Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Classic Boat

Jean-Luc Van Den Heede was awarded the Pindar/IACH Cape Horners Lifetime Achievement Award during the a star-studded Cape Horners annual lunch in November. The 78-year-old French sea-dog has rounded The Horn 12 times – the most for any living circumnavigator: six times solo east-about, four times solo westabout, once as a member of a two-man delivery crew and once while cruising in 2014. The former maths teacher still holds the world record for the fastest solo west-about circumnavigation of the world, which he completed in 122 days, 14 hours, 3 minutes and 49 seconds back in 2004, together with the record for the Golden Globe Race set in 2018. Receiving the award from long-time yacht sponsor Andrew Pindar OBE, Jean-Luc said “I am quite surprised and very honoured. In France,…

IN ASSOCIATION WITH Welcome once again to the annual Classic Boat Awards in association with Classic Marine, where we celebrate the best in the sometimes unsung world of classic and traditional boatbuilding and restoration. The pages that follow feature everything from antique restored sailing yachts of all sizes to new, cutting-edge, spirit-oftradition yachts and just about everything else you could imagine in between. Here, too, are new and restored powered vessels, and a few contenders for centenarians still sailing today, in partnership with Gstaad Yacht Club. Some have been complete rebuilds, others partial, and yet more, of course, brand new. Sailing yacht restorations seem to have continued the big comeback started last year. We also have a new category – for this year at least – which comprises three unique,…

Here was Integrity, afloat in Nome, just where I had left her. The harbour freezes over during the winter, so she had been hauled ashore to a sheltered spot and covered in snow. It wasn’t quite your average travel hoist; she came up a gravel slipway on a trailer, towed by a Caterpillar snow plough (a type of modern husky team with a horse power boost). Given William Scoresby and crew had managed to repair the keel of a 300T ship in the Arctic by careening her between ice flows, I felt confident that extracting Integrity from the water was simple fare for the inventive men of Nome, before they returned to the more pressing and potentially lucrative task of hoovering gold nuggets off the sea bed. In order to…

DUNKIRK LITTLE SHIP Lazy Days Dunkirk fever – and that’s not an exaggeration – has been building for a long time in anticipation of the 2025 ‘return’ when the remaining fleet make a commemorative cruise from Ramsgate to Dunkirk and back, just as they did in 1940 to save 338,000 troops in Operation Dynamo. It’s not too late to join. Henley Sales and Charter have to on their books – the little launch Lady Isabelle that was the smallest in the fleet when she went over in 2005 – and this, Lazy Days, veteran of many returns as well as Operation Dynamo itself of course. In fact – she’s already booked on to the 2025 return with the new owner in mind! She was built at the Hyland yard in 1930…

NORFOLK FORAYS An ex-Marine looking for an adventurous, ethical life, had the 1923 King’s Lynn smack restored for adventures on the Norfolk coast SAILING HINCKLEY The Maine yard of Hinckley is synonymous with high-end picnic (motor) boats, but here is a recently restored wooden yawl built by the famous yard in 1966 FINISHING SCHOOL Our annual update from the glossy world of varnish, and a look at how chandler Alasdair Flint keeps his bright-finished Vertue looking like this! PLUS… The restored Dunkirk Little Ship White Rose; a life on the charter wave on Mylne yacht The Blue Peter; the history of yacht club arguments; and more on MARCH 2025 ISSUE ON SALE 14 February 2025 Or why not subscribe? SAILING TODAY WITH YACHTS & YACHTING IN THE FEBRUARY ISSUE •…

In 1915 the New York Yacht Club commissioned Nat Herreshoff to produce a new one-design, 40ft (12.2m) LWL, which would be suitable for cruising as well as racing, and which would bridge the gap between the 1905 New York 30s and the 1913 New York 50s. The result was the New York 40 class – or the Fighting Forties as they would become known – a gaff cutter (or, with the forestays for both headsails converging at the stem and with the aft of the two sails being the larger one, perhaps it is better described as a sloop with a jib topsail). Twelve of the new boats – each with custom interior fit-outs – were ordered by members of the NYYC and all of them were built in about…

Istanbul museum buys Cangarda The Rahmi M Koç Museum of Istanbul (est 1994) recently expanded its massive maritime collection by acquiring the 138ft (42m) steel-hulled American steam yacht Cangarda of 1901. She was built by Pusey & Jones of Wilmington (Delaware) for the Michigan ‘lumber baron’ Charles Canfield and named after his and his wife’s surnames: CANfield and GARDner. During the second ownership in Canada in 1927, the yacht hosted the then Prince of Wales, his brother Prince George (later Duke of Kent) and the British and Canadian PMs: Stanley Baldwin and William Lyon Mackenzie King. After years of progressive neglect, Cangarda eventually sank in 1999. A rescue was undertaken by Elizabeth Meyer and the hull then lay on the hard at Fairhaven (Mass) with the machinery and woodwork in…

It’s easy buying a boat, although I’ve only bought a few in my life, having built some and sold a few. How and from whom I bought Fesquie, a National 12, and my first dinghy, is lost to the miasma of memory, but it can’t have been hard, or the selling of her. Life was simpler in those days, and when Sally came into my field of vision, hanging to a mooring off Hamble, the transaction was similarly straightforward. A price, a handshake – probably not even that – and she was mine. In the three lever arch files I compiled containing details of her build, plans, ownership and photos, there is but a single sheet of paper with proof of her sale, and the signature of one Brian Cooper,…

Rocca, a small family boatbuilder based near Paris, were among the pioneers of leisure boating in the wake of the economic boom of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of its popular 15ft 1in (4.6m) outboard dinghies was later modified to accommodate an inboard Renault 4-cylinder engine, a rare witness to the forgotten venture of the largest French carmaker on the nautical market. When Domenico Rocca emigrated from his native Italy and arrived in France in the early 1920s, wood was the foremost material in boatbuilding. Domenico started his career at Chauvière, a then-famous aeroplane propeller builder also building river canoes, a few runabouts and some great racing boats. He spent a few years learning the trade as a foreman, before setting up his own business in Vitry-sur-Seine in 1928…

How was Baruna’s deck originally built TM Baruna’s deck consisted of Port Orford cedar planks fastened to the spruce deck beams with bronze wood screws and plugged. The seams were caulked and payed with Jeffery’s Marine Glue No1. Bronze cross-strapping was installed at the main mast and aft of the deck house to provide extra strength under sail. A mahogany bulwark and cap rail completed the structure. The original deck had been replaced, with a plywood sub deck overlaid with teak – all somewhat rotten through. She also had her Barient winches, a milestone in development, being the first two-speed, geared in both directions. They were named after the developers Jim Michael and Tom Moseley’s yachts, Baruna and Orient. Baruna was a testing platform for Barient hardware and saw numerous…

If doors, drawers, lids and flaps of yacht furniture are to operate smoothly, their long edges and those of supporting frameworks must be straight and square. The same is true of boards bonded edge to edge, while broad surfaces must be flat. Machines churn out these parts consistently, also generating noise and dust, but for workers who appreciate the quietude of a more hands-on approach, the essential plane is a jointer which in any case makes a cleaner cut. Planing high spots while riding clear of lows, the jointer’s intermittent shavings lengthen, until one unbroken shaving signals end-to-end uniformity. Jointers can be huge – that used by a Cooper making barrel staves may be longer than the Cooper is tall and must be supported upside down on legs while staves…

In late August last year, the 45th Victoria Classic Boat Show filled the city’s inner harbour with a stunning display of power, sail, and working vessels. The annual event, which began in 1978 as a celebration of Canada’s west coast maritime heritage, drew 83 boats from throughout the province, Alaska, and waters of Puget Sound and the Pacific Coast. Unlike festivals with a schedule of speakers and demonstrations, this event, hosted by the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, is strictly about boats. All weekend, owners conducted tours and told build and history facts; plein air artists and musicians performed on decks; and a team of overly qualified judges combed every entrant in search of winners for a list of fitting awards. Among them were builders Abernathy and Gaudin, designer Tad…

Building wooden vessels at the edge of the sea is woven into the history of the tiny island of Carriacou. Traditionally built to carry fish and cargo, these wicked fast sloops now race throughout the Caribbean, thanks to a renaissance of interest and talent, fuelled by the love of Summer Cloud. The 39’ (11.88m) beauty was commissioned in 1995 by Antiguan businessman, Eddie Barreto, to replace his Carriacou sloop, Summer Wind. Years of fishing had taken a toll on the 1982 boat, so he asked Baldwin DeRoche to build a new one on Carriacou’s sister island, Petite Martinique. The new vessel was bronze fastened, with silver Bali planks from Guyana, a green heart keel, white cedar frames, and local floors. When hull and rig were complete, Barreto sailed her home…

When my crew and I fetched up in Mystic Connecticut in the late summer of 1983 aboard the 35-tonne pilot cutter Hirta, we passed through the bascule bridge in the centre of the little wooden town into the wonderland of ships, boats, artefacts and workshops that is the working Seaport Museum. The Charles W Morgan, built in 1841 to hunt the whale, the Grand Banks schooner LA Dunton and Olin Stephens’ masterpiece Brilliant set a unique backdrop, but it was the people who will always remain in my mind. Shipwrights, blacksmiths, riggers and sailors were keeping the ancient skills alive as they built boats, maintained historic square riggers and sent classic yachts out across the ocean. As you’d expect with so many saltwater people, the social scene was colourful in…

PLYMOUTH, DEVON All go at historic slipway A busy autumn is leading into a busy winter at Stirling and Son at the No 1 Covered Slipway in Plymouth’s naval dockyard. The 80ft (24.4m) Brixham sailing trawler Vigilance is reaching the final phase of her comprehensive hull and decks restoration on the eastern slipway. She was launched in 1926 from Upham’s shipyard in Brixham, where she will return to early next year for fit out and rigging by volunteers of the Vigilance of Brixham Preservation Trust before commissioning ready for her centenary year. The western slipway is occupied by the 84ft (25.6m) Knud Reimers sailing yacht Agneta which is beginning a thorough hull restoration. The yacht, with her semi-composite framing and varnished topsides, is suspended above her ballast keel while the…

Cycling has certainly captured the imagination of sailors worldwide with the wall-to-wall coverage of the competition for the world’s oldest international sporting trophy, otherwise known as the America’s Cup, which these days features “cyclors” pounding away at pedals below deck like Lycra-clad galley slaves on a Phoenician trireme. I suppose this is progress of a kind as it’s smashed the world pedallo water-speed record previously held since 1968 by a pair of rather pink Brits in Majorca who not only had forgotten their sun-block but were trying to outrun an Orca and make it back ashore before they got grilled or eaten. Though we’ve never regained the America’s Cup since we lost the first one in 1851 this kind of stirring exploit nevertheless makes one proud to be British, particularly…