Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i Classic Boat

The America’s Cup Hall of Fame always throws a good party but what makes the inductions special is the reunion of Cup legends who come together to celebrate the Cup’s past, present and future. With the support of L’Oreal, Barcelona’s Museu Maritim de Barcelona was the stunning venue and guests dined under the gilded transom of the replica of John of Austria’s Royal Galley, after drinks in the presence of the Cup itself. The 1977 wining tactician and Hall of Fame member Gary Jobson was master of ceremonies and the host was the Herreshoff Maritime Museum home of the Hall of Fame. Cup guru and chairman of the Hall of Fame Selection Committee, Steve Tsuchiya, welcomed us before the proceedings got underway with a record number of honourees. Four inductees…

Since the era of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the natural beauty of the Lake District has prompted many to wax lyrical. The blend of verdant hills, rugged crags and fast flowing streams plunging down the hillsides into the dark profundity of the lakes has inspired many. There are few things in this world that can embellish this bucolic idyll but it’s fair to say that the sight of the Windermere 17 fleet in full flight, skimming across the lake, varnished hulls glistening and white sails aglow accentuate the natural beauty of the place in a way that few man made objects can do. The Windermere 17 class celebrated its 120th anniversary this year and is remarkable in the fact that it is not only one of the oldest…

THE SET UP I knew I wanted to build a clinker boat in the traditional way. I had heard about the Morgan Giles boatyard at Teignmouth, a place where some of the finest wooden boats had been crafted under the watchful eye of Frank Morgan Giles, boatbuilder and designer in the first half of the 20th century. And so, I found myself in Teignmouth Museum, studying the faded plans of a 14ft 7in (4.44m) sailing dinghy, originally built in 1950. It was just what I was looking for, a local clinker boat with history and so I persuaded my mate Conor that this was the one. We started lofting on a wet September day, laying two sheets of 8x4 ply on the workshop floor and painting them with thick white…

Classic Boat: Why was it necessary to replace the yacht as she was? Tony Morse: I remember vividly the first time I saw Baruna, standing across the marina in LA, utterly captivated by her profile. She was awe-inspiring, powerful, and majestic – her lines and proportions unmistakably bearing Olin Stephens’ signature. I could already envision her restored, with every detail in mind. Baruna is historically significant in offshore yacht racing. But over the years she had become neglected and needed more than just a basic restoration. She required a new owner with the passion and finance to restore her to her glory – with touches of modern comfort coupled with today’s glues and paints to ensure she could safely see out the next 100 years. It might sound simple but…

HONING PADDLE Tiredness and dull tools are a cheerless combination soon remedied by a mug of tea and a spell at the sharpening stones. While the tea brews and the body adjusts to angling a tiny interface of tool steel correctly upon the stone, so the mind turns to what’s happening at the cutting edge. The feeling when the bevel finds its sweet spot compares to that moment when sails fill and the boat comes alive in the hand upon the tiller. You forget the hassle endured in getting to this point; everything is falling into place. Despite our better knowledge of physical science behind the process, a mystical aura surrounds the rituals and materials of sharpening. Where space permits, an area set aside for sharpening will be found rewarding,…

2025 AWARDS SHORTLIST The boats that wowed the world in 2024. Make sure you have a read and cast your vote. This photo shows Dorothy, last year’s winner in the small restored sailing yacht category RIGGING TO WIN Seeing the two New York 40s, Rowdy and Chinook, match race for the first time in 2024 was, for those present, the spectacle of the year. We look at Chinooks’ re-rig back to gaff. DRESSED TO KILL Sydney design student Madeline McCormick had a photo assignment to complete. The answer came in the form of a fashion shoot aboard the 8-M yacht Defiance. PLUS… Celebrating maritime ways in the Pacific Northwest; a wooden runabout from Renualt; sailing in Alaska; a Carriacou sloop in the West Indies FEBRUARY 2025 ISSUE ON SALE 5…

An evening in late September 2022, dusk. I arrive at Fox’s vast boatyard, on the River Orwell in Suffolk, just in time to meet a boat being carefully reversed between the buildings on a low loader. It’s something of an occasion: my first view of the yacht that I first heard of over 30 years ago. She is Selina King, the largest and finest of Arthur Ransome’s yachts, and now, after over half a century of very mixed fortunes in Bermuda and America, she is coming home at last, to complete her restoration in Harry King’s yard at Pin Mill, where she was built. She has been delivered to Fox’s because the narrow lane down to Pin Mill couldn’t cope with the lorry and its load, and for the benefit…

For the first time in its 28-year history, the Boat Building Academy (BBA) in Lyme Regis, Dorset, has enrolled more woman than men in its flagship 40-week course: the newest student intake comprises eight women and seven men. The most women enrolled previously was four, and for two years there were no female students at all. Diversity in boatbuilding has long been a concern, say the BBA, and the rise in female applicants is the result of a far-reaching diversity and inclusivity mission launched just over a year ago by the BBA and Belinda Joslin, founder of Women in Boatbuilding (WIBB). The multi-faceted strategy puts diversity at the heart of the academy’s priorities from the top down, and includes practical and financial support. A five-day Women’s Workshop course now runs…

BONHAMS Cartoon capers at Monaco Comic book art from Superman to Dan Dare owes a lot to pioneering French illustrator Ernest Montaut (1878-1909), whose renderings of early automobile racing exaggerated form, distorted perspective and added “speed line” flourishes to create the impression of wild and hedonistic break-neck velocity. But when it came to illustrating the remarkable 1908 Monaco powerboat race he had little need to exaggerate, as the contenders – and events that unfolded – were even more cartoonish than comic book fantasies. In the blue-riband 200km race, the British Wolseley-Siddeley broke down on the start-line, the Italian entry didn’t even make it that far as it had already caught fire and sunk (well, it was a Fiat), and one of the French contenders had earlier sliced a spectator boat…

Some said it couldn’t be done. Rescuing 338,000 troops from Dunkirk and the clutches of the Nazis in 1940 using a motley flotilla of small pleasure vessels from English shores and rivers seemed too dinky and unconventional to some at the time. But the steel-hulled Llanthony played her part heroically alongside the 800 or more other ‘little ships’ at Operation Dynamo, today seen as an audacious, imaginative and (meteorologically) lucky answer to an impossible predicament. Eight decades later, when the small, upper Thames boatyard of Michael Dennett took on a complete restoration, some again said it couldn’t be done. You can guess the outcome from the photos on these pages, but perhaps not the question: how would a yard like Dennetts take on a yacht… it’s tempting to call Llanthony…

This morning I visited my sailmaker before breakfast. Pete Sanders of Sanders Sails in Lymington starts work early, so when a rain squall rattled my window at 0530 I gave up on the shut-eye project, brewed a quick mug of tea and shovelled myself into the Volvo with my ‘code zero’ headsail. The torque-transferring luff rope for the top-down furler had settled in and needed six inches taking off so I could winch it up again for the tight luff we all seek. I’d thought about doing it myself, but opted for the safer option of handing it to the guy who built it. Pete was in his office when I arrived, working on a sail design while tucking in to a round of buttered toast. As usual we spent…

Walking up river through Cowes, one street back from the edge of the Medina, many will know that your view of the water is somewhat hidden by the various boatbuilding yards that line the shore. The scene is well set with the sound of ferries coming and going, and the reassuring hammering and humming from shipwrights. Down Arctic Road, in a yard soaked in maritime heritage, Sam Fulford’s Wooden & Steel Ship Repairs is in the heart of the action. YARD HISTORY Constructed by George Henry Marvin in 1885, the Arctic Dry Dock, Marvin’s yard, and the yacht building and fitting yard on the plot, were likely the single largest yacht building and fitting enterprise in Britain at the time. It housed and worked on King George V’s racing cutter…

The 25th Voiles de Saint-Tropez at the beginning of October had to be celebrated in style and the week was a succession of conviviality with ideal weather almost daily on the water and a lot of fun ashore in the evenings. The event itself is much older than the 25 years now celebrated. In 1981, the first Nioulargue Regatta was held with a race between the Swan yacht Pride and the 12 Metre yacht Ikra. The course was from Saint-Tropez to the Nioulargue buoy then back to Pampelonne Beach, where the loser treated the winner to a late lunch. In the following years, La Nioulargue grew into the spectacular season finale it is today and where, in the spirit of the original challenge, the finest classics can be seen together…

The Henley Sales and Charter (HSC) brokerage, founded (as Hambleden Sales and Charter) by Gillian Nahum in 1992, has been sold to Heather and Stephen Dennett, better known for their boatyard in nearby Chertsey. Dennetts is now something of a one-stop-shop, with the HSC’s extensive barn storage and office in Beale Park and, of course, the nearby boatyard. HSC has sold and imported boats internationally, as well as locally, over the years, with transactions in far-flung places like the USA, Jordan, Botswana, Italy, the Netherlands, France and more. Gillian (on the right in the photo) already has a long-standing relationship with the Dennetts: her boat New Venture was restored at the yard, a restoration that won a Transport Trust award. Gillian will stay on at HSC in a consultative role…

Of the boats I have sailed on over the years, some stand out. They include a multiple Bermuda race winner; a J-Class America’s Cup challenger; the first yacht to have been sailed singlehanded non stop around the world and, of course, Sally, the boat I have owned for nigh on 30 years. Each hold memories, some just flashes from a day’s sail, others encompassing many seasons. From a race aboard Moonbeam, it’s asking the skipper of that mighty Fife, hissing rail down in the Kyles of Bute, why a fellow skipper of another big Fife was on the runner tail and being told that it was the most important position that day; fail to get the new one on, and you risk losing the mast. The yawl Finisterre is better…

I started this summer’s Baltic Sea cruise with what was intended as a trip down Memory Lane. My boat Constance, an American Mason 44, lives in a heated shed on an island near the bottom end of Jutland and after the usual scrape round the local hardware stores to get her going after the winter we headed straight out for Fåborg on the bigger land mass of Fyn. The reason for the visit was to check out anything I could discover about Johanne, the 90-ton galeas-rigged trading ketch built in the town in 1929 in which I served 40 years later. I came close to losing my life aboard her, but I also met my lifelong shipmate, Roz. How Johanne and I fell in together is too convoluted a tale…

A few years after Britain’s lifeboat service was founded in 1824, the man on whose ideas it was based was involved in a spectacular rescue himself. Sir William Hillary was coxswain of the newly-built lifeboat at Douglas when, late on the stormy night of 19 November 1830, he and 13 volunteers rowed out to rescue the 22 crew of the mail packet paddle steamer St George, which had struck St Mary’s Rock about 400m north of the harbour entrance. While trying to manoeuvre close to the ship the lifeboat struck the rocks herself, breaking six oars and smashing the rudder. Then she upended throwing Sir William (who couldn’t swim) and several crew into the turbulent sea. He and others grabbed ropes and were hauled on deck of the St George…

HYSKIER Classic Little Ship motor yacht Hyskier was built for Robert Thom, heir to a family of Glasgow tea merchants. Robert Thom’s family enjoyed three summers of cruising the west coast of Scotland before the outbreak of the Second World War, during which Hyskier is recorded in 1940 as one of the Dunkirk Little Ships, and by 1942 was back in home waters as a member of the Clyde River Patrol, a flotilla of government requisitioned motor yachts operated by yachtsmen. These days, she’s in Brittany with her current owner, the French living legend, Gérard d’Aboville, best known for his solo ocean rowing adventures: 1980 across the North Atlantic (a year which began with him taking part in the Paris-Dakar Rally on a motorbike); and 1990 across the North Pacific. He…

Sprung moulding planes A full set of 18 matched pairs of round and hollow moulding planes, capable of making any moulding imaginable, would cost around £4,500 new but the two or three vintage pairs required to satisfy most needs may be had for pocket money. Better still, where one particular moulding is desired – an ogee or ovolo perhaps, to embellish panelling or beams – a dedicated moulding plane with iron shaped to that exact profile does the job. Whereas a round or hollow necessitates preliminary work of establishing a channel or fillet to guide it, the sole of a dedicated plane has a fence, fixing the distance of the iron from the edge of the work, and a stop preventing the iron cutting too deeply (2). The tricky part…

Sitting down on the parapet of the bridge over the river Great Ouse in St Ives I got to reflecting that there comes a time when a man, if he be a man at all, has to settle the score, reckon with his many failings, the vanity of his virtues and hollow wins, pay the piper, grasp the nettle and, when all is said and done, stand up. So I stood up. And as I did so I looked ever the ledge contemplating my beginning and end and the emptiness in between and saw the horror of my past, for there on the medieval masonry was a faint trace of faded, pale blue gel coat. It transported me back to that long, long, endless, endless, everlasting eternal summer of 1974.…