When we remember that Ireland was for many years a leading sailing country in the promotion of the One-Design concept, it's maybe typical of our cussedness that when some star DIY activist is building a one-off boat to some recognised design, they'll often – some would say almost invariably – stray from the set plans to make their own "improvements". They do this even if, in the case of using the drawings of a renowned designer, the resulting boat has a question mark or two hanging over her true authenticity, and thus her value may drop when it comes to making a sale.
This "builders' desire" to improve on the designer's vision is nothing new, and it has even impinged on supposed One-Design racing classes. When the Dublin Bay 25s started building with several rival Dublin Bay boat-building firms around 1898, despite the plans being from the sacred drawing board of William Fife of Fairlie, it's said that a Dublin-built boat would more accurately be called a Dublin Bay 26, and that the only genuine DB25 was the one built by Fife himself in 1899.
Dublin Bay 25s (25ft LWL) racing off Dun Laoghaire – it's said the only one actually 25ft on the waterline was the only one built in the designer's yard in Scotland. Photo: DBSC
VIRTUE REWARDED
So perhaps it's virtue rewarded that she is the only survivor of the class, now called Iona and in Dutch classic yacht ownership. But this "one design optimizing" tendency has continued in ODs ever since, with a local peak being reached in the early 1900s by Paddy McKeown, the "Belfast Back-Street Boatbuilder".
He was commissioned in 1902 to build the new 18ft Waverley Class OD keelboats to the designs of John Wylie of Whitehead, and fifty years later as a nosey kid, I was rowing the dinghy around the Waverleys anchored in Ballyholme Bay, and noting with bewilderment that no two had precisely the same shape of transom.
Jeff Gouk's restored Belfast Lough Waverley Lilias – discussions about who had the one true Waverley to John Wylie's design could case heated arguments at mixed-fleet regattas. Photo: W M Nixon
This disparity was crystallised some time later during Ballyholme Regatta, when the mother fleet from Whitehead came across Belfast Lough to race with the offshoot class in Bangor. It was always a particularly tense contest, further fuelled ashore post-racing by it being the one and only day in the year when Ballyholme YC had a license to dispense beer.
SUPPING THE DEVIL'S BUTTERMILK
This increasingly-rapid supping of the Devil's Buttermilk was discreetly done in a mini-marquee on the mini-lawn. But the noise within was soon maximizing, and as innocent kids we were astonished when two old men tumbled out of the now-raucous tent, fiercely exchanging blows.
Apparently a Whitehead skipper and a Ballyholme skipper had begun a discussion as to which had the only really genuine utterly true Waverley class boat, and soon mere words weren't enough. As to it being "old men fighting", when you were still in short trousers, anyone over 17 was irretrievably adult, and being an old man began around 23.
The Glen Class were made as identical as humanly possible for wooden boats, but nevertheless some were always reckoned faster than others. Photo: W M Nixon
THE HILDITCH ODDITY
Be that as it may, it was thought that the oddest thing about the respected firm of John Hillditch & Son of Carrickfergus was that they built scrupulously to One Design plans. Yet even this purported boat-building strictness wasn't enough for some, and when Arthur Clapham started building the new Mylne-designed 25ft Glen ODs with the hulls upside down in his yard close west of Bangor in 1945-46, after each batch had reached the hull completion stage, the deposit-paid owners were invited in to make their choice.
LUCK OF THE DRAW?
Most just took the luck of the draw. But ace skipper Terry Neill got his wife to make him up a picnic lunch, and he spent the entire day uninterrupted in the shed, squinting and measuring until he'd got the choice down to three hulls, finally selecting one that certainly was a winner. But so were all Terry Neill's boats, new or old. That said, she was and is Glengesh, No 6, if you happen to be looking for the most special Glen of all.
NIMMO VISION BECOMES REAL IN GALWAY
Moving into a much larger size scale, when that astonishing bundle of energy John Killeen of Galway went into cahoots with multi-material boat builder Dan Mills to create a cruising version of the Open 60 (now the IMOCA 60), their plans went awry. But it was awry only in a very good way. One of the leading French designers provided the basic shape of the hull, but when the Galway duo had worked out how to fit in everything to provide John and his family and friends with the comfort and seagoing ability he expected, the Open 60 had become the Galway 70. And she is still one of the finest boats built – and partially designed too – in Ireland.
The fabulous Galway 70 Nimmo – named in honour of the great harbour engineer Alexander Nimmo – started as an Open/IMOCA 60, and just grew
THE McGUIRKS GO OFF PLAN
Often this inability to resist fiddling around with the original boat design runs in families, and the McGuirks of Dublin Bay have been at it again. Wally McGuirk (the Da) has been through here before. Among other craft he self-built O'Brien Kennedy's last design, the steel 40ft cutter Swallow.
McGuirk Modifications – the steel-built Swallow (foreground) and the alloy-built Lugh are fresh takes on original designer's work. Photo: W M Nixon
In fact, it was an especially personal project, as he knew Kennedy well into retirement, and the creator of the Swallow drew the lines quite some time after he became entitled to a free bus pass. Heaven only knows what changes Wally made, and continues to make, but we've particularly noted the in-hull legs, which enables the boat to comfortably take the ground in a drying anchorage in Sutton Creek close off McGuirk Towers along the Kilbarrack shore, and equally it allows Wally to go into all sorts of shallow drying havens denied to today's fin keeled boats.
AN ALUMINIUM MAN
As for Wally's son Rory, he's an aluminium man, and likes working with the stuff so much that he took eight years of spare time to build an alloy motor-cruiser from the range of DIY designs created by Canadian Tad Roberts, successfully building the Classic Enavigo 39 completely in aluminium. Except that the result is not quite the purest of the pure Enavigo 39s. She's a Enavigo 40-something-or-other. Fresh ideas were developed in early stages of the build, and Rory added a little more to the LOA, though precisely how much seems to be a matter for debate.
The Enivago 39 as envisaged by designer Tad Roberts
COMMUTER SPEEDSTERS
Either way, she is a memory-jogger for the much large commuter launches that Wall Street's Masters of the Universe used once upon a time to commute to work each morning from Long Island, thereby avoiding the crowded sweaty trains and road-jammed highways used by ordinary wage slaves. All the would have on waking each morning in their waterside mansions was a small cup of black coffee, and then mabe attired in maybe a dressing gown of best Cary Grant-style, they'd amble down the lawn to the maybe 75ft launch, aboard which they'd find the engines warmed and ready to go to town at 34 knots, a shower and bath as wished, an excellent cooked breakfast, and a crisp shirt and suit to don in readiness for the day's battles.
The classic Long Island Sound commuter yacht was utilised to get the Titans of Wall Street to work in comfort and style.
But they weren't the first. In the 1860s, the great ironmaster Henry Schneider was among those who made Barrow-in-Furness on the Cumberland coast in the north of England into a ferociously energetic centre for shipbuilding, with submarines becoming a speciality.
However, as the requirements for Barrow to become a ship-building heaven made it a polluted hell for living in, Henry Schneider made it his business to build an agreeable large house at Bowness on Windermere in the Lake District close to the north, among the outrageously beautiful mountains.
Henry Schneider's 1869-built commuter yacht Esperance under way on Windermere.
To get south to work, Henry would emerge from the house already dressed for his day as a Captain of Industry, and follow his heated-tray-carrying butler down to the private quay, where his 75ft steam launch Esperance waited to carry the breakfast-enjoying owner the five miles down the lake to the nearest rail station, whence he would travel in his private carriage to his luxuriously-appointed offices in Barrow.
The story of Esperance doesn't end with Schneider's death at the age 70 in 1887. She lived on, converted to a houseboat, and partially fictionalized as the pirate ship of Uncle Jim (aka 'Captain Flint') in Arthur Ransome's Swallow & Amazons, while the real boat can now be seen restored in the Windermere Jetty Museum.
But of course, time was when any conurbation's river was the best way to get about town. Anybody who was anyone in Tudor London had their own multi-oared barge. In fact, they were so common that when the roads began to improve, it became a mark of distinction to have your multi-horsed carriage.
PERSONAL ROWING GIG
Nevertheless, where it made sense, the personal rowing gig was an elegant solution. Uffa Fox lovingly recalled the Cowes of his younger days, where the long-established boat and ship yard of J Samuel White & Co in East Cowes was the pace and style-setter. John Samuel White (1838-1915) had been the main mover and shaker, and the family home was a fine manor house to the south on the west bank of the navigable Medina River, most conveniently reached by boat.
Cowes, Isle of Wight. The Medina River enabled shipbuilder John Samuel White to be rowed downriver to work each morning in an eight-oar gig, and rowed home again for lunch. Photo: John D Fielding/Flickr
So not only did the current senior White family top honcho get delivered from home to work in an eight-oared gig rowed by yard employees each morning, but he was delivered home for lunch by the same means most working days, and the crew would be ready to bring him back home in the evening.
Seems sensible. Much healthier than the DART every time. And in Venice they would wonder why we make such of a fuss about it.
