Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2019 i Classic Boat

The 2018 Trophée Panerai closed in style with the 40th anniversary edition of Règates Royales in Cannes. The origins of the regatta go back to 1929, but it faded out in the 1960s and was revived in 1978 by Jean-Pierre Odéro and other enthusiasts, growing from a fleet of just five 8-Metre yachts to the 1,500 sailors who gather annually these days. The event is run by the Yacht Club de Cannes with support from the town council and port, as well as a team of many volunteers. This year sailors came from across Europe, Brazil, Australia, the USA and Russia, among them Olympic and America’s Cup sailing star Torben Grael, who was at the helm of Vanessa, a 1974 design by Italian Giulio Cesare Carcano, now restored under the…

IRC has adjusted its rating rule to cater better for heavy displacement boats, in a move that may benefit many classic yachts. The change was prompted by British Classic Yacht Club commodore David Murrin after he noticed discrepancies among results at Panerai British Classic Week, which is raced under IRC. The club employed naval architect Jack Gifford to provide an analysis of British Classic Week results going back a decade. After considering the BCYC’s data and conducting its own research, the IRC Technical Committee ratified the change in September 2018. Dr Jason Smithwick, Director of Rating in the RORC Rating Office, said: “While the IRC formulation includes the consideration of a boat’s power to weight ratio, it was considered that we could improve our formulation for the dynamic effects of…

The Thames Estuary incorporates the greatest expanse of mud in Europe over which the North Sea spends a small part of each day. When it does, at what is known locally as ‘tide time’, all manner of shoal-draught craft can be witnessed. Shallow hulls have been in evidence along the UK’s east coast for centuries – 900 years ago, a Viking longboat dried out just as successfully as a Thames barge, a Colchester smack or a Leigh bawley does today. These working craft, and the proximity of the Thames Estuary to London, with its daily influx of tens of thousands of commuters, among whom were many potential customers, inspired a significant number of designers including Frank Shuttlewood, Norman Dallimore and most famously of all Maurice Griffiths to produce yachts that…

There’s a small English enclave in Sequim (it’s pronounced squim, like squid) in the placid pastures of northwestern Washington State. Aside from the English accents and vernacular spoken on the premises, BBC6 Music blasts out and the larder always has a big stash of Yorkshire tea. It’s not what one would expect in these parts, but there is a circuitous logic to the fact that this now is the site of the Tally Ho restoration. In charge is Leo Goolen 29, the lad who has taken on the 1910 Albert Strange cutter that was in dire straits after serving her many owners as a fishing vessel or private yacht. Her claim to fame is winning the stormy 1927 Fastnet Race on corrected time. Restoring her is an ambitious effort that…

The winner of the Classic Boat Award at the Royal Society of Marine Artists exhibition, at the Mall Galleries in London in October, was Maarten Platje (above centre), with Jennifer Scott of Dulwich Picture Gallery (left) and RSMA chair Elizabeth Smith. Of his depiction of ‘White Heather and Britannia in the Solent in 1926’, Maarten said: “It must have been an awesome sight!” An exhibition of Maarten’s historical military paintings will tour the USA, starting with the Channel Island Maritime Museum, CA.…

After two decades as owners of Honnor Marine, Bob and Norma Brown sold the business. The Cape Cutter 19 rights went to new company Cape Cutter Marine – see New Classics last month. The rest of Honnor Marine, best known for the Devon range, was bought by Tim and April Altham, who now run it with their daughters Sasha and Alex, both dinghy sailing instructors. We caught up with them at the 2018 TheYachtMarket.com Southampton Boat Show and learned a bit more about this popular range of trad GRP day-sailers, all of which rate at RCD Cat C, are beachable and feature safe, boomless mainsails. The range includes the Longboat and Gig, not listed here – see honnormarine.co.uk. COASTER The biggest boat in the range, the Coaster is intended as…

The timber was in stock, the plans had been analysed, the temporary moulds and Mylar templates were produced and Ben Harris and his team were full of enthusiasm. It was time to start building the Ed Burnett-designed gaff cutter Panacea. Work would start with the hull and then move on to the ballast keel (which, unusually, would be cast in house), the deck, the interior, the engineering and electrical systems, and finally the rig. Hull construction began with the all-oak centreline which consists of the stem and apron (both solid rather than laminated), the keel (dead straight, 3in/75mm thick and varying from 4-13in/10-33cm in width), the deadwood and stern post. The scarf joints were glued with resorcinol and bolted with bronze bolts. The rabbets for the planking were mostly machined…

When planking up a carvel hull, ‘backing out’ is the hollowing of the inside face of a plank to fit snugly against frames at the turn of the bilge. It’s a job best done using a plane that’s convexed across the width of the sole, but the boatbuilder hoping to buy a new one off the shelf would be searching in vain. Down the years there have been spar planes with hollow soles, compass planes with soles rockered fore-and-aft, and coopers’ stoups with soles convexed both ways (equal to the boatbuilder’s bollow) but no mainstream manufacturer has thought it worth making a backing out plane. An ancient gutter plane, devised for shaping rainwater channels, might make an acceptable stand-in, or the largest of the round moulding planes, a No 18…

That boatyards worked fast in the great days of sail is well known, but it still seems astonishing that the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company completed the 108ft (33.5m) schooner you see pictured here in just seven months. Mariette’s keel was laid in October 1915 and the speed is explained by the fact that Herreshoff had 500 men working for him over that winter, the largest number he had ever had, to ensure the boat was launched in time for the season in May 1916. Herreshoff famously did not favour the schooner rig, thinking it too complicated, costly and wind resistant. Consequently he ‘only’ designed and built 15 schooners, a tiny proportion of his output. Mariette is one of his nine steel-riveted schooners often described as ‘legendary’ for their size (an average…

One Hundred Hideous Golf Injuries or Crippled by Croquet or The Hidden Dangers of Tiddlywinks are not the kind of books you would expect to find on the shelves of a golfer, croquet player or fanatical tiddlywinker you might think – and I remember a few of the last from school days. More likely it’s One Hundred Great Golf Courses, How to Conquer Croquet or Top Tips for Tiddlywinks, plus a row of unreadable autobiographies. One might perhaps come across something to remind one that one’s chosen sport carries a fair risk of injury. Tiddlywinks finger, for instance, is a painful affliction, and like tennis elbow or croquet crutch, well known in medical circles and easily identified at the surgery by the patient’s lament: “But doctor, I must have my…

For north European sailors summer seems a long time ago, but back in July the small Cornish harbour of Mousehole hosted its biennial Sea, Salts and Sail festival, treating Mounts Bay to the sight of traditional sail of all shapes and sizes. Boats can choose to raft up and dry out against the harbour wall, or anchor outside in the shelter of St Clement’s Isle. The 12th festival hosted 50 boats ranging from yachts to work boats and 4,000 visitors, in sunny if somewhat light conditions. Classic Boat illustrator Claudia Myatt joined skipper Joanna Powell on board pilot cutter Agnes on charter from Falmouth, offering guests sketching lessons as well as taking the opportunity to fill a few sketchbook pages of her own. The next festival will be in 2020.…

No one knows for sure how many Tumlares have been built since Knud Reimers produced this elegant design from his Stockholm office in 1933, but it is generally thought to be in the region of a thousand. Reimers himself claimed, as early as February 1935, that 50 boats had been ordered in 11 countries, and at various times since then Tumlares have been built and sailed all over the world. In southern England, my father had a Tumlare called Jinny the Queen for nearly half a century. She was very much part of my upbringing. Consequently I’ve always been interested in the class and while planning a recent trip to Australia, it didn’t escape my notice that at least 22 Tumlares have been built in the country, many of them…

DAVIA Dunkirk Little Ship This month we feature two war heroes, firstly Davia, designed as a coastal cruiser with a real turn of speed, something she demonstrated the very year of her launch, when she won the 1929 Andre Gold Cup, a race from London to Cowes. In 1940, she achieved victory in a higher-minded enterprise, when she rescued British and French soldiers off the beaches of Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. This, of course, makes her one of the fabled Dunkirk Little Ships, a status that is proved by her inclusion on the official list kept by the Association of Dunkirk Little Ships. She’s 52ft (15.8m) long, with a beam of 11ft 5in (3.5m) and was built at the prolific yard of James Silver to a design by John Bain,…

Even with its edges struggling for definition against the cloying grey mist of a late autumn day, Pin Mill on the Suffolk coast is quite beautiful in a small, wistful, English way. The hamlet, on the south bank of the tidal River Orwell just three miles from the North Sea, is hidden from the main road and the 21st century by what Arthur Ransome described, in 1935, as "a steep green lane that end[s] in the river itself". He was staying at Alma Cottage while writing We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea, the story in which the Walker children sail by misadventure to Holland in a yacht. The Walkers, like their creator, stayed here at Alma Cottage and, from the foot of that green lane, they watch the Thames…

January/February 1989 – CB11 “Perestroika!” shouted the title of our leading editorial of January/February 1989, borrowing the word Gorbachev loved to use to describe his intended ‘restructuring’ of the Soviet Union. Later that year the Berlin Wall would fall. On a slightly different scale, we were busy ‘restructuring’ too, increasing our annual production from four issues a year in 1987, to six in 1988, then to eight. And to kick off the first issue of the year, we published an interview with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, about his Dragon Bluebottle.…

For the citizens of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, Labor Day has been synonymous with the Classic Boat Festival since 1978. And so too this year, between 31 August and 2 September, the festival took place in a warm, informal atmosphere, for the 41st time, welcoming 85 vessels from across north America, not to mention thousands of visitors along the quays who were assisted by a small army of volunteers, without whom the event could not have happened. The quayside was busy too with activities ranging from maritime trivia, lectures on scrimshaw, visual signalling at sea, protection of waters, and the role of British Columbia during the war, as well shipbuilding (including Songhees canoes built from red cedar), while children were entertained with face-painting and more. On 1 September,…

The Comité International de la Méditerranée (CIM) has responded to suggestions that its rating rule is unfair by declaring that creating a level playing field among all kinds of classic yachts in all weather conditions is impossible. Ernst Klaus, of the CIM Rules Committee, made the comment as he answered criticisms made by French yachtsman Bruno Troublé in our last issue. Former America’s Cup skipper Troublé wants to trial a new Med handicap system based on the IRC rule, but with a classicspecific element that is yet to be drawn up. His proposals follow a survey of members of the Association Française des Yachts de Tradition (AFYT) last year about the validity of the CIM rule as a rating system. Klaus answers Troublé’s individual points below, but meanwhile he told…

You didn’t fancy being a tailor? My parents ran a Savile Row tailors, a very rarefied atmosphere! As a child I used my pocket money to buy wrecked dinghies and restored them with help from shipwrights in the yards where we kept our Metre boats. I would ask endless questions about what they were doing and why and could I have a go? Apart from frequently being told to sit quietly and pay attention, they were always very obliging. I simply felt free and at home knocking around in boatyards. How have your years in internet marketing helped with running a boatyard? In 1994 the marine industry was on its knees, so I retrained as an engineering CAD designer, later I started my own internet consultancy. It gave me plenty…

MECUM USA speed king’s austerity runabout “Pleasure craft from the shops of the raceboat king, that are built side by side with the Miss Americas, have always had the reputation for being the softest riding of all speedboats.” So ran an advert for the new 1930 line-up of Gar Wood boats. That Garfield Wood was “the raceboat king” is unarguable. Born in 1880 to a ferry boat operator father, Gar went on to build an industrial empire that funded his passion, becoming the first man to break 100mph on water, claiming the world waterspeed record five times and bagging a huge trophy haul with 10 legendary Miss Americas. When he built a 33ft (10m) triple-cockpit runabout for himself, America’s wealthiest sportsmen clamoured for one of their own. Garwood Industries was…

Despite its title, the Beccles Wooden Broads Cruiser Show is a private gathering of enthusiasts with no entry fee, no membership fees, no hidden agenda, no commercial sponsorship and nothing to sell. The only cost for those wishing to bring their boat is the mooring fees charged by the Beccles harbourmaster. The event is the brainchild of Dave Wooltorton who wanted to fill the gap left by the demise of the Vintage Wooden Boat Association (VWBA) annual rally. The events were a valuable opportunity for the owners of these increasingly rare craft to come together and share their experiences. Dave decided to concentrate on this aspect and timed the new event to coincide with the annual Beccles Carnival Weekend in August. The 2018 event was its fourth edition and lasted…

It was a Swede called Bengt Kinde who, in 1933, commissioned Knud Reimers to design the Tumlare. A member of the Arsta Bay Yacht Club in Stockholm, Bengt wanted a boat that would be economical to build, seaworthy, easy to sail and simple, to allow him to sail in the region’s archipelago. Bengt’s boat was built at Kalle Johansson’s shipyard at Norrtälje, with Huon pine planking which had, apparently, been stored in a nearby attic for 70 years. She was christened Aibe when she was launched in 1934, and she is still sailing today, based in France. Tumlare is Swedish for porpoise, and in the plural they are variously referred to as Tumlaren (the Swedish word) or Tumlares. Reimers described the design as a combination of a Norwegian 19.5 square…

“Think of the Eventide as the sort of boat you can make to be what you need, either a shoestring boat for day sails or, as I chose, a modern wood epoxy composite yacht, fully kitted out for serious sailing, as well as comfortable day sails. She is sea kindly and steady under sail or motor, stands up to her canvas well and as many have noted, is no slouch. Fiddler’s Green, with 5ft 8in (1.72m) head room, has five berths, holding tank for the heads, water filter for the galley, decent cooker with oven, heater, fridge with freezer, LCD lights, decent motor (Beta 17), good, well maintained tan sails… all the mod cons. She is a boat I am proud of and I know will take me anywhere. She’s…

TENBY, WALES First Tenby lugger in more than a century August saw the launch of the first Tenby lugger for more than 100 years, reports Clare McComb. The 24ft (7.3m) lugger Heritage (left) was started in 2011 by a local EU grant-aided consortium, MITEC. The boat is built in larch on oak, to traditional methods. In late Victorian times these 16-28ft (4.9-8.5m) open boats with their dipping lugs were a familiar sight along the Welsh coast, with almost 70 registered at Tenby from 1890-1914. Once the hull was built, West Wales Maritime Heritage Society (WWMHS), stepped in to complete the project at its base at historic Hancock’s Boatyard at Pembroke Dock. WWMHS has also acquired Margaret, the last remaining Tenby Lugger, and its next task is to restore her back…

WORKSHOP Building a handy sawing bench BY ROBIN GATES A decent bench for ripping and cross-cutting timber by hand can’t be had for love nor money. Saw horses and trestles are too high, have mean-width tops and their splayed legs foul the saw. Some are even plastic. A Black & Decker Workmate, perhaps? Even at its lowest height of 23.5in (60cm) it’s still too high for most to get a comfortable knee-clamp on a board and saw at an efficient angle. I designed this sturdy sawing bench at an ergonomic height of 20in (51cm) for Mr & Mrs Average, with a 30in (76cm) by 11_in (29cm) top to support broad timber, and vertical legs for ripping close to the edge. For ease of availability it’s made from 2.4m (7ft 10in)…