River Cyde. However, an incident during the sailing season which is still unresolved has caused great doubt and uncertainty amongst established yachtsmen and so I look to you for an opinion on the matter so as we may face the future with more confidence. These are the facts: On Tuesday 11 August 1987, during an evening race, the fleet were rounding a leeward mark in a flat calm, which many yachts overlapped. One of the crew of the yacht Catriona, being a dog named Sarah, grew bored with the proceedings and decided…