JANUARY 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
RAISING THE BAR S&S yacht Baruna’s
PETROL AND VARNISH American runabouts
great restoration
HIRE POWER One Broads yacht’s century of charter
THE FIRST WHITBREAD RACE Event that changed everything
MEET THE BROKER
PACIFIC CALM
TRADITIONAL TOOL
Richard Gregson
Voyaging by phinisi
Stanley bench plane
www.classicboat.co.uk
NO SOONER, BARUNA 4
CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
The talk on the quays at Les Voiles was of the yawl Baruna, fresh out of the shed after seven and a half years WORDS DAN HOUSTON PHOTOS KOS EVANS CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
5
SMART HIRE
18
CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
At over 100 years old, Bootlegger is still going strong as one of the longest-serving hire boats on the Norfolk Broads WORD AND PHOTOS RICHARD JOHNSTONE-BRYDEN
Above: Bootlegger was completed in time for the 1923 season and launched for the first time in Potter Heigham
B
uilt over 100 years ago by two generations of the Woods family, the 30ft (9.1m) gaff-rigged Bootlegger is one of Norfolk’s oldest charter yachts. She has spent the majority of her life in hire on the unique inland waters of the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads, with only a brief interlude as a private cruising yacht. Today, Bootlegger is the sole surviving member of the Upton-based Eastwood Whelpton’s original hire fleet. Bootlegger’s origins date back to 1922 when her keel was laid by the Norfolk boat builder and designer Walter Woods in his Potter Heigham boatyard as the latest addition to its hire fleet. His career began as an apprentice in the Great Yarmouth shipyard of Wm Brighton followed by a spell working with George Mollet in Brundall. H Little & Co subsequently recruited Walter to set up and manage its new boatyard in Potter Heigham. He continued to manage the yard when it became part of the Norfolk Broads Yachting Company (NBYCo) shortly afterwards and went on to build several highly regarded Broads yachts including Smuggler, Pirate, Corsair, Scout and Buccaneer, as well as, six Great Yarmouth One Design half deckers. Walter finally became master of his own destiny in 1917 when he bought the Potter Heigham boatyard, after NBYCo went into liquidation, and renamed it Walter Woods & Sons. Thus, Bootlegger was one of his first designs to bear his name on the brass builder’s plate. Sadly, Walter’s health was already failing as Bootlegger took shape and that winter he asked his son Herbert to return from Ipswich, where he had been working for Ransomes Sims and Jefferies since 1914, to help him run the yard with his brother Walter (junior). Herbert knew the Potter Heigham business extremely well, having started his own career at the yard under his father’s supervision as an apprentice in 1907. Herbert was involved in the final stages of Bootlegger’s construction and launched her down the slipway beside his Bungalow – Bure Haven – in 1923. Herbert took over the business after his father’s death in 1929 and Bootlegger remained part of the yard’s hire fleet until she was sold to a private owner in 1938. Her new owner kept Bootlegger in a nearby boathouse, where she remained for the duration of World War Two, thereby avoiding years of neglect as a block craft moored on a deserted Broad. CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
19
BECAUSE ELEGANCE MATTERS
US ROAD TRIP
34
CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
For Americans, it’s Pebble Beach concours on water. And in the summer of 2023, the annual Lake Tahoe classics marked its 50th anniversary WORD AND PHOTOS BRUNO CIANCI
CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
35
52
CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
SPICE OF LIFE An exotic voyage of discovery in the far east aboard Ombak Putih – the 42m Indonesian Buginese-built, gaff-rigged phinisi WORD AND PHOTOS FIONA HARPER
I
ndonesia’s Spice Islands with its exotic crops of nutmeg and cinnamon have been fought over for centuries. But the eastern archipelagos straddling the Equator are also entrenched in history thanks to natural historian Alfred Wallace’s revolutionary theories on evolution Dodinga village is about as far from London as one can get. Fewer than 100 foreigners visit the neat, single-street village that straddles a narrow isthmus shaded by coconut palms on Halmahera Island in Indonesia’s North Maluka province. The only way to reach the island is by boat, then it’s a half-hour walk on a road lined by dense jungle on one side, and a coconut plantation on the other. Yet its significance in the archives of history is well-established. It was here in 1858 in this far-flung village that English naturalist Alfred Wallace had an epiphany during lucid moments of malarial delirium. His ‘aha moment’ completed the last piece of a decades-long puzzle that led to his theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace later recovered enough to take a boat to the nearby island of Ternate and dispatched an essay he’d penned to friend and mentor Charles Darwin, which would later become known as the Letters from Ternate. Wallace had spent the past eight years in the Malay Archipelago (Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) collecting thousands of biological specimens unknown to science. Musing on the rich diversity of species he wrote: “I have lately worked out a theory which accounts for them naturally.” Darwin wrote in a letter to Wallace in 1867: “It is curious how we hit on the same ideas,” before publishing his volume On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. While Darwin’s name is forever etched in history, Wallace’s is largely forgotten, although his name lives on in the Wallace Line, a hypothetical divider separating the biogeographical regions of Australia and Asia. The line runs roughly north-west between Lombok and Bali and extends northwards along the deep waters of the Makassar Strait between Kalimantan and Sulawesi. Wallace deduced that species such as placental mammals of Asian CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2024
53
CLASSIC BOAT DECEMBER CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY2023 2024
55