Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Classic Boat

Commissioned by the Norfolk Broads Yachting Company (NBYCo) during the golden age of Broadland charter sailing holidays, Rogue’s days as a hire yacht were brought to an early end by the consequences of war. Her subsequent passage through the hands of a succession of dedicated private owners has included Government requisition, three restorations, a prolonged spell on Cambridgeshire’s Fens and racing success on her native Broadland waters. Rogue’s story began with the laying of her keel in 1913 by NBYCo’s Wroxham boatyard. It is believed that the 27ft (8.2m), gaff-rigged Rogue and her sister yacht Vagabond were designed by the yard’s foreman, Alfred Pegg. They were intended to be an enlarged and improved version of a successful series of yachts built for NBYCo’s hire fleet since 1909. The five-berth sister…

Many of us will have looked longingly at large yachts and wished we owned one. Many will have bought or built their first boat as a teenager and will have seen their boat-owning life as a progression from small dinghy or canoe through to ever larger and more luxurious craft. But life will eventually tell you that the simple things in life bring the most pleasure and for many, it is a realisation that takes them back to the smaller boats of their younger days. The simplest form of boating is a canoe or a rowing boat. In the past, rowing boats were the mainstay of most harbours, and the Viking longboats took their oarsmen to the far reaches of the then known world. Today, unfortunately, we tend to think…

FARIDA Laurent Giles gem Around the mid to late 20th century, British innovation in sailing boat design was at a pinnacle, with groundbreaking designers like Uff a Fox, Laurent Giles, John Illingworth and Angus Primrose leading the world. The 35ft cutter Farida, launched to a Laurent Giles design in 1939, slightly precedes the fury of post-war innovation, but when you consider than she’s almost contemporary with Whooper (1937) which, at a similar size and from the same designer, has won probably more classic racing silver than any other yacht in… well, certainly Britain, you can be assured she’ll fly. Her form manages to be both unusual and beautiful, a trick Giles was sometimes able to pull off. She was re-launched in 2019 after a complete, no-expense-spared restoration, and made a…

It’s been business as usual at Stirling and Son, under the historic Number One Covered Slipway, and at the ‘sister yard’ in Treluggan, over the border in Cornwall. A huge Norwegian ice-class wooden motor yacht still dominates the east slip at Stirling and Son, and she’s been joined by the 47ft (14.3m) McGruer sailing yacht Rinamara on the west slip. There is also the never-ending stream of new clinker dinghies, the most recent of which was delivered to her new owner for Christmas. There has been a significant increase in welding and engineering work at the slipway too. Treluggan’s sheds have the overspill of smaller boats and these include the delightful 35ft (10.7m), 1963 Arthur Robb teak yawl Nin Dar Anna, undergoing a refit. You can read our feature on…

The relationship that develops between an artist or maker and his or her hand tools is difficult to describe, but the pain felt when a tool is lost might be compared to losing a finger – because it’s in the hand that the loss is most keenly felt. A replacement may do the job but will never take the place of one which, over years and projects, grew to be an extension of the worker’s arm. A look inside the tool chest of an old shipwright reveals chisels worn to glimmering steel stubs, hand saws shrunken to pad saws by so much sharpening, and planes bearing dark imprints of the hands which pushed them across miles of timber. Over a working lifetime these tools have become a family, perhaps a…

In the late summer and early autumn of 2020, the clouds briefly parted between lockdowns and the world stepped outside for a short spell of freedom. Throughout spring and summer, boatbuilding and restoration work had continued around the world behind closed doors at a steady, uninterrupted pace, but sailing had been put on hold. Amid a series of ever more affirmative press releases (“We will go ahead!”) from the biggest beano of them all – Voiles de Saint-Tropez – a lean shape was taking form in a shed on the Tuscan coast. In the end, the press releases came true, and that shape, a newly-rebuilt Bar Harbor 31 called Scud, was ready. With the huge rig, low freeboard and menacing, low-profile upperworks, she looked dangerous, and so she proved to…

Five decades after Sir Robin Knox-Johnston won the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race to become the first person in history to sail solo and non-stop around the globe, a second cache of some 2,000 negatives covering his preparations and return to Falmouth in April 1969, has been discovered. The first batch of 3,000 images was saved from being thrown in the skip, when former Sunday Mirror photographer Bill Rowntree happened to return to the Mirror’s old offices at Holborn Circus to attend a pension meeting and bumped into the picture editor who asked if they were worth keeping. Rowntree put the box under his arm and took it home, where it might have stayed hidden in his cellar forever. Now a second box of equal historic importance has come to…

The last 12 months has been a very busy period for the team rebuilding the Thames sailing barge Pudge in dry dock at the Fullbrige in Maldon. The major overhaul led by Kevin Finch on behalf of the Thames Barge Sailing Trust includes a new deck and beams, stem and new king planks either side of new hatches. Pudge was built in 1922 by the London & Rochester Trading Company in Rochester, Kent. She was requisitioned in May 1940 while in Tilbury, drafted to Dover and thence to Dunkirk to take part in Operation Dynamo. Pudge is one of four surviving Dunkirk spritsail barges. She ceased trading in 1960. She is expected to return to sail in May 2022 for her 100th birthday.…

The teenaged yacht conservator Ash Faire-Ring has been back at work on his restoration project after taking two months out to sail around the UK on his friend’s oyster smack Primrose. Since returning in November, he has been busy replanking his 34ft (10.4m) Thames sailing barge yacht Growler in its homemade, unpowered, unheated tarpaulin tent. Ash was hoping for a summer launch last year, but the new aim is to complete the inner layer of planking, then tackling the outer skin before the engine goes in in the first week of March. “Very exciting times,” as Ash put it. Growler was built in 1922 on Conyer Creek in Kent.…

NEW KIM HOLMAN YACHT The newly-launched 43ft wooden sloop Cass must be the first new wooden Holman yacht since the birth of the GRP era SPEED VS AUTHENTICITY The debate is well rehearsed on the Med, but how does it play out on the East Coast smack racing scene? RUN RABBIT RUN The 33ft Dick Carter yacht that prevailed against the giants to win the 1965 Fastnet, now restored. PLUS… We visit the Rhoda Mary Shipyard where Luke Powell built Pellew; Tom Cunliffe on the fine art of a free lunch; the America’s Cup Britain nearly won; all about blocks; and much more APRIL 2021 ON SALE Friday 12 March, 2021 Available online 30 YEARS AGO March 1991, CB33 We kicked off this issue with a visit to Pier Piersma…

DEVON Sharing traditional skills Newly launched Cremyll Maritime Training aims to create a community of people learning and sharing the skills of traditional boatbuilding and seamanship. Based at Cremyll in Devon, the project is part of a wider series of initiatives driven by Dominic and Barbara Bridgman and their fellow directors Robert Webster, Simon de Groot and Debbie Risbourough. The CIC, or Community Interest Company, was formed in 2016 to save the Tamar sailing barge Lynher from destruction. “Our objective is simple: to introduce more and a wider range of people to learning the skills required to preserve our maritime heritage," said a spokesman. Thanks to the Earl of Edgcumbe they have secured the Gymnasium, built as a training centre by the Royal Navy at Cremyll in 1899, as a…

MARINER’S SELECTION An essential selection of items that might find a place on every traditional boat or boatyard. The sailmaker’s needles, palm, hook, beeswax and twine wouldn’t do Ben Ainslie much good as he races in the Prada Cup in Auckland, even if he does have ‘real’ sails, but they are all items still used today by a few traditional sailmakers. classicmarine.co.uk BAG FROM SAILS We always enjoy the products of German company 360Grad, which makes bags and accessories from recycled sails. The brand’s spring and summer 2021 collection uses a series of carefully selected colours: “The yellow stands for optimism, luminosity, spirit, sunshine, light. The grey means strength, resilience, and serenity. Thus, our models in the yellow/grey combination stand for confidence and patience – strength and hope. Everything will…

The plan was simple. Beverly and I would have a sort of training cruise for navigating locks, rivers and bridges, and with uncertainty about how far we could go with the various Covid restrictions, we decided to explore as much as we could of the Thames. We thought we’d certainly reach Henley and Sonning and perhaps get up as high as Oxford before the first really low bridge stopped us. As a highlight, we planned to celebrate our 39th wedding anniversary at the French Horn in Sonning where we spent our wedding night 39 years ago. September promised perhaps a little less congestion on the river than August, before getting her back into healthy saltwater for the winter. And so, on 29 August after tea, we set off eastwards from…

When someone is drowning out at sea there is always a need for speed but there are so many aspects to rescue at sea. Anyone going to the rescue has to first of all get to the wreck and then when they have rescued the survivors they have to get safely back to the shore. It is a delicate balance and in the past the need to survive has always taken precedence over the speed factor. Two centuries ago, trade by sea was at its height but relied on sailing ships which in turn relied on the wind. Too little wind and they could be in trouble close to the shore. Too much wind and they could also be in trouble close to the shore and for the watchers on…

Hughes: +44 (0)207 349 3758 Email: steffan@classicboat.co.uk KILRUSH, IRELAND Dublin Bay 21: boats 3 and 4 well on the way The rebirth of an entire class sounds like the stuff of pipe dreams, but it is precisely what has been going on for the last few years at the Kilrush Boatyard in County Clare. The classic yacht restoration scene in Ireland may not be as evolved as it is in the UK, USA or many European countries, but it has a great champion on its side in the form of one-man dynamo, yachtsman and yachting historian Hal Sisk. Hal first came to our attention for the very authentic, detailed restoration of GL Watson’s 36ft (11m) cutter Peggy Bawn of 1896, a restoration that set a new bar in smaller yachts.…

Star Yachts has received two new orders – “not big ones, but both in new directions” said Star Yachts’ Win Cnoops. Win is known for building, under his Star Yachts moniker, some lovely, traditional, wooden, strip-plank motor launches in varying sizes. The new orders are for a 19ft (5.8m) “fast launch” without the customary stepped deck, at the customer’s request; and an 18ft (5.5m) version of the open 16-footer (4.9m), the yard’s first boat to receive electric drive. “With the extra 2ft in length, she’s going to look very sleek indeed!” said Wins. Build has just begun on the 18 (left), and the 19 (right) will start straight after that. Win tells us that his boatbuilding neighbour at the historic Underfalls Yard, John Raymond Barker, best known for the build…

BY ROBIN GATES Half the secret of planing the face of a small board successfully is securing the work – the other half is using a well-tuned hand plane. The basic set-up is to butt the end of the board against a low planing stop with its far edge supported by bench dogs, to prevent the board from pivoting. Commercial versions are often metal, some dogs being complicated by ball catches or springs while some planing stops have teeth like a rip saw to dig into end grain – risking damage to both plane and user if you miss your stroke. Using hardwood offcuts and hand tools you can make entirely safe versions which cost nothing and suit your own requirements. In this instance a blind mortise for the planing…

It has been wonderful to see Andrillot back on the water after her recent refit, making the swift passages for which she was designed (CB390). As the first of the legendary Vertues she is a pretty special boat: there can only, ever, be one first. However, the boat we see today is quite different from that which slid down the slipway at Moody’s boatyard in Bursledon on a spring day in 1936. That boat was a 25ft (7.6m), gaff-rigged cutter, with a short, low coachroof. There was no propellor and she had a pretty basic layout down below. Her surprisingly tall, 37ft (11.3m) mast, stepped well into her, illustrated Laurent Giles’ latest thinking on how a modern gaff cutter should look. Nic Compton’s superb photos show that even with her…