Old boat, new plug
Ned Coackley builds a traditional Conway One Design – with a couple of modern twists
Building a 1920s One Design – with modern twists
In 1928 Conway Yacht Club in North Wales set out to find a suitable boat design for racing in Conwy Bay. It was the third attempt to find a One Design as the Conway Restricted Class had become too extreme.
Its replacement – the Conway and Menai Straits One Design (now known as the Royal Anglesey Fife Class) was very pretty but not really ideal for the choppier waters of the Conwy estuary.
Deganwy resident WH Rowland was a member of the Conway YC, and owned Rowland’s Dockyard, which later became Dickie’s of Bangor. With several classic yachts to his name he was asked to design a more suitable boat.
With a flatter, dinghy-like hull and fin keel, the result was a sturdy, powerful design that could cope better with the short, steep chop sometimes found on the lee shore off Deganwy and Llandudno’s west shore.
The first boat was built by Matthew Owen in Menai Bridge, though according to some,
this had a centreboard and internal ballast. It proved a winner at Conway but was converted to a fin keel. Later boats were built at Dickies, some at Deganwy and a few at Morris and Leavett at Beaumaris.
A total of 14 wooden boats were built (but none with a number 3 or 13). The final wooden hull was Maryland in 1946.
Those familiar with the boats of the Menai Strait will see the similarity between the Conwy One Design (COD) and the Menai Strait One Design, which also came from the design board of WH Rowland 10 years later. The rig is identical but the Menai Strait One Design is slightly broader and retained the centreboard more suited to negotiating the considerable sandbank to the east of Bangor pier.
As time went on the Fifes drew a new lease of life from the introduction of fibreglass hulls and numbers sprang into the 40s. Conway YC followed suit with a hull and deck mould from which two boats were built in 1985 and 1986, but further fleet expansion didn’t follow and the fleet remained at 16 boats until 2019. Interest in sailing had waned and several wooden CODs were discarded by ageing owners.
With the club centenary approaching, Conway Yacht Club decided to form a Centenary Trust with the aim of gathering as many of these dilapidated boats as possible, rebuilding them and leasing or selling them on.
Looking for longevity
It was apparent the boats wouldn’t last forever, despite the best efforts of the Centenary Trust, so it was agreed that once the wooden boats were saved, the moulds – which had been idle for 30 years – could be used by Trust volunteers to produce one boat per year. This would expand the class and replace wooden boats as time went by.
So far four boats have been saved, with Kandahar (which sat in the open at Gallows Point for 25 years) taking to the water once more in time for the 2019 Straits Regatta.
Number 19, Alys, also took to the water that year – but hers is a different story. Named after the daughter of Owain Glyndwr, Alys would be the first new-build COD since 1985...
Having learned to sail on the Conwy River more than 50 years ago, and with 20 years experience of boat design and building, I decided it was time to give something back. I offered to sponsor a build and teach volunteers the techniques necessary to produce a hull and deck.
Mostyn Estates kindly lent us an empty joinery workshop in Llandudno. I worked out a timeline and quantity estimates, and a crew was gathered. We were ready to go. We worked ‘Gentleman’s Hours’ for six weeks during the summer of 2018 – usually from 10am to 1pm. The crew varied from day to day but put in the shifts when polyester curing times required.
With experience of a California boatyard, I used the American technique of laying the glassfibre reinforcement lengthways along the hull mould as opposed to the UK method of transverse layup.
After six weeks the hull and deck were released from the moulds, trimmed and joined before being moved out.
Around the corner was another lean-to shed where Alys joined a couple of wooden CODs undergoing rebuild. Over the winter of 2018-19 the fit-out began with framing and bonding the deck to the hull so that the whole unit became a solid monocoque.
During planning I found that the builder’s laminate schedule didn’t correspond to drawings and that there was a
discrepancy in ballasting. Ian Wolstenholme, who’d designed the conversion from wood to GRP, kindly supplied his complete1985 file, from which I obtained the reliable information.
As a qualified yacht designer, I modernised the laminate schedule by replacing some chopped strand mat with woven roving and stiffened up the thinner but stronger hull with fishing boat standard framing from Sea Fish Industry building rules.
Wolstenholme’s preferred ballasting method used 1,100lb of steel shot instead of 700lb of lead, which neatly reduced cost, gave a vertical centre of gravity in the right place and provided the mass necessary to compensate for the lighter GRP hull.
Cost and simplicity were paramount and having volunteer labour significantly reduced building costs. We bought GRP materials in bulk and wood components off-the-shelf, except for marine ply and the long cockpit coamings.
As weight needed to be increased to meet the target set by the two other GRP boats, a plywood core was used for the deck instead of the original balsa. However, the ply was cut into 100mm blocks and laid into resin-rich mat instead of being weighted down in large sheets.
Gaps between blocks were filled with a sawdust/resin dough before overcoating with mat and glass cloth. This method provides multiple bridges between the inner and outer layers as well as a solid core for fastenings and multiple dams between blocks should water penetrate via a fastening. Alys will be around a long time!
Further modifications to improve safety and add weight were a collision bulkhead in the bow and bonded-in buoyancy tanks under the fore and aft decks.
Class rules for fit-out required tropical hardwoods but in the modern world this is not acceptable so local oak was used for all woodwork. Divergences such as this have caused concern at Committee stage and have yet to be resolved, but we must look to the future while keeping a respectful eye on the past.
Launch day
Using an outboard on a COD has always been precarious due to the long aft deck and the need to hang a motor on a bracket over the transom. Alys has a sealed engine well in the aft buoyancy tank so that crew never have to leave the cockpit and the engine is always within the outline of the deck.
Another trial we introduced during the 2019 season was a metal mast. I reasoned that 95% of boats use aluminium spars, and possible newcomers to the fleet may prefer not to maintain 30ft of spruce on their otherwise low-maintenance day racer. Neither did I have time to build a mast before the season.
Ebay provided a second-hand spar for £200, which we cut and altered to accept COD rigging. Great concern was expressed over this experiment, which in fact provided no performance advantage and weighed more than a wooden spar.
A new wooden mast
It was difficult to find comparative quotes for new metal spars and the only one we obtained was twice the price of bespoke wooden spars. So that was that and over the winter I built a mast from beautiful Douglas fir.
The box boom is also different to the normal round, solid pole and copied from the X One Design class. Slab reefing and Cunninghams are historically banned by class rules and the art of reefing has also been lost in class. Alys’s development boom is cheaper and simpler to build and allows internal running rigging to control reefing lines and the outhaul, and hopefully exemplify appropriate sail handling. We shall see!
A short 2020 season allowed some sailing trials with the wooden spar and a new high-quality mainsail in Marblehead cloth by Boatshed Sailmakers of Pwllheli.
The plan is to take Alys to Falmouth Classics and Cork in 2022 – maybe we’ll see you there.