Rants & Musings, Aluminum Boats
Index
Another Reason We Have an Aluminum Boat
The Home of Aluminum Boats
Finding an Aluminum Sailboat
Another Reason We Have an Aluminum Boat (John, 03/2010)
We were out walking on the foreshore here in Nova Scotia a few days ago and came across this remnant of what I’m guessing was a commercial wharf. Clearly it had been in the water for quite a while before it fetched up here in a winter blow.
Of course I can’t guarantee that Morgan’s Cloud would survive a collision with it, but I’m pretty confident that it would not sink us, or perhaps even do that much damage. I say that based on our own collision with a large growler (baby ice berg) some years ago and our sister-ship’s eight knot meeting with a sleeping whale. The former did no damage at all, and the latter deformed the hull plate only about 1/4” over a 1 sq ft area. (The whale swam away too, I’m glad to report.)
Then there was the time that I hit the corner of a steel floating dock
in Scotland when I misjudged the effect of a 40 knot gust at the wrong
moment during a docking. The crash was horrendous, making me fear that
the boat would start sinking immediately. However, the impact only left
a deflection about as big as that left by the whale. In both cases the
dents were just filled with epoxy putty and painted over.
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The Home of Aluminum Boats (Colin Speedie, 01/2010)
Over here in Europe many people choose an aluminum yacht for the excellent strength to weight ratio and the sheer robustness of construction. As a result they are more and more the choice of long distance sailors, especially those heading for higher latitudes. Many of them are cruisers from well-known French yards—OVNIs and Garcias probably being the best represented, and they’ve really made some notable journeys. But these are boats that would be as comfortable going up an African river as up a fjord; capable, comfortable family cruising yachts that with few modifications can (and have) covered much of the globe from pole to pole.
But the French have also designed and built some pretty specialized craft for real polar work, such as Eric Brossiers’ Vagabond which has spent five years overwintering at Spitsbergen as a research base, and Northabout, the first yacht to make an east-west circumnavigation of the arctic sailed by Jarlath Cunnane and his redoubtable Irish crew. Both of these are not of excessive size (around 15m) and both come from the drawing board of Gilbert Caroff. Great boats, but hardly your average cruising yachts.
A new boat launched recently on the French market that incorporates a good deal of sound thinking has recently been reviewed in many of the sailing magazines here and has gained rave reviews. The Boreal 44 is the second in a range (the first is a 50) designed and built by Jean-Francois Delvoye and his team at Treguier on the North Brittany coast. Having built and sailed his own yacht on a six year Atlantic circuit (including two years in Patagonia) with his wife and four children, Delvoye returned to France to build his dream boat incorporating all of the ideas he had gathered during their six years voyaging. And it shows, as the boat is full of great ideas, some of which we would have loved to incorporate in our own OVNI.
Things like a really neat hard dodger, with a small chart table and watertight door—excellent from a safety point of view, but great, too, for just taking things in whilst staying warm and dry. A minimum of 8cm of insulation throughout, and all of the portlights are double-glazed and in Securit glass. To assist her sailing qualities the chain locker is sited by the mast, with the chain being fed to the locker via a tube just below the deck. The lead ballast is cast in moulds to fit between the internal frames, and so is more dense than the usual cast ingots encapsulated in resin, thus aiding the centre of gravity.
The deck looks clean and uncluttered, and in the face of current fashion he has stuck with parallel spreaders, surely a better design choice for this type of boat. Everything except the genoa tracks is welded, to keep the water out and corrosion at bay. The only thing I personally don’t like from what I’ve seen so far is the self-tacking staysail, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be obligatory.
All in all it’s a pretty convincing package, and is a welcome addition
to the French canon. And for anyone considering a new build aluminum boat
with high latitude potential built in, she must be a real contender for
many of the established yards.
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Finding an Aluminum Sailboat (Colin Speedie, 12/2009)
The summer of 2009 was a good one in Scotland, at least compared with the rest of the UK and Ireland. But as is generally the case, once the weather breaks, that’s it, the summer is over, and it’s time to make tracks.
We had set off from Tobermory on the Isle of Mull early in the morning, and by the afternoon were well down into the Firth of Lorne en route south to the North Channel before a long spell of southerly gales were due to set in.
Away on the mainland shore we could see another yacht beating South, and could soon see that it was another OVNI. A few minutes later we crossed tacks, and managed to take a few photos of her against the massive backdrop of Mull. A French 385 called Brecqhou, we had seen her earlier in the season in Arisaig, and she looked right at home in the wild setting of the hills.
A brief chat on the radio led to an exchange of e-mail addresses so that we could exchange photos somewhere down the line before we parted, Brecqhou heading for the Crinan Canal, us on into the night and a quick stop at Jura.
Some time later we made contact once again, by which time I’d learnt a little more about Brecqhou and her owner, Hubert Perier. Since buying her in 2002, he has sailed her to the Azores, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Scotland, an impressive record. And it reminded me once again what great boats these are that demand to be sailed in this way, and that the French sailors really do use them.
It’s odd that aluminum boats have never caught on in the UK. Apart from a short production run of a 28-ft multichined sailboat called a Sarum, and a few semi-custom boats from Whisstocks, one-offs apart, that’s about the sum total of alloy yachts that I know of. Yet they have been hugely popular for years in France, and not just OVNIs, although they are perhaps the best known of the French boats. I’ve just been looking through the boats for sale in the French sailing magazine Voiles et Voiliers, and of 48 yachts in the 13m size bracket no less than 14 are aluminum, and from 9 different builders.
And all of them are boats that are capable of long voyages off the beaten track: 3 OVNIs, 3 nice round bilge Garcias, two elegant Mauric-designed Meridiens and a variety of others. Anyone looking for a good boat for high latitudes could do far worse than start with any one of them.
I asked a boat builder friend why it was that British builders never took to alloy, and he suggested that one reason may have been that to build in aluminum would have meant stocking such a wide variety of different stock—differing hull plate thicknesses for example—that unless some sort of series production was envisaged it would never have been viable, and maybe there’s something in that. And it’s fair to say that we never built many steel boats either, so maybe it has more to do with our love of production boats, and the cost of building one-offs.
Either way it seems a pity, especially as the Dutch builders have taken to building in alloy, too, and with the same attention to detail they have always brought to their steel yachts. In Falmouth, where we lived for many years, there are still really good quality cruising sailboats like Rustlers being built in GRP, and even one-off wooden pilot cutters, but nothing in aluminum, although there is absolutely no reason why not. The kind of craftsmen who work there are the equal of any others in the world, and I’ve no doubt could build aluminum boats to the highest standards.
So, until there is a cultural change, if you’re in the market for an aluminum
boat, whether a one-off, semi-custom, old or new, then France is the place
to look—and right now there’s plenty of choice.
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