This article was originally published in September 2020.
While high-tech modern racing vessels can be seductively sophisticated, a classic yacht takes charm to another level.
My absolute passion is sailing. I rather consider my 30-year City career a necessary distraction to keep me off the water. A distraction because a bad day on the water always beats a good day in the office, but a necessity because boats are expensive beasts to keep and maintain. (So, thank you to all my clients for the business that’s paid for those new sails!)
Until just a few years ago, She-who-is-now-Mrs-Blain and I spent all our free weekends racing on the Solent – the inland sea that divides the Isle of Wight from the real world – or charging up and down the south coast of England on offshore races. We’ve been fortunate enough to afford some very nice racing yachts – all named Batfish – and to have great friends to crew the boats. But it’s been the quality of our crews’ teamwork that has made our yachts successful.
In recent years we’ve discovered a new kind of sailing – cruising. Instead of sailing with eight or nine crew on the foredeck, stacking sails as sewer rats, trimming jibs, working the mainsheet and playing the various halyards from the pit, the pair of us clamber on board on a Friday night, hoist the sails, set the autopilot and trundle off across the Channel (standing alternate watches through the night so we don’t hit anything in the shipping lanes), before mooring up in some sleepy French harbour in the morning. We spend the next two days eating, drinking and meeting our Yooropean chums, before sailing back on the Sunday and heading straight for the train up to London on Monday morning.
Last year we sailed to Normandy and kept going, eventually ending up in La Rochelle on the Biscay coast after eating half the lobsters in France as we sailed port-to-port around the Brittany coast. Cruising means pointing and getting on with it. Who could have imagined that seaside towns had such great restaurants, excellent wines and interesting markets? Who knew?
Before we discovered cruising, we loved offshore racing: charging through the night towards some X on a chart, half the crew dozing below while the other half sat on the rail in the rain, getting soaked by breaking waves as they trimmed the sails and prayed to the weather gods. We would then spin the boat around a miserable rock outside some harbour and race straight back – probably via a dog-leg course to some godforsaken lighthouse off the Channel Islands. And we called it fun! It was. We were good at it. We were even champions – top boat out of 600 competitors.
Offshore races are point-to-point. The legs are long and require loads of patience, especially when the wind isn’t blowing. The skills involved include choosing the right route to benefit from the expected wind, weather and tides. The other kind of racing is ‘round-the-cans’, where there are two or three short, sharp races each day over a regatta. Each race involves lots of complex manoeuvres called tacks and gybes, and racing turns around moored buoys (the cans). This necessitates very tightly co-ordinated crew skills, as specialist downwind sails such as spinnakers and A-sails are hoisted and doused (sailor-speak for dropped), since each leg is at a different wind angle. Each crew member knows their place and role, and each hoist, drop and bear-away is executed with balletic precision. (Or so we hope – when it goes wrong, it really goes wrong – I have pulled sails out the water with fish in them.) After racing, all the competing crews compete again in the bar. It’s messy, great fun, and makes the following day’s racing even more challenging.
All our boats have been modern in their day. Our sails now are made of complex, man-made carbon fibres woven to retain shape and efficiency on moulds to give them the best aerodynamic shape. The lines (heaven forbid you ever call them a rope – every one has a specific name: halyard, sheet, strop, barber and jack) are constructed of engineered non-stretch materials with breaking stains measured in multi-tons. Each line is a different colour so we don’t get confused what it does.
There are multiple blocks, turners, clutches, tracks, and jammers to control the running rigging. The winches are geared to make it possible to grind in the sails even in the worst storms. The mast is made of carbon fibre, while the hull is crafted from carefully calibrated expoxied vacuum-bagged honeycomb glass. Below the boat is a 2.6m-long razor-thin keel with a torpedo-shaped lead weight at the bottom to give the vessel the maximum righting moment. The carbon steering wheel controls a 2.5m carbon rudder polished to diamond smoothness to cut through the water. Every single piece of kit on the yacht is designed for functionality and efficiency.
Today, the latest yachts don’t even float. Take a look at Ben Ainslie’s new America’s Cup yacht, Britannia. Ainslie has won four Olympic gold sailing medals, but the UK has never won yachting’s premier event. His new boat flies on hydrofoils a few feet above the surface at about 40 knots. My little race yachts, by comparison, are lucky to get into double digits. In just a few years’ time I expect to see the technologies now employed on these new race boats become commonplace on the weekend sailing circuit. I can’t wait!
Yet it’s not all about modernity and speed. The other week we went out sailing on our chum’s classic yacht – Thalia, a racing gaff cutter built in 1888. Classics are the complete antithesis of today’s modern yachts. Thalia is made of beautifully crafted larch with a wooden mast and boom. The only tech is some 80 carved wooden turning pulley blocks, each embossed with a brass farthing. There isn’t a single winch – every rope has to be hauled through pulleys by grunt work. And every rope is made of natural materials, and every one of them is brown. The joke “pull the brown one” is only funny once.
We took Thalia racing in the world-famous Hamble Classics regatta. The wind was blowing dogs off chains on the Solent the first day. It was howling from the west, but the tide was racing the other way against it, meaning the waves were pushed up into massive short- sharp crests breaking over the gunwales and soaking us all as we struggled to hold our balance on the flat, exposed deck. We tried to pull in the soaking wet sheets and lines. It hurt, our backs ached: it was the equivalent of being thrown in a 200-year-old barrel and pushed off Victoria Falls! We came second or third – I don’t know. We survived. That was enough. And we loved every second of it.
I looked at my wife. She knows that look. She threatened to divorce me if I even think of buying a classic yacht… But I’m working on it: breakfast in bed on a Sunday and, if a couple of clients give me some really good deals, perhaps I can persuade her.
