Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i Classic Boat

BARCOLANA CLASSIC Classics race on eve of the world’s biggest sailing race Trieste’s Barcolana race is offcially the biggest sailing race in the world – 2,689 boats in the 50th anniversary race in 2018 and a highly respectable 2,015 in 2019, all on the same two-mile long start line, writes Nigel Sharp. The day before this big race, however, there is the Barcolana Classic race, this year attracting 107 boats, 24 of them from host Yacht Club Adriaco, which is said to be the second oldest yacht club in the Mediterranean. I was sailing on the 1963 Cheoy Lee-built Jan Gilda, one of three Vertues taking part. Jan Gilda’s home port is Jezera in Croatia, about 180 miles down the coast, and she is owned and helmed by Croatian Trnovski…

Looking into the future can elicit feelings of dread. Mass extinction, climate change and cultured meat are, to most, the stuff of nightmares. But what about electric power? Electrically powered boats are much older than you might imagine. In late Victorian times, they numbered in their hundreds on the Upper Thames, powered by an extensive network of charging points. Nevertheless, getting behind the wheel of Landamore’s newest boat, the Mayfly 21, it was instantly obvious that electric power is, still, the future. Already, in small vessels designed for day-to-day use on inland waterways in the developed world, electric power is a no-brainer: Rob Marriott, of the Broads builder Landamores, says they have not sold a single diesel-powered Mayfly. Even in their second coming, electric boats have been around for at…

Building Thembi, our Ed Burnett-designed cutter, in 2005 opened the possibility of exploring waters previously out of reach in our aged, engineless Folkboat Sonas. An early voyage to the Faeroes in the Folkboat had provided a glimpse of the beauty to be found in the north and subsequently Thembi has spent four memorable seasons in Arctic waters. I came to sailing from a climbing and mountaineering background and was much influenced by the writing and adventures of Bill Tilman. My friend and climbing mentor Ken Wilson published Tilman’s omnibus and from reading those accounts dawned a realisation that the sea and a boat would be the perfect symbiosis with climbing in the far north or south. The next major influence came from my friend Alasdair Flint, owner of the immaculate…

HAVSÖRNEN Round Gotland Race winner from Tore Holm Havsörnen is the yacht that belonged to Philippe Fabre and whose refit was finished by his son Robbie after Philippe’s untimely death (p54-55). She’s a 52ft 11in (16.1m) bermudan cutter designed by the great Swedish naval architect Tore Holm, best known as a designer for the Universal classes, particularly 6s and 8s, and built at the Holm family yard in Sweden. Holm, as well as his famous metre boats, also drew a number of o.shore cruisers, of which this is perhaps the most notable, known largely for her victory in the competitive Round Gotland race in 1937, the year of her launch. She’s been winning races in her more recent history too, on the Mediterranean circuit. These have included winner in class…

Passion is by far the most effective fuel in circulation. One person who seems to know this concept well is Peter ‘Pete’ Langley, who in 1983 had both the intuition and the ability to revive the historic Port Townsend Foundry brand – that of a firm founded exactly 100 years earlier that had ceased its activities. Once upon a time, in the foundries of this extraordinary company, located in downtown Port Townsend, Washington, were built tugboats, passenger steam liners, steam engines and hardware, including that used in the construction of the celebrated Victorian-style mansions that still adorn the historic city centre. It is precisely from the hardware itself that Pete Langley set about starting again, and it is in this often-underestimated sector that he opted to concentrate his efforts. Listening…

Every summer since 1920, spirited small yachts have given their sailors that special feeling, that contented smile that comes from crossing the bay, tiller in hand, at the helm of a wooden boat that cuts through the chop – wind in your hair, spray in your face – like no other boat you have ever sailed. With an immense main sail, tall spruce mast and steady, full-lead ballast keel, the Herreshoff S-boats drive confidently through gusty winds and sail circles around other boats in light zephyrs. With 2019 marking the centennial anniversary of one of Nathanael Herreshoff’s most enduring and innovative yacht designs, his S-Class is still going strong. Large fleets of these one-design racers on Long Island Sound, Buzzards Bay and Narragansett Bay continue to inspire sailors with a…

Let no one, least of all this magazine, if only by implication, ever tell you that restoring an old wooden boat is easy. In 2010, Danish man Bendix Sandfoss Laxvig was visiting Copenhagen and spotted a 66ft (20.1m) ketch lying in Frederiksholm Canal. She’d been there for 26 years, letting the elements wreak their havoc on her fabric. Bendix, a lifelong member of the Frogman Corps (the Danish equivalent of the SBS or Navy Seals), had been sailing since the age of eight, starting with a friend in Optimists out of Elsinor and moving into the yacht-racing scene in Denmark, helming everything from Folkboats to X-boats, with some of the country’s most noted sailors. Through all these years, Bendix somehow managed to avoid owning a boat of his own. The…

To mark a decade of the National Historic Ships UK Photo competition, judges were asked to choose the best image from all the winners over the years. The above, ‘50 degrees south’ by Yasmin Mills, came out on top for its sense of drama, level horizon under testing circumstances and, presumably, some di. culty in capturing the shot in extreme conditions.…

Quiet Convenient Clean “Using a well-engineered electric outboard has been a revelation. The stress, mess and worry of oil, petrol, starting issues and sheer weight have melted like snow in April… the vital question is “how far will it go?”… the answer is “further than you think… certainly miles beyond anything I’ve asked of it in four years’ cruising…’’ TOM CUNLIFFE, writing in Classic Boat, Nov 2019 Epropulsion Spirit: _ 1018Wh battery _ Faster to charge _ Battery. loats if dropped _ Foldable tiller means only one cable to connect _ Three shaft length options _ Direct drive Torqeedo 1103: _ 916Wh battery _ GPS data on tiller gives speed & range indication _ Removable tiller (more compact for storage) _ Near-silent direct drive _ Much more robust than the…

SAWING Deeping and flatting Trees felled and cross-cut into logs are converted to smaller sections of usable timber at the sawmill using circular or band saws. Plain- or slash-sawn wood, cut tangentially to the annual rings, yields the most attractive grain but is prone to future movement as it dries, shrinks and warps. Quarter- or rift-sawn logs, cut radially, give more stable wood with straight but less interesting grain. For structural work the quarter-sawn is best, but in yacht furniture, where movement is accommodated by appropriate joints and framing, the eye-catching arches and swirls of plain-sawn material are often preferred. As hand tools have been replaced by more-convenient machinery, so also has the language describing their use disappeared from the workshop lexicon. Deeping, for example, is an old-school sawyer’s term…

DARLING OF THE REGATTAS Along with Ester, this 50ft Fife III yacht is the boat everyone was talking about this summer, in the Solent and the Med THE SHORTLIST FOR 2020 Voting begins for our annual awards KATHLEEN Indecently elegant 19th-century dayboat that has been owned by three successive generations of RNLI men PLUS… Cruising the Ionian Sea in an old Greek fishing boat; preview of a major new exhibition by boatbuilder artist James Dodds; a visit to the busy Dennetts yard on the Thames; and much, much more FEBRUARY 2020 ON SALE Friday 4 January, 2019 (or why not subscribe!) 30 YEARS AGO JANUARY 1990, CB19 Art, particularly in the colder months of the northern hemisphere winter, has always been a topic in this magazine. In 1990, we presented…

Tea clipper photo finish The Cutty Sark may be the most famous tea clipper of them all, but she never came close to eclipsing the speed achieved by rivals Ariel and Taeping in the fastest and closest tea race in history. The Taeping, laid down in 1863, and the 1865 Ariel were among the first generation of composite ships with wooden planking on iron frames. Yet even before the similarly constructed Cutty Sark joined the rivalry in 1869, the pair had made history in the epic 1866 tea race from Fuzhou in China. Passing and re-passing continuously on the long voyage, the pair raced neck and neck, logging 14 knots up the Channel, with Ariel signalling her arrival o. Deal 10 minutes ahead of Taeping. However, after waiting for the…

Butterfly Rose of Argyll, Mousehole (above) is a stunning large (141 x 170cm) oil painting of a maritime scene in Mousehole, Cornwall, and a wonderful study of both wind and light on the sails of a working boat It also shows fine life drawing skills in the figures of the crew. The winner of this years’ Classic Boat award at the 2019 Royal Society of Marine Artists goes to Tim Hall. Tim now concentrates on painting the Cornish sea and landscapes, and runs Cornwall painting holidays cornwallpaintingholidays.co.uk…

Integrity is a timber-built sailing boat based upon yacht designs of the late 1880s. She was designed and built by Stirling and Son Ltd in Plymouth, UK. Her vital statistics are 43ft (13.1m) LOD, with a weight of 23 tonnes. Her length over the spars is 60ft (18m) as she has a long bowsprit extending forward and a boom that projects over the stern. She has a topmast that can be sent aloft in fine weather or housed against the main mast in windy weather. She also carries a square sail for downwind work. She is traditionally built and rigged with a minimum of electronics and systems. The underlying essence of the boat is one of functional aesthetics. After a number of years of what could be termed extended sea…

Does the world need another plywood dinghy? That was certainly the question the top brass at the Old Gaffers Association must have asked themselves when they decided to commission a kit dinghy for amateur construction, writes Nic Compton. “There are plenty of dinghies made of clinker ply and fitted with gaffrigs to look traditional,” says OGA treasurer Tony Kiddle. “But we wanted a more modern take, more like a Heron; a family boat that’s still fun for the kids to sail on their own when they get older.” Designer Andrew Wolstenholme seems to have come up with the goods with this 13ft 6in, single-chine dinghy that looks quite a lot like – well, a Heron. To be fair, the OGA Dinghy (as it’s called) is longer, wider, has a deeper…

Edited by Stean Meyric Hughes: +44 (0)207 349 3758 Email: steffan@classicboat.co.uk At a time when many small, independent boatyards are being lost to waterfront development, it is heartening to see one gain a new lease of life. Everson’s, founded in 1889, is one of several boatyards on the River Deben, and its distinctive wooden sheds form an important part of the riverside character in the village of Woodbridge Renamed the Woodbridge Boatyard in 2010, the business had been up for sale for several years until it had the good fortune to come into the hands of Eric Reynolds, former boatbuilder, classic boat collector and heritage enthusiast. Eric had passed through Woodbridge on the train many times with no thought of buying a business there. That is until his wife was…

For fine work, the wood carver manipulates chisels and gouges using hands alone – driving the tool with one hand; restraining and steering it with the second hand wrapped around the shank while also resting on the wood itself. But for setting in a design with edge tools driven vertically, and the heavier work of roughing out (called ‘bosting in’) the short sharp blow of the mallet can be more e.ective A boatbuilder’s mallet is a hefty square-faced tool, typically wielded with some force when cutting mortises, whereas the wood carver’s mallet has a round head, shaped to meet the gouge equally from any angle. While the square mallet exposes only tough end grain to the punishment of repeated heavy blows, inevitably the round mallet striking all around its head…

The east coast is not like the south coast, which is just one of the reasons that charts of the east coast aren’t much use on the south coast. South coast charts aren’t much help on the south coast either. What’s needed is local knowledge. For example, on the south coast the main hazards to navigation are sea-school boats practising man overboard in harbour entrances, but you won’t find these on charts. Buoyage is different too. On the east coast, a red and white striped safe water buoy has a very specific meaning. If it’s on land, it indicates where water used to be. If by happy coincidence it’s afloat, it’s in water, which is great for the buoy but highly inconvenient for anyone approaching in a boat, as it’s…