WINNER HAL SISK
CLASSIC BOATER OF THE YEAR
The award goes to a man who’s probably the only person to have restored yachts by the three great Scottish designers Fife, Watson and Mylne. He’s a retired engineer with a doctoral degree in coastal engineering and he’s lectured on yachting history in five continents. His early years were spent racing Cadets and Enterprise dinghies from Crosshaven in Ireland. Later he raced successfully oshore with brothers George and John, and he was the co-founder Irish Sea Oshore Racing Association in early 1970s.
Moving into smaller boats, he kickstarted a revival of the Water Wag class, the world’s oldest one design, by building first new Water Wag in 20 years in 1977. He proudly declares he’s campaigned it for more than 40 seasons!
We give him the award this year for his stunningly ambitious ongoing project to restore all seven of the still-extant Dublin Bay 21s, but it’s just the tip of an iceberg. In 1983, he restored the 1884 Fife III-designed 22ft ga cutter Vagrant, then re-enacted her maiden voyage from Scotland to Dublin. In 1992, he built a replica of Simon & Jude, a 30ft catamaran designed and built for Sir William Petty in Dublin in 1662. There were more, but in 2005 came Peggy Bawn,a 35ft GL Watson-designed ga cutter built in 1894. It redefined the bar in terms of small-yacht restorations and became the first boat we devoted a series to the restoration of, written by our late, great technical editor Theo Rye. Hal’s specialist publishing house was behind Martin Black’s acclaimed GL Watson biography. If that weren’t enough, he’s chairman Association of Yachting Historians and was key to the scanning the Lloyd’s Register of Yachts as well as The Yachtsman magazine and more to come. There is perhaps no one in the world who puts as much into the history of small-boat sailing, and probably no one who has spent as much, yet failed to walk away with a 100ft yacht or a J Class. That failure is his greatest success.