Thomas and I made a start on the winter work. We took off most of the running rigging and I spent several days in one of the old RAF seaplane hangars at Plymouth Yacht Haven re-varnishing the spars. Working into the evening in the empty hangar as a northeast wind rattled the big sliding doors, it was eerie to think Lawrence of Arabia knew this space when he was reinventing himself as Aircraftman T.E. Shaw at RAF Mount Batten in the early 1930s.
I left Thomas alone with the angle grinder and he cut off the windlass, which we drove to Dave Webster of Deep Blue Engineering in Millbrook for refurbishment. It’s a manual windlass which you crank with a hand spike and frustrated us all year by working on the backward stroke but not on the forward so it took twice as long as it should to haul up the anchor. I emailed a photograph to Dave asking for advice and when he immediately recognised it as a Simpson Lawrence 250, I knew I’d contacted the right person. When we got to Millbrook, he had two others in a queue.
Thomas wanted some advice on restoring the roller reefing on his own old wooden boat, so Dave suggested he ask a bearded chap in a woolly hat wandering through the boatyard carrying two supermarket bags. He turned out to be Nick Skeate, one of the world’s most famous gaff rig sailors. Forty years ago, he lost his boat on a reef in the Pacific so he designed and built a replacement in New Zealand and has since sailed her three and a half times round the world.
She’s Wylo II, a 32′ gaff cutter with a steel hull, wooden deck and a sail plan designed for long-distance, short-handed passages: two similar sized jibs so shortening sail means simply rolling one up rather than swapping a large jib for a small one, and an enormous topsail for light winds. Nick’s spending the winter in the mud at Millbrook rather than the sunshine further south because he has some repairs to make, so he showed us round.
Nick has sold the plans of Wylo II so there are now 50 versions of her afloat.
Guiding Star will come out of the water at the end of February for two weeks to renew the anti-fouling and paint the hull and bulwarks. The big job left over from last winter is to strip and re-varnish the coachroof, forehatch and tiller.
By April, we’ll be ready to sail. I can’t wait.
Guiding Star Looe Lugger 1907 