Classic boat owners are getting younger
It pays for anyone to be wary when claiming to have spotted a trend, but in the little global fraternity of traditional sailing, you have to be as careful as a drunk on a ladder. If one boat owner, say, chooses to retain the Formica in his galley when refurbishing a post-war cruising yacht, it’s possible, given the sample size to call it a ‘trend’, but not necessarily advisable. What about the trend of the ‘young conservator’ or YouTube boatbuilder? It’s not entirely a new idea: Alec Laird became famous for his restoration of the 72ft LOS ga cutter Patridge of 1885, over two decades (1979-1999), a job that he started while still a teenager. That was considered amazing at the time, and every reference to his great work included mention of his age. Then there was Ashley Butler, who restored the 38ft-long (LOD), 1903-built Morecambe Bay prawner yacht Ziska, starting in
1997 at the age of just 19. He sailed it from Cornwall across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. For some time after that, not much blipped our radar, and we could have let those instances lie as oddities to be remembered in isolation.
Then something seemed to happen. Or perhaps someone happened. Leo Goolden, a boatbuilder in his 20s, restored a Folkboat and, again, sailed it across the Atlantic. He’s now in
Port Townsend, Washington State, in the final two years (he hopes!) of a mammoth rebuild of the 1910 Albert Strange cutter Tally Ho, a massive, 48ft boat, atypical of her designer. It is, simply, the most talked about restoration of all time, a claim that’s easily proved by the number of people who have viewed his YouTube films he’s made of the restoration – millions.
Max Campbell, also tied to England’s West Country, was next, restoring a little 22ft Clyst Class sloop built in 1965 and named called Flying Fish. In the wake of the young men who went before him, he duly set sail and went west to the Caribbean. Around the same time, Steve Dennette and Alix Kreder, two rock-climbers in their early 30s started to build a new 38ft William Atkin ketch on Steve’s family’s farm in Connecticut in the most traditional way, by felling trees planted by Steve’s grandfather. Is early 30s ‘young’? It will suit most of us to think so, I suspect.
Then the ages really started falling in earnest. Ashmole Faire-Ring of Norfolk on England’s east coast, burst onto our pages a couple of years ago, aged just 17, when he took on the partial rebuild of a half-sized Thames barge yacht called Growler, built in 1922. Shortly after that, we heard of Katie McCabe, who bought a 26ft Morgan Giles-designed West Channel One-Design built in 1952 – at the age of 12! By the age of 14, she’d sailed Falanda around Britain, becoming the youngest person ever to do so in the process. Up in Ullapool, Megan Loftus, 16, has just embarked upon the restoration of former CB editor Nic Compton’s yacht Kingfisher of Baltiza. This is a Suhaili type, and Megan plans one day to follow in Suhaili and Robin KnoxJohnston’s wake and sail around the world. As the daughter of boatbuilder Tim Loftus, Megan is steeped in the world of sailing, and at the old age of 16, this is actually her second yacht; her first was a century-old Itchen ferry. Stan Brown, aged 16, has just bought a 25ft Yachting World 5-Tonner for £1 and has had it craned into the family’s back garden for a restoration to start. These are just the instances I know of. I wonder how many other young people have recently got the classic boat bug? It’s definitely a trend, and the thing that might surprise some readers is that, so far, the success rate of finishing the build or the restoration, has been 100 per cent. That is far higher than the overall success rate. So much for the listless young, then…