Acquired dream
Dreams are rare things. Dreams that come to life are rarer still. Dreams need vision, varnishing and anti-fouling once a year to keep them afloat. Occasionally dreams come with manuals.
The legendary Taleisin has completed two circumnavigations – and now she has new owners.
While most boats are dreams, very W few contain the essence of their builders and sailors. The 29’ 9” cutter Taleisin is one such boat. Designed by Lyle Hess in 1977, Taleisin became a living dream for the young couple Lin and Larry Pardey.
Hess had a talent for taking the qualities of the traditional English workboats and refining them into sleek, seaworthy cruising yachts. Taleisin was commissioned by the Pardeys as a step up from their smaller Hess 24’ design Seraffyn in which they had cruised and circumnavigated.
While Seraffyn carried them over 45,000 nautical miles, it was the desire for a little more storage room for the permanent live-aboard couple that drove the design of Taleisin.
Their cruising books and their life had been built around the mantra of “go small, go now” and for that reason they preferred simple boats which were selfsustaining and avoided troublesome electronics and mechanical devices.
All of this seems delightfully out of step with the current day version of the cruising yacht where big, expensive, plastic and full of gadgets seems the norm.
Years before building Taleisin, Larry had milled several black locust trees, and shipped teak logs to remote Bull Canyon in Southern California. Over three years, he and Lin crafted this timber into teak carvel planking over black locust frames, bronze floors, bronze hanging knees and solid teak decks.
The resulting hull had a straight stem and wide side decks of the Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, blended with the beam and sail-carrying capacity of the modern cruising yacht.
Over 30 years Taleisin cruised nearly 100,000 nautical miles with two circumnavigations and an enviable list of countries and memories under her keel. After scouring the world, Lin and Larry eventually settled on New Zealand as the place they wanted to come ashore.
In 1985 they purchased land on Kawau Island and began building a home base. Their waterfront workshop became known as Mickey Mouse Marine and
Taleisin became a regular feature of North Cove.
In 2015 with a lifetime of adventure and Larry’s failing health, the tough decision was made to sell Taleisin.
Beautiful classic yachts, especially famous ones, tend to be inherited, not sold. “Larry and I knew every piece of timber, fitting and fastening in Taleisin, so every inch of that floating object was almost like a part of us,” says Lin.
More important than selling the boat was making sure she went to the right home.
The Pardeys saw off many potential suitors for Taleisin, wanting their cherished boat to go to sailors who would continue voyaging in her.
“Eben and Annie were young, eager and looking for the
challenge of a completely new adventure. They arrived at our jetty and asked to be shown onboard. I was impressed with the way Eben looked at the details and asked the right questions. Annie looked so comfortable moving around on deck and settled onto the settees down below as if she’d been there before.”
Taleisin was sold and sailed to her new home in Westhaven Marina. For the first few weeks the questions from Eben and Annie flew fast and furious, Lin recalls.
“After a month the communications tapered off to a question a week. Each email or call included something about a new skill Annie or Eben had acquired, or an interesting ‘someone’ our boat had brought into their lives. Strangely these communications give me the feeling that, just as we never bought Taleisin, we never actually sold her. It’s more like we’d found adoptive parents to cherish her.”
Stepping aboard Taleisin it is immediately clear you are in the presence of a special boat that has been built around the dreams of two people. With more than 30 years of cruising on her, the Pardeys have thought of everything and reduced it to its most simple and elegant form.
From the quirky Japanese sitz tub under the cockpit deck to the ingenious windvane self-steering system, everything has been handcrafted and designed to be repairable.
Eben and Annie are very much at home aboard Taleisin. They are learning the cruising way by immersion, leaving jobs and business behind while they adjust to a new way of life. It has been two years since they first inherited her and like all good art, they are still finding things about her that surprise and delight.
It helps that the Pardeys wrote 11 books on cruising, six of which are based around their experiences with Taleisin. These are like having extensive manuals for the boat and explain much of the thinking behind the Pardey’s design decisions.
Sailing an engineless work of art is an acquired skill and more so if you are berthed in a marina. Eben and Annie have resorted to mounting a 15hp outboard on the transom to take the panic out of marina maneuvering.
Eben has cleverly designed a bracket system which requires no holes to be drilled into the hull and will leave the boat complete if they should want to remove it in the future.
Making mistakes is all part of the learning process and Eben and Annie are being candid about these on their blog (taleisin.com). They are mistakes everyone on the water has made at some stage and being honest about it all is making the learning curve less steep and endearing them to many folk who are providing assistance from unexpected quarters.
Somewhere in Taleisin’s teak timbers there is a shadowy line. The dreams and experiences lived out on her by the Pardeys will cross over into the plans and hopes of Eben and Annie. Spending time on Taleisin it is obvious that we are somewhere near that transition; somewhere near where dreams become memories yet to happen.