The Americas Cup J - Class Boats

During the 1930s J-class yachts were built to race in the America's Cup. Only 10 were ever built as they were extremely expensive to build and maintain, especially in the post war years. They succeeded the 1883 Seawanhaka Rules 75-footers of 1920 and were replaced by the 12 - metre class yachts when the Cup was challenged again in 1958.

The J designation refers to the class of yacht defined by its sail area, displacement, length, and mast height, formally defined in the Universal Rule. When designing a J-class yacht builders would have to decide which characteristics to maximize to build the ideal yacht.

All three America's Cup races featuring J-class boats were won by the New York Yacht Club. In 1930 Enterprise defeated Shamrock V of the Royal Ulster Yacht Club. In 1934 Rainbow defeated Endeavour of the Royal Yacht Squadron. In 1937, at the peak of J-class racing, the "Super J," Ranger defeated Britain's Endeavour II.

Only three of the original yachts are still sailing today; Shamrock V, Velsheda and Endeavour. They have all undergone extensive restoration and rebuilding.
A replica of Ranger was launched in 2004. As of April 2008 another three yachts are being built or planned. These are Endeavour II, Lionheart and Svea. According to J-class regulations, any new yacht built must use existing designs from the 1930s.

Boyhood Literature

This copy of the American "Yachting" magazine was first read by my father three months before I was born - note the price - they are now about $15 - $20NZ. Pretty pricey really, especially if you are a boat fanatic like myself. If I was really obsessive about purchasing every sailing magazine I laid eyes on I could easily spend in the region of one to two hundred dollars a month. But I don't. I am one of those people at the magazine stand who flicks through and only buys if there is something really interesting and valuable. I have learnt to use the library. Old sailing news is still good news in my book and well worth the wait. I sometimes take a stack home from the local library and saunter my way through them.

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In his time my father was a great collector of sailing magazines and our hallway cupboard was full of the Yachting Monthly, Yachting World, Yachting, Rudder, Sea Spray, Wooden Boat, Sail magazine and many more. I can still see him kneeling in the hall in a sort of genuflection to his hoard of yachting magazines. They gave him a great deal of pleasure and like a good CD or book he came back to them more than a few times. I have to say as I grew bigger and developed my own interest in sailing and sailed my own centerboard yachts on the local estuary I too spent some time kneeling in a draughty hallway flicking through a stack before lugging it off to a comfortable chair for closer examination. I remember all this with fondness. The formation of formative years is enduring and the practise continues from time to time to this day.

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Today I pretty much only purchase the English edition of Classic Boat magazine on any regular basis and I get a lot of pleasure from reading this. It is full of articles about wooden boats which I am particularly fond of.

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My sailing library now includes a huge number of sailing books about yachts and voyaging and almost every maritime facet in between and a fair old stack (and it is old) that I have inherited from my father.

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"Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man" - I didn't have a chance - but look at me - I'm smiling and I KNOW what the wind is saying when it begins to stir in the trees.

Fantasy

Yacht 'Fantasy' circa 1948 Lyttleton Harbour - Photo from private collection

This is the yacht 'Fantasy' sailing on Lyttleton harbour not long after she was launched. She was designed by the English naval architect Harrison Butler.

Harrison Butler designed all his yachts to a design rule he created called the Metacentric Rule. The rule was a mathematical equation relating to proportion that was meant to create the most efficient and fast hull for a given length. I think that the rule has now been discredited. Despite this the rule did have the byproduct of producing beautifully balanced hulls. My father who sailed on Fantasy said that she would sail herself to windward for long periods without anyone at the helm.

This characteristic is not something to be taken lightly as anyone who has sailed on an unbalanced boat will tell you. Many years ago I did a trip to the Pacific Islands in a beautiful looking yacht with very very bad "weather helm" i.e. the stronger it blew the more the boat wanted to rip the tiller out your hands and round up into the wind. Weather helm can be exhausting, especially in our case where we had lost our self steering wind vane in a storm and had to steer long watches for many days.

The curiously beautiful balance of Harrison Butlers boats is ascribed to the fact that the lines of the underwater plane of his hulls are symmetrical fore and aft. When you combine this symmetry with an above the waterline hull of non extreme type you have a hull whose balance is perfect when sailed upright and does not alter a lot when heeled.

In the UK many of HBs designs are considered classics and many have been restored and are still sailing.

By modern standards some of these older yacht designs do not give the same amount of accommodation for a given length, but their charm lies in their traditional design and very well mannered sailing behaviour.

THE SAGA OF MY DINGHY

In the background you can see the good ship Mariner ( she is just behind the yacht with the dinghy tied to her stern and has a blue cover over the mains'l on the boom). In the foreground is my trusty dinghy with my yachts registration number painted in the stern sheets - KZ4472. She is a fibreglass clinker dinghy of approximately 8 1/2 feet long of unknown design. I bought her a couple of years ago off the online auction TradeMe for $460 when my older and smaller wooden dinghy nearly drowned me one day (long story and too embarrassing to tell). I keep the dinghy permanently tied to the pontoon and use her to get out to the good ship Mariner and also as my tender when going away for day trips around the harbour or short trips up the coast. For longer trips I take an inflatable which I can easily get up on deck.

I picked this new dinghy up from the seller at Snell's Beach about 100km away. If you were ever wondering how well an upturned dinghy travels upside down on the roof rack of an aging Honda then the answer is it depends on the driver (long story and too embarrassing to tell).

If you look closely at the bow of the dinghy you will see that she is chained to the pontoon. This is not as satisfactory as how she was originally secured, which was with a long length of stainless steel wire rope which enabled the dinghy to float well away from the pontoon allowing other dinghies and their occupants easy access.

Well shipmates, about four weeks after I had this new dinghy back and wired to the pontoon, I went down one day and found the dinghy had disappeared! - I don't think I have been as furious for a long time and I was a long time furious believe me. It wasn't so much the money involved, it was the time taken searching out and bidding on the online auctions and having to drive all that way to pick her up.
I knew the dinghy had been stolen because I could see that the piece of thin wire painter still attached to the pontoon by the padlock had been flexed backwards and forwards until it had broken. A pair of oars had also been stolen from a dinghy close by belonging to the owner of the yacht opposite mine on the moorings.

I reported the theft to the local Police Station - and I must say to my embarrassment that there was a point where I was describing with great eloquence the pedigree of the thief, where a certain glance from the constable had that - tone it down or you will be arrested look about it.

The dinghy was found two days later by my friend whose oars were stolen. My dinghy had one of his oars in it, we never found the other one. In the bottom of the dinghy was a plastic bag with fish bait in it - so someone had stolen the dinghy to do a bit of night fishing.

My dinghy doesn't have a name and I shall have to think of one - something along the lines of 'Rinky Dink', 'Calabash' or the dinghy equivalent of 'Hunky Dory'. - Just had a thought and a Dilemma - because I got my dinghy back perhaps I should name it 'Boomerang' - Hmmm, as a Kiwi I might have to think about that one.

THE FILM "MAMMA MIA" AND TAI - MO - SHAN

The Yacht Tai - Mo - Shan in the English Channel approaching Dartmouth - 1934

This is a photograph of the Tai Mo Shan taken in the English Channel at the end of her voyage from Hong Kong.

This is the yacht that played the part of the yacht ‘Fernando’ in the vastly popular film “Mamma Mia” which featured the music of ABBA.

In many ways the history of this yacht and the exploits of its crew both during this voyage and during World War Two are the equal of any applause for the film “Mamma Mia”

Two yachts designed by H.S.Rouse were to become very famous in the post-war era. The Tai Mo Shan and more famously the Tzu Hang, the 46 foot ketch, built by Hop Kee in 1938. The Tzu Hang survived fifteen years of world cruising in the hands of Miles and Beryl Smeeton and underwent a terrifying pitchpoling in 1954 and later a capsize off Cape Horn in 1956. These exploits are featured in Smeetons book “Once is Enough”.

In 1932, five adventurous young naval officers financed the building of a 54 foot ocean racing ketch in the yard of the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co Ltd. She was designed by H.S. Rouse and constructed in teak and named Tai-Mo-Shan [High Hat Hill], after the highest mountain in the colony.

The Voyage of 16,217 miles without a motor, from Hong Kong to Dartmouth is told in Martyn Sherwoods book “The Voyage of the Tai – Mo – Shan.

After deciding to economise by not installing an engine, the officers had to ask the formidable Admiral Howard Kelly for permission to sail the new yacht to England by an unorthodox route, that is against the prevailing winds, via Japan, the Kuriles, the Bering Sea, the Aleutians, California, Panama and the West Indies. "Quite rightly", wrote Lt Martyn Sherwood later in his book, "We were placed on half-pay for the entire voyage". The admiral's approval, came with the comment that it was "refreshing to note this spirit of adventure and initiative", and also with a pay cut, down to seven shillings a day for each man. This lack of money, in sailing Tai-Mo-Shan to Britain without a motor, was to leave them stranded for sixteen days on Crooked Island in the Bahamas. Admiralty penny-pinching was somewhat balanced by a splendidly-timed congratulatory telegram, sent to Dartmouth by King George V.

The crew were four submariners and a naval doctor; Lt Martyn Sherwood, 32, Lt George Salt, 24, Lt Philip Francis, 24, Surgeon Lt Bertie Ommaney-Davis, 27, and sailing-master Lt R.E.D. "Red" Ryder, 24. All these crew distinguised themselves during World War Two by winning four DSOs, a Croix de Guerre and a VC between them.

It has been revealed recently that the voyage was in fact fully supported (except for full financial support) by British Naval Intelligence with the brief to see and record as much as they could about Japanese naval movements.

A LITTLE BIT OF DETECTIVE WORK

Painting - Jack Coggins

This is a yawl with a bone in her teeth. The yacht is one that has been built from a particular yacht design. I am going to take a punt as to the identity of that design.

I see from the flag that is flying off the leech of the mizzen that she is from the United States. By looking at the point at the bottom of the stern I can see that she is of hard chine hull form. Comparing the size of the crew with the size of the boat I would estimate that the yacht is about 34 feet in overall length excluding the bowsprit. The other features of the yacht that are worthy of note are the combination bowsprit and boomkin and the cabin form without a doghouse.

So what yacht is this? Well what gives her identity away is really the overall look of the boat. Its not really a hard bit of detective work at all and many sailors who know their boats would pick her for what she is. So what is she? - well I think that she is an example of the V-bottom Sea Bird design, a type developed by Captain Thomas Fleming Day and yacht designers on the staff of the Rudder Magazine. The reason for using the V-bottom type was that it is easier for the amateur builder to lay down and construct this type of hull form.

A smaller edition of this yacht (26 feet) was sailed across the Atlantic in the very early 1900s by Fleming Day. It was one of the great early transatlantic crossings.

But a more famous voyage was completed by the bigger 34 foot edition pictured above by the legendary Harry Pidgeon who completed a single handed circumnavigation in the 1920s in his yacht Islander. He wrote a classic book about his exploits called "Around The World Single - Handed". It was at the beginning of the golden age of small boat circumnavigations - an age marked by the spirit of courage and the robustness of simplicity.

These were far off and much simpler days when a small yacht could come and go throughout the Pacific Islands and many other areas of the world without the red tape and bureaucracy of today. These adventures were uncommon and the sailors of this era were treated as heroes.

They were heroes. These were the days before GPS, SSB radios, VHF, EPIRPs and air searches. You left harbour and your return depended solely on your seamanship, the seaworthiness of your little ship with a little bit of luck for good measure.

Many of this type of yacht were built by amateurs all over the world. My Uncle built this larger version here in New Zealand in the late 1940s and called her Joy. He started the ill fated 1951 Wellington to Lyttleton yacht race in her that saw four yachts perish. He left Wellington but returned because of storm force winds and huge waves in Cook Strait - but shipmates that's another story.

Harry Pidgeon and Islander - I salute you, and all circumnavigators old and new - such a voyage is a huge accomplishment indeed.

NIGHT PASSAGE

Photo - Alden Smith

NIGHT PASSAGE - Poem by Denis Glover

Plotted sure for set, eye to weather,
The revs eased down
I nosed happily along
The dark coast where I belong.

"Now look at dawning froth
Beating at hills held by rock teeth.
If you like it's like a frilly petticoat
White - beaten against the reef."

"Aye," grunted Mick, wise in the ways
Of the swirl and flick
Of women and wave. "Aye, purty - purty,
But a sea petticoat can be dirty."

At least in the east light seen
The hills' breasts rose clean.