FEBRUARY 2024
£4.95 US$11.99
T H E W O R L D’ S M O S T B E A U T I F U L B O A T S
PRIDE OF CANADA
AWARDS Shortlist revealed
Oldest boat in the country sails again
NORTHWEST PASSAGE In a wooden classic NEW BOAT TEST
Contessa 32
STAYING ALIVE
Which boats survive
TORPEDO BOAT REPLICA WW1 hydroplane US ROAD TRIP
Pacific coast yards
www.classicboat.co.uk
CANADA’S DAUGHTER
She was designed for the Thames but built in Canada. After 127 years, she’s possibly the nation’s oldest boat and her recent refit sees her ready for another century WORDS JAN HEIN PHOTOS JAN HEIN AND FRIENDS OF DOROTHY
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TIMELESS
The Contessa 32 is one of the most wanted glass classics, which is why Jeremy Rogers recently built a new one for a trip to Cape Horn. And now they’re building another WORDS NIGEL SHARP PHOTOS NIGEL SHARP AND JEREMY ROGERS LTD
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T
he opportunity to sail on and write about a brand-new Contessa 32 was too good to miss. After my keelboat ownership began with a timber Nordic Folkboat in 1998, it was probably at the back of my mind for most of the next 20 years that I might have a Contessa 32 one day. Sure enough, when it came to it I didn’t consider anything else and I went to look at six of them. The most expensive of these was the 1990 Dart Dash which initially I told myself not to view as the asking price was above the budget I had set. As soon as I saw her, however, I knew she was the one so I bought her and renamed her Songbird. I haven’t had a moment’s regret since. It was in 1971 that Jeremy Rogers started building the Contessa 32 which he had designed in collaboration with David Sadler. It proved so popular that at one stage the company was employing about 200 people and was producing two boats every week in five different factories in the Lymington area. But in the early ’80s, the company found itself the casualty of a recession and went into receivership. That was when Mike Slack acquired the moulds and, over the next few years built about 25 of the boats in Lowestoft, including Dart Dash. In 1996, Jeremy Rogers bought back the moulds and went back into production, but this time on a more modest scale. When he retired in 2012, his son Kit took over as managing director and began to run the company with his wife Jessie. The company has now built a total of about 650 Contessa 32s, and nowadays typically produces just one a year, each of them effectively custom built. Kit and Jessie also have a Contessa 32 of their own, the 1972 Assent which was owned for many years by Willie Ker who took her on some extraordinarily adventurous voyages, and which was the only finisher in her class in the notorious 1979 Fastnet Race. While Assent is now often used for cruising, she also regularly races in the Solent area including Cowes Week (where the class has its own start), the Round the Island Race (which normally attracts more than 30 32s) CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2024
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BATTLE SHIP A replica World War One wooden warship, with a pedigree in racing motor boat history, wowed visitors at last year’s Southampton Boat Show WORD AND PHOTOS MARTIN KELLY
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T
he cavernous Boathouse 4, in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, is alive daily with the bustle, noise, smell and dirt of classic naval boats under repair and renovation: everything from small rowing gigs to admiral’s barges. In the quieter mezzanine above the workshop floor hangs a boat of great historical importance while, underneath her, a fully operational replica of her has just been completed. The hanging vessel is Coastal Motor Boat 4 in which, in 1919, Lieutenant Augustus Agar earned the Victoria Cross (VC). She has been much restored over the past 100 years and is now only a bare hull stripped of her engine and most of her equipment. The replica that has just been completed below CMB4 is a near-copy 40ft (12.2m) Coastal Motor Boat (CMB) launched in the summer of 2023. Gleaming in her white paintwork, she has undergone sea trials and a formal commissioning ceremony and is proving fully able to emulate the record-breaking speeds once achieved by her elder sister in 1916. These torpedo-carrying hydroplanes were designed by the famous shipbuilder John I Thornycroft Ltd in 1915 with the aim of skimming at great speed over minefields and carrying out torpedo attacks on the German High Seas Fleet at its anchorage. The name adopted for them by the Royal Navy was a cover to preserve secrecy: to call it a Torpedo Hydroplane would have revealed far too much; they were usually referred to by their designers, builders and operators as “skimmers”. But the CMB sprung from a pure pedigree: they were a direct development from the cutting-edge sporting boats designed, and raced, by the Thornycroft family during the 10 years prior to the war.
A SPORTING LEGACY The Thornycroft family, under the inspiration of the patriarch, John Isaac Thornycroft, played a major role in the new sport of motorboat racing when it developed at the turn of the 20th century. Not only did the family race boats, they also invested much effort into their design and development and, particularly, with their ground-breaking use of model tank testing. John I Thornycroft Ltd was a very successful shipbuilding and engineering company, founded in Chiswick in the 1860s and subsequently moved to the famous Woolston Yard in 1905. John Isaac (the Isaac is used to distinguish him from his son, John Edward, who also had a significant role in the company) had been instrumental, along with his rival and friend Alfred Yarrow, in developing fast, steam powered, torpedo boats during the 1870s and subsequently torpedo boat destroyers in the 1890s. Ironically, Thornycroft’s first involvement in marine petrol engines comes out of the company’s production of steam road vehicles as a natural extension of their maritime steam plants; this led to motor car production, and then to the first Thornycroft racing boat, Scolopendra, being powered by a 22 hp Thornycroft car engine. She was 30ft (9.1m) LOA and capable of 16 knots and took part in the inaugural Harmsworth Trophy event in Cork in 1903. CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2024
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THE FROZEN GAUNTLET Integrity is no steel-hulled ice-crusher, but she’s proved herself in icy seas over the years. Now it was time for her builder and crew to sail the North West Passage WORD AND PHOTOS WILL STIRLING
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ntegrity had been designed and built at our small Plymouth shipyard in 2012. Seasoned English Oak, copper and bronze with a heavy dose of lead underneath. Five years of use in all seasons within hailing distance of the shipyard had allowed us to test and improve the boat, but also to teach ourselves how to sail her. Following the extended Plymouth based sea trials, Integrity spent five years in Iceland with a number of summer voyages to Jan Mayen and East Greenland. By this stage the North West Passage expedition was set for 2023. These years based in northern Iceland brought a different type of boat preparation and training to build on the foundations laid in Plymouth. Each successful voyage cultivated a deepening assurance in the qualities of the boat and the crews. Crucially, there was also developing experience of navigation in ice. We also learnt about ourselves; having to deal with the boat and manage our own behaviour when tired, cold, hungry and, at times, frightened. Facing these problems is to gain experience. After each voyage, spares and repairs were considered in two categories: the immediate in order to make the boat safe after an incident and; the onward in order to have the ability to continue a journey. We had to be sure we had a comprehensive response in terms of our own ability to service, maintain and repair the boat and also the appropriate tools and spares on board in order to effect that maintenance and repair. Spending time in Iceland before and after each excursion also brought a key element of great value:
friendships with those familiar with the Arctic and the benefit of their advice. Having departed from Iceland for one final sojourn in East Greenland, we sailed on south from Cape Farewell, reaching Lunenburg, Nova Scotia late in the season. This was a journey in the wrong direction but had been felt worthwhile because we wanted the boat to be in an area of infrastructure and expertise for a thorough winter inspection and refit. The aim of the work was to remove any element of doubt as to the structural condition of the boat where things could not be immediately seen for survey. It was with the boat in this strategic position that the final stages of planning for an attempt to sail through the North West Passage the following year could be set in motion.
THE LABRADOR COAST In early June, all sail set and with a farewell committee on the quayside, we moved a little too quickly across Codroy Harbour and came to rest firmly on a mud bank inside and adjacent to the harbour entrance. The previous autumn Integrity had sheltered in the little harbour from a hurricane, billed as the deepest low recorded, to make landfall. We had been most fortunate to be in the right place at the wrong time; with the wind howling down off the Wreckhouse Mountains, Integrity had been secured to the quay by mast and rudder stock, in confidence that those members could not be pulled out of the boat. CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2024
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CRAFTSMANSHIP
Clockwise from top left: An Arctic Tern, built in 1987, gets a new paint job; Model of a native canoe with a tug model behind; More artwork on the drafting board; Tugzilla, one of Sam’s most iconic creatures; Building a model
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for his grandson