The Scottish Islanders

 

Above is a fantastic photograph of the fleet racing in the last major event before war put a stop to such things. When I was putting my book together, I was delighted at the support from companies such as Beken, who were content for me to use a portrait image of my own Islander, Stroma, without payment. This image isn't in the book, it came from someone whose forebears had purchased a copy at the time. Perhaps we'll eventually do a reprint.

The feedback from purchasers has been very positive, also I've been getting sent material, such as the photograph, also anecdotes about the boats and their families, which is making the whole exercise feel very worth while. There's a lot of social history that deserves to be recorded, not just regarding the older, rather patrician families, but also just about the characters who made the west coast and its little bays and havens a lot of fun. I'm thinking of men like Boyd Keen, who made it into the book, and the recently departed and much loved Cubby MacKinnon, about whom a book, Mistress and Commander, appeared a few years ago.

Seriously, the book is quite a limited print run, and it's selling quite well, via social media only, because the margin between cost and retail price rules out major bookshops. So, if you want a copy, or know someone whom you think might enjoy it, you can find the online shop at

www.shop.yachtarchive.scot

Another Mystery Boat

I'm posting some photos taken by my friend John MacLean of Iona, of a lovely little sailing skiff that he rescued from certain destruction about sixteen years ago. He is anxious to trace her provenance and to learn about her history. I'm hoping that this post can set off a trail of detection among enthusiasts for our great Scottish designers and yards.

Right now, all the John knows about his skiff is that he thinks she was built in 1910 and before he found her at Crinan she had apparently been lying for many years beside a loch at Scammadale, up the road from me. There are several fishing lochs up there, miles from main roads, and one can imagine it being too much trouble for the estate owners to look after this lovely little work of art. It must have taken many years of total neglect to reduce a wonderful example of fine craftsmanship to her present pitiful state. It's a sad reflection that someone considered a craft obviously built for occasional sailing in salt water suitable for a fresh water fishing loch. 

The builder's plate looks pretty authentic and ties in with our  knowledge that Robertsons built lots of tenders and small craft, along with some pretty spectacular larger racing yachts and steam yachts. It doesn't help to confirm the date though, as although Alexander Robertson brought his sons into the business he didn't set up Alex Robertson & Sons Limited until August 1922.

In the middle of the plate is the top of the lifting ring, which pulls up to allow insertion of a hook, one at each end to hoist the boat aboard her mother ship after, we hope, a happy trip around the bay under an unstayed lug sail set in that mast partner braced to the forward thwart.

It's possible  that this wee treasure was built for one of the magnificent steam yachts that Robertson was building. But from the excellent Robertsons Wiki Entry, which was largely written by David Hutchison, a member of the family, it seems that yard didn't launch anything of this type in 1910. Candidates around that date could be Alfred Mylne's 60 foot Galma of 1909, or J A McCallums 65.2 foot Aroha (also Adana) of 1914. Yards wouldn't normally farm out the small craft, but if one of them had done Robertsons would have been a good choice. Towards the First World War Robertson was building mainly for the Admiralty and I doubt they would have required a lovely sailing tender.

If we assume that the neighbour would be a West coast yard we are looking at the McGruers of Clynder and William Fife III of Fairlie. 1910 rules out the McGruers, as it seems that they were just getting going then and didn't build larger yachts until later. May Fife McCallum's book Fast and Bonnie has a comprehensive list of Fife yachts, but 1910 seems again a fallow year for large steam yachts. The only candidate is the 83 ton Shaheen, built for a London owner, not very likely.

Two other possibilities occur to me.

Firstly, it's possible that one of the shipyards, such as Connel & Co, might have been building a steam yacht and commissioned Robertsons to produce a very special sailing tender. Directors of those yards did undertake these projects, often for themselves, but usually when work in the yard was slack.

Secondly, our pet might have been ordered by James Rennie Barnet of G L Watson & Co Limited to go with one of the magnificent steam yachts he was designing. He had a special interest in small sailing boats, having been an enthusiast for canoe cruising of the Rob Roy MacGregor type in his youth. You can read about one of his trips on the Forth Yacht Clubs Association website here: Cruise of the Kelpie

So, it's over to you, dear readers, to come up with some ideas!

Classic Boat Awards 2014

Ellad, photo by Nigel Pert

Saskia

Interesting to see a good Scottish contingent getting awards at the Classic Boat 2014 awards, with best restoration William Fife III’s Ellad heading the list, and his Saskia included.

Our own St Ayles skiffs did well, coming runners-up to the CW Hood 32 footer from the United States, a fibreglass “Spirit of Tradition” daysailer, which I guess would have collected a few trans-Atlantic votes.

Skiffieworlds in Ullapool

American plastic daysailer

Among the human winners were Fiona and Alastair Houston, tireless organisers of the Fife Regattas and Martin Black, the painstaking biographer of G L Watson, whose massive work is a great read and a fantastic resource for anyone looking for information about our sailing heritage of a hundred years ago, available from our fellow blogger the Leggy Prawn.

Fiona and Alastair

Martin

The images in this post have been lifted from Classic Boat, who attribute the one of Ellad to Nigel Pert. The takers of the others are not identified, but the one of Martin is mine, which I took when we were aboard the Ayrshire Lass last year. It’s always nice when the commercial sector acknowledges the efforts of those of us who publish for the fun of it. 

The Designer Unconstrained

As is well known the major challenge for any designer of racing yachts is exploiting the rating rule. Whether we are talking about America's Cup boats or small restricted design classes whichever yacht goes faster through the water will have a better chance of the gold. Such boats can have great disadvantages, sometimes being quirky and even unsafe. Once outclassed, as they inevitably are, they may have little residual value.

It must come as a welcome relief, therefore, to be asked to design something that is unconstrained by a rule. The designer can then apply his creative ability and experience purely to achieve the requirements of his client.

The picture above shows examples of the work of the three greatest Scottish yacht designers (in my opinion) of all time.

At the top is Thistle, George Lennox Watson's 1887 design for a syndicate of members of the Royal Clyde Yacht Club to challenge for the America's Cup. She was the only one of the three to be built to a rule, the YRA rule of the same year, which was intended to encourage greater beam to produce stiffer yachts than previously. She was 86 feet 4 inches on the waterline.

The designers of the other two did not require to comply with a rule.

The middle yacht is Rosemary IV, designed and built by William Fife III of Fairlie in 1928, when his yard was without an order, to keep the workforce busy. She is 36 feet on the waterline. Having no client to please allowed Fife even more freedom and the design is in my view one of his best, having significantly shorter overhangs than his normal productions.

The yacht at the foot is Alfred Mylne's Islander, also designed in 1928. Not only are the ends much shorter than the designs that Mylne did to a rule, she has much firmer sections than either of my other examples.

When the Clyde Clubs Conference were considering a new design in 1928 Alfred Mylne would have been extremely keen to become involved. The new design was intended to replace the 19/24s, nineteen feet on the waterline, twenty four feet overall, sail area massive, which had in turn replaced the 17/19s, governed by a similar rule.There was a general recognition that rules like these had resulted in some pretty extreme boats and several accidents and should be replaced with a new more wholesome boat.

Most importantly, the new boat would be  strict one-design.

The Conference considered various existing designs, such as Westmacott's Sea View Mermaid and Solent Sunbeams and Alfred Mylne's own Belfast Lough River Class of 1921. They probably wanted something slightly larger, because of the better opportunities for short cruises on the Clyde and the Scottish West coast.

Alfred Mylne had recently produced a new design for the Royal Bombay Yacht Club and this duly became the Scottish Islands Class One Design, but with a Bermudian rig as opposed to the Indian boats’ gunter.

The Islander would be 20 feet on the waterline as opposed to the Rivers 18, with the same overall length of 28 feet 6 inches. The sail area would 420 square feet, against the River's 350.

In February 1929 The Yachting Monthly reported that

"The new class has one feature which is a sign of the times, in that the boats will be fitted with auxiliary power and side propellers, those owners who do not wish to carry an engine being required to fit the propellor and carry a weight equivalent to that of the engine."

The view was also also expressed that

"fitted with auxiliaries the new boats will not be very fast, particularly in view of their moderate sail spread..."

There is no doubt that with modern sailcloth the boats are nowadays not under-canvassed. The seas are timeless and the short overhangs, buoyant ends and firm sections are still as valid for safe sailing in a small boat as they ever were.

In order to preserve the one-design principle to the letter and not just to the spirit various rules were enforced. The first five boats were built on a mass-production principle by the McGruers, who worked closely with Mylne and could deliver on a price, having just built the identical Indian boat.

On completion the first owners selected their hulls by lot.

The dummy propellor rule was another example.

Later on the owners were to agree that new sails would only be ordered by a vote, unless for a blown-out replacement, limits were placed on yachts being hauled out for scrubbing and so on. Occasionally owners would compete in each others' boats too.

I've researched the history of this class and published the results on sister website www.scottishislandsclass.blogspot.com. While doing this I was struck at how owners would sell their Islander only to buy another one, to the outside world identical in all respects. The extreme case was the sale by Herbert Thom of his Gigha, the newest boat and buying Westra, number one, following mutterings about an unfair advantage. Underlying all this must have been a reluctance to believe that it was the helmsman who was making the difference.

Herbert Thom did get an advantage in one respect however. It's often been remarked that the Islanders had a rule that each yacht should have a different hull colour and a lot of rather pointless research has been done, admittedly some of it by me before I learned better, to identify the "original" colours. The rule is contained in the 1959 edition, but until I find the earlier one I won't accept it existed earlier. Instead I've had access to personal papers, currently top secret, confirming that all the original fleet were white, apart from Sanda, which was light blue and Thom's current yacht, be it Gigha, Westra or, later Canna, which was always varnished.

It has been suggested by one apparently authoritative commentator that this led to litigation, a judge ruling that varnished was "brown" but there's no evidence of an actual case. From what I've learned of the original owners they were a dignified bunch with better things to do than waste time and money in the courts.

What is certain is that, like everything else he did Thom was exploiting a rule. Traditional varnish could easily be scraped off at the end of each season and the minimum number of fresh coats applied at the start of the next to keep the topsides light, whereas paint would just be abraded to give a sufficient key for a fresh coat, composed of course mainly of lead.

All this suggests that new poachers will soon arrive on any hillside and the gamekeepers will find it hard to keep up. There are lessons in this for our friends in Scottish Coastal Rowing, who have their first World Championships in Ullapool next year.


This is a repost from my  Scottish Islands website, where my friend Hal Sisk posted the following interesting comment

“In 1893, John Coats Jr.commissioned the great G L Watson, at the height of his career, to create two identical 36ft cutters purely for match racing. These were specifically not to be influenced by any rating rule, truly unconstrained. The result was the delightful clipper-bowed pair Gypsy and Brunette.

In his extraordinary busy period,also designing the America's Cup challenger Valkyrie and Britannia II and a steam yacht of 1025 tons for Arthur H E Wood, he also managed to find time to occasionally helm one of the pair in their frequent Saturday races.

My beautiful Peggy Bawn, built the following season as a "fast cruiser" which could also race as a 2.5 Rater, is almost a sistership to the match racers. So she also represents an unconstrained design, from the Golden Age of Yacht design. Indeed her hull shape and hydrostatic parameters conform closely to the "Britannia Ideal" which, for a sea-kindly sailing craft, persisted as a type right up to the late 1960s, until more powerful auxiliary engines caused sailing yacht design to move in the direction of quasi motor sailers.

See also my foreword to Martin Black's "G L Watson--the Art &
Science of Yacht Design".

Hal Sisk 

PS Yachtsmen are slavish followers of fashion and most one designs reflected the style of recent racing craft. An classic example is the Dragon class, with unnecessary long U-shaped overhangs, looking backwards to racing rules which primarily measured waterline length." 

It's possible that Hal may hold the key to the identity of the mysterious Leggy Prawn.

Ace Marine now own the Mylne archives and can be found here:- www.mylne.com

G L Watson can be found at www.glwatson.com

Successors to the Fife dynasty can be found at www.fairlieyachts.com

Leggy Prawn is blogging

But who is at the helm?

Since this blog started we’ve had occasional gems of wisdom from a strange sea-creature, who styles him(her?)self the Leggy Prawn. Time after time he(she?) has come up with solutions to the mysteries and uncannily accurate information, suggesting that among the seabed’s dark rocky nooks and weedy fronds there is a good old-fashioned library of the type never seen nowadays on shore. Perhaps one of our modern politicians, who value nothing other than saving money, has simply tipped a maritime archive into the deep.

Anyway, this strange, articulate and erudite resident of the seabed has now started blogging and the early results look promising. You can visit the new blog here:-  

Leggy Prawn's Blog

I'm adding the new blog to my list below and recommend our other blogging friends to do the same.

Has anyone seen Karita?

Red lives again

 

Great news for lovers of small boats everywhere comes from Britanny.

Chantier Hubert Stagnol has established a reputation for building replicas of classic designs, including Seabird and Fyne, both originally drawn by William Fife III in 1889. For his latest project Mr Stagnol is building a copy of Red, one of the first ever one-design class in the world. By a happy coincidence I recently wrote about the class and its descendants and my post can be viewed by clicking here:- The Clyde 17/19 foot class

At present I don't know what construction method has been chosen for the new Red, but Mr Stagnol's previous efforts have made good use of new technologies. The great thing about a rebuild of an old design is that by using modern materials and glues incredible strength can be built into the structure, ensuring longevity beyond the dreams of the designer. We know that our old masters were quick to embrace whatever technology was available, for example by incorporating metal frames and bracing in composite construction, and we can assume they would have seized the possibilities inherent in strip plank and epoxy construction. Despite their best efforts it remained the case that an owner who wished to remain competitive would have to commission a new yacht every couple of years, because his existing boat would have lost her rigidity. I've written about these issues in some detail on my other blog, www.scottishislandsclass.blogspot.com.

Looking at the half model, above, I suggest that Messrs G L Watson and Chantier Hubert Stagnol have come up with a winner. The hull looks very powerful and seaworthy, and it will need to be to carry that massive rig of the old Clyde luggers.

Of course the great thing about a one-design class has always been that the designer is liberated from a rating rule. As it happens I've also posted about this already, here:-  The designer unconstrained

It seems that nine of these boats were built originally, but none survive. Red seems exactly right for the sort of economical and social sailing that is coming into vogue these days, with classic meetings around the coasts and a general move away from plastic ugliness. It will be great if she soon has some sisters. In case you're tempted I've added both G L Watson and Chantier Hubert Stagnol to my links section.