Golden Vanity: history and restoration
Golden Vanity is a traditional wooden ga cutter and Mumble Bee class Brixham sailing trawler. She is a ‘fishing smack’ – although she was built, in 1908, as a yacht for the renowned marine artist Arthur Briscoe, who regularly sailed on board with his close friends and spy novelist Erskine Childers, who wrote Riddle of the Sands. She is very strong and seaworthy with a deep displacement keel.
As with many boats of her class and age Golden Vanity has led a challenging life with various phases of restoration and use, including with the Golden Vanity Trust where she was sailed by hundreds of young people from various backgrounds and varying abilities. In 1999 she passed to the Trinity Sailing Foundation and it was here that Charlie Tulloch, Principal of First Class Sailing first sailed on her.
In 2019 funding diculties forced Trinity Sailing Foundation to cease operating and she was acquired by First Class Sailing and housed under a lean-to at the Hamblebased Elephant Boatyard, where a team led by Paul Pilsworth of paid helpers, volunteers, a couple of specialist engineers and a boatbuilder from the yard, stripped her hull, topsides and bulwarks of years of layers of paint back to bare wood. A few areas were recaulked and the odd graving piece was chopped in. Then fresh paint applied. The shoe on her keel was needle gunned back to shiny bare metal before a galvanizing zinc paint was applied.
Lots of areas of the deck were recaulked, the spars stripped back to bare wood and coated with Deks Olje D1 and D2 finishing oil. Her capping rail got sanded back and D1 applied. The shrouds were replaced.
A new mainmast was made out of closegrained, kiln dried, Canadian Douglas fir. Apart from a few feet at each end, the mast is hollow and was made from an assembly of eight sections in bird’s mouth construction, and then painstakingly planed and sanded to a circular form, before receiving 12 coats of varnish. It is approximately 56ft (17m) long and 23cm (9in) diameter at the gooseneck.
All four tonnes of her moveable ballast where heaved out by hand and replaced with 22kg lead prisms.
The engine was hoisted out to the bottom of the companionway stairs which allowed the engine itself to be worked on – de-rusted, painted, new alternator arm welded on, while also allowing people to get into the engine bay to replace the drip tray, fit sound/fire insulation, change seacocks and fuel piping, paint and generally make it 100 per cent better than it was.