Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i Classic Boat

The eighth Cowes Spring Classics was held over the weekend of 16-18 May with a mix of classic yachts large and small, bermudan and gaff, in attendance. The regatta got underway in warm sunshine with welcome drinks on the pontoon at Shepards Marina followed by an excellent crew barbecue at the Cowes Corinthian Yacht Club, regatta HQ for the weekend. The first race on Saturday morning was sailed in light winds with class wins for Volonte, Arrow (the latest addition to the local West Solent OD fleet making her first appearance at Cowes Spring Classics), and Gloriana, a Hereshoff 12 also making her first start, and the smallest boat in the regatta. After a lengthy lunch break, the wind picked up to perfect race conditions by late afternoon, providing an…

In Moreton Bay, near the mouth of the Brisbane River in Queensland, Australia, there are six sisterships of a class of keelboat designed in the late 1950s, all loved by their owners, who talk glowingly of their strength, seaworthiness, and more, not to mention their impressive racing records. The Tasman Seabird was designed by Alan Payne who would later achieve fame for Australia’s first America’s Cup challenger, the 1962-built 12-Metre yacht Gretel. “The intention was for a strong, robust, sea-kindly, ocean-racing yacht that rated well for its size and would cope with the worst conditions that the Tasman Sea and the Sydney Hobart race could deliver,” said David Payne, Alan’s nephew and a former draughtsman/designer at Alan’s practice. SEABIRD The first Seabird to be completed was Cherana, built by Trevor…

The Irish have always had a love for one-design boats. The Water Wag, designed as a sailing and rowing boat for Shankill Corinthian SC in 1886, is the first known OD, and the class still thrives 130 years later. The idea of ‘freezing’ developments and costs had great appeal over the handicap sailing of the age, with its ever-changing rating rules, and led to a plethora of small OD dinghy and keelboat classes across Ireland, and later the UK. One of these is the Fairy OD keelboat. Thirty three were built from 1902 to 1907 to form two fleets, one based in Belfast Lough, the second inland on Lough Erne. Remarkably, most are still sailing. Compare this record to cars from that era. How many of the 21,955 Oldsmobile R…

It’s high summer. The regatta scene is here and, as many of us know, when it comes to putting on a good time there’s none like the French. In my days as a pilot cutter owner I sailed in many a Gallic maritime spectacular. I’ve followed the samba band through the scattered streets of Paimpol, sung songs in the fish market at Douarnenez as cases of wine crashed onto the tables and the boats swam so thick in the harbour you could walk across it on their decks. I’ve sailed with a thousand-strong fleet through the impossible stacks of Les Tas de Pois, but perhaps the most memorable bash of them all fell to me down the Bay of Biscay at La Trinité. I can’t recall how we came to…

PLYMOUTH, DEVON, UK Vigilance returns Vigilance has been relaunched from Stirling and Son’s, No 1 Covered Slip, after a two-year restoration. The 78ft (23.8m) Brixham trawler was built by JW and A Upham of Brixham and launched in 1926. After almost a century in commission, she was suffering from timber and fastening decay and becoming increasingly misshapen. The Friends of Vigilance Preservation Trust secured a National Heritage Memorial Fund grant to restore the hull and decks. Restored in English Oak and much of that from her native Devon, she can look forward to fitting out and rigging in readiness for her second century of maritime activity. BEAULIEU, HAMPSHIRE, UK Buckler’s Hard boatyard expansion Buckler’s Hard Yacht Harbour must be one of the most beautiful ‘marinas’ (it really defies the word)…

This is a story of personal sacrifice, the importance of community, the serious abuse of kitchen tables and, above all, a super-human ability to simply keep going. It centers on Cachalot, a wonderful little vessel, elegant and, as we shall discover, incredibly tough. But this is really about people. Some have enjoyed the hell out of this boat, a few knocked her about, others picked up the pieces. To be blunt, this is a story that should have ended several times over. How many yachts featured in these pages have previously been “run over by a steamer”? We did check and it’s not a metaphor. Even Cachalot’s early years were mercurial. She first comes to light fleetingly in 1898, thanks to an ad in The Yachtsman, where she was described…

Antigua’s 2025 Classic Regatta was a mix of vintage, traditional, and modern classic vessels, blended together by the spirit of “The Gentlemen’s Race.” Moored Med-style in Admiral Nelson’s 300-year-old dockyard, captains and crew had an easy commute to daily happy hours sponsored by Red Stripe beer and English Harbour rum. A welcome party at the former gunpowder house, Boom, ignited a week of serious competition and camaraderie. Every boat had a story of pedigree, build, ownership, and the voyage to reach Antigua. This year’s head-turners included the 42ft (12.8m) Paul Johnson Venus design, Cherub, fresh from a rebuild after surviving a category four hurricane. Owner Angie Wolf’s exuberance led an all-female crew to an overall second-place finish in the Classic GRP class. The 1911 Bristol Channel pilot cutter Cornubia left…

As the maritime might of Venice dwindled in the 18th century, the city state ascended to new peaks of decadence with a gold-encrusted ceremonial barge that made British royal yachts look like a home-built Mirror dinghy. Centre stage in this circa 1732 Canaletto (above) is the doge’s 1727 ceremonial barge, a 35m long (115ft) floating palace with 8m (26ft) air draft and red velvet saloon seating 90 dignitaries. On the lower deck 168 rowers – four to an oar – pulled 42 sweeps, each 11m (36ft) in length, with 40 more sailors for other duties. If the doge’s name were an acronym it might stand for Department Of Government Extravagance. Now compare that with a contemporary British royal yacht, Portsmouth II, at just 16m long (53ft) with a crew of…

The term ‘motor sailer’ triggers people in different ways. Detractors from the “we hardly ever use the engine” camp will think of a high-sided tub that neither sails nor motors well, its owners not necessarily ‘quite the right type’ of people. Those who own them love the comfort and accommodation, and talk about punching through bad weather in slippers from the warmth of a wheelhouse. Others still who understand the concept, but have never tried it, harbour some envy about the whole concept. After all, who wants to sail to windward anyway? To others still, the term is a source of confusion. Is a motor sailer a motor yacht with a steadying rig? Or a motor yacht with an auxiliary rig? Or a sailing yacht with a bigger engine and…

While many readers will be familiar with the marine journalist Maurice Griffiths, and perhaps even of the marine artist Charles Pears, few may know the story of the intrepid yachtswoman they both married and who championed sailing for women. Dulce Hazel Kennard was born in France in 1900. By the 1920s, she was regularly writing articles for sailing magazines and, all too conscious of the fact that she was working in a male-dominated profession, used a pen name – Peter Gerard. It was the first name by which she was generally known for most of her life. She first met Maurice Griffiths when he visited the offices of a magazine where she worked to try to sell his articles. They were married in 1927 and jointly owned a converted Lowestoft…

OPPOSITION Ted Heath racing yacht This beautiful piece of mid-century, Sparkman & Stephen-designed sailing hardware in all its glossy mahogany glory, Opposition, formerly British Prime Minister Ted Heath’s second Morning Cloud, is as fine and as famous an example as they come from an era when racing yachts – even those built to the then quite new IOR Rule – could still look beautiful to anyone’s eye. Sixteen years on from a major rebuild undertaken at her original builders, Clare Lallow, Opposition still looks fresh out of restoration and comes available just when interest in boats of her era is on the rise: a new class for such yachts has been inaugurated by CIM at the Mediterranean classic regattas. Opposition is very carefully laid up indoors and is offered in…

Better boring and sawing with a backing piece Brad-point bits are generally held to be the best for boring clean holes in wood, and none better than Veritas bits from Canadian tool company Lee Valley. While the point centres the bit precisely on the spot two spurs scribe surgically around the hole, and only then do the cutting lips get to work, sending their shavings spiralling up the polished flutes. For boring blind holes such as pilot holes for screws this is all well and good, but if boring right through the wood the bit which entered so neatly at the surface will likely burst from the other side like a foot through a rotten garboard. A practical solution is to clamp the work to a backing piece, ideally of…

A mong the crowds in Ramsgate on 20 May, the day before the little ships left for Dunkirk on their commemorative, fiveyearly rally, there was a boy of about eight standing next to his dad, pointing at one of the boats, and asking anyone who’d listen: “what does that flag mean?” The boats dress up, but so do the people. Flags, medals and ties fly the colours of many things, Dunkirk things, of course, but military medals too, yacht club ties, fire service decoration, the list goes on. The people wanted to show they were part of something greater, fitting for Dunkirk really, one of many miracles without which we’d have lost the war to Nazi Germany. Another of those miracles flew overhead at lunchtime, a Spitfire making low fly…

She leaked! Sacre bleu! It was perhaps simply a way for Sally to tell me she’d been ashore too long and craved seawater. Out for the winter, when usually she’s kept afloat all year, with a week or two of fettling in spring, the months had slipped by, the weather remaining devious, until in early April a call from the yard suggested she might be better off launched, not least because she was blocking a couple of boats behind her. Now keeping your wooden boat sweet is second, actually third, to keeping your boatyard happy. Long ago, I had Sally out in a south coast yard where I learned that particular hard lesson. Your yard owner is actually second to your harbourmaster, but both are almost impossible to appease sufficiently;…

Should you have ever found yourself in the members’ room of the Scottish Malt Whisky Society in London, you might understand how our plan to cruise Scottish distilleries came about. Scotland has over 150 distilleries, and 30 or so are a short walk from beach, jetty or mooring; therefore, visiting them by boat made perfect sense. And even when not discovering distilleries, Scotland is a beautiful, challenging and uniquely rewarding cruising ground. One challenge you will face is the weather. I’m not sure the Scottish weather understands the Beaufort scale. In three months, I can count on my thumbs the number of days we had a perfect Force 4. It was either F5 and over or nothing. However, while windless days can be frustrating for those with sailing yachts, they…

Occasionally, as I’m drifting along some coast in a leisurely manner aboard my yacht, thoughts turn to just what an esoteric pursuit yacht cruising is; sailing for the sake of sailing. Think about it long enough and you start to realise what a leap of imagination it took for the first pioneers to take the step from sailing for commercial gain to simply going sailing. So I decided to look a little closer at the pioneers of yacht cruising and see what drove these early trailblazers. Delving back through the archives, I settled on three Victorian men who were pivotal in creating the pursuit we know today: John ‘Rob Roy’ MacGregor, Richard McMullen and Empson Middleton were central to its development. Naturally, they all shared a love of the sea…

PIONEER TRUST AND HARKER’S BOATYARD, ESSEX n these parts, they say that westerlies go around you, but easterlies go through you. It was a cold, steady easterly that blew through us and over the waters of the Colne and Blackwater estuary on a late April day, as the Class One smack Pioneer waited at her mooring in Brightlingsea Creek, Essex for her first sail of the year. It was also the first sail of the year for most of us in the ‘Spike Crew’: Dan, Ted, Tom, Tomasso and me, students of the 2025 Marine Surveying Training course run in Ipswich by Adian Tuckett and Martin Evans. After weeks in a classroom and poking around in the bilges of old boats, our heads were fit to burst with galvanic corrosion,…

SLIDING BEVEL For angles other than the perpendicular of the try-square and 45 degrees of a mitre-square, the essential measuring tool is a sliding bevel. The ‘sliding’ aspect refers to its slotted blade accommodating the pivot, its point of attachment to the stock. This is a relatively simple tool, pleasantly devoid of numbers. In transferring the angle between, say, a frame and a deck beam, the bevel is offered up, the blade locked and the tool carried to the wood awaiting marking out for a hanging knee to fill the space. Down the years, however, inventors have been as obsessed with devising a better blade lock as with designing a better mousetrap. Perhaps the most reliable lock is a straightforward threaded screw tightening on the cheeks and pinching on the…

DUNKIRK RETURN From Ramsgate’s send-off to our piped arrival into Dunkirk, we report on a glorious and often humbling crossing, and hear from the people who made the crossing 85 years after Dynamo. FASTNET CENTENARY Ahead of its 51st edition, we look back on 100 years of one of the greatest and most challenging yacht races MOONRAKER AND RONDETTO Two contenders for the most interesting pocket cruiser in the same issue and both under 30ft. DLS Moonraker, is a 1911 28ft sloop designed and built by Alfred Burgoine, now fully restored. Rondetto is the 25ft sloop built by JG Parham & Sons, based on the famed Nordic Folkboat. AUGUST 2025 ISSUE ON SALE 11 July, 2025 Or why not subscribe? SAILING TODAY WITH YACHTS & YACHTING IN THE JULY ISSUE…