Westerly 22 Young Tiger

CMDR Denys Rayner 1943

Loch Nevis 7 August 1904
This image is from C.C.Lynams The Log of the Blue Dragon 1892-1904, London: A. H. Bullen 1907. The photo was taken in 1904 by Lynam of his family sailing in Loch Nevis - which is heaven in Gaelic. My seafaring mentor Denys Rayner, who read the book when at school, wrote that it infected him with "the sailing canker"
Denys Rayner shared Lynam’s preference for yachts in which the skipper removes ‘grease off a plate covered by the cold gravy of the mutton-chop’, keeps a cabin tidy and scrapes ice from its roof before dawn. Lynam was among the first to enjoy a kind of yachting that did not include much larger boats than the Blue Dragon - 25 foot, 2.2 tonnes - and did not rely on paid hands or wearing blazers and caps and racing. He pre-dated by 20 years Kenneth Grahams 1917 remark through Rattie about the pleasures of messing about in boats in The Wind in the Willows. I respect people who race around the world in sailing boats, but I find the idea of circumnavigating without stopping the opposite of how a small boat should be enjoyed. I have sailed across the Atlantic in a 22 footer but one of the tests of seamanship is finding and getting in and out of a multitude of different harbours and anchorages. Just as Lynam enthused Rayner, so Rayner infused me with the joys of visiting lots of places in small boats

25 August 1997 on the River Orwell at Sea Reach near Harwich on the UK east coast, of Rayners first design Robinetta launched in May 1937

Westerly 22

The 22 was offered with either a Bermudian or Gunter rig, but Rayner was a champion of the Gunter rig, citing both its ease of handling and what he felt were superior sailing characteristics.

Rayners friend Jack Hargreaves noted British Broadcaster, was an enthusiastic supporter of postwar family sailing and the boats then being designed in Britain for everyman". Here he is aboard Young Tiger.

Young Tiger setting out for the Americas

Here she is in Bequia, having been safely sailed across the Atlantic by two relatively inexperienced sailors, Simon Baddeley (Hargeaves stepson) and Sue Pulford. They first landed in Barbados, the crossing taking 29 days.

Years later Simon Baddelly was able to track down his beloved Young Tiger in 2007.

Denys Rayner had a rather distinguished career a Naval officer in the RNVR, fighting throughout the Battle of the Atlantic in WW2. But he is likely to be more for his achievements as a yacht designer. His life and service are well worth reading about and I found especially poignant the care he and his took of less fortunate souls after the war. Read the wiki.
His father was a racing yachtsman but at an early age Denys realized that he was more interested in cruising, his imagination fired by C. C. Lymans The Log of the Blue Dragon. After a succession of small boats and cruises therein, Rayner in 1937 was able to design his own boat, Robinetta, and cruise the Western Highlands as had Lyman.
After the war Denys was able to return to his experiments with yacht design and adding manufacture. Like others in postwar Britain, he turned his attention to plywood and the design and building of small, trailerable craft with accommodations for a small family. Along with other designers, notably Robert Tucker, he helped enable a boom in small boat sailing which democratized the once elite sport by making it more accessible to the growing middle class. He also experiment with twin or bilge keels, allowing very shoal draft boats, a system discovered by Arthur Balfour.
In 1963 Rayner founded Westerly Marine and began building in GRP or fiberglass. The firms first design was the Westerly 22, based on his earlier Westcoaster. In 1965 a scheme was hatched. Young Simon Badderly, a family friend, and a companion, Sue Pulford, would sail a 22 to America, where Simon was to take a position after finishing his schooling. The boat was Young Tiger, the voyage a successful one which earned Simon the RCC Challenge Cup for a cruise in a small boat. Simon and Sue made the remarkably uneventful passage in 29 days, confirming Denys Rayners conviction that these were very seaworthy boats, indeed. There is a full account of that cruise, as reported in the pages of the Royal Cruising Clubs Journal for 1966 at 70.8%.
Westerly Marine went on to become at one time the largest boat building firms in Britain and have a very active owners group. The 22s continue to be quite popular, and can still be found in the UK and US, and probably further afield. A later Jack Laurent Giles design, the 26 Centaur, became the companies best selling model.

Much thanks to Simon Baddelly for the use of his material. Simon is soon off to Corfu!

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Pen Duick II and The French Sailing Revolution

Back in the early 1960s France was still recovering from a war which had left many of its cities in ruins, its businesses broke and its economy on the rocks. To make matters worse there were deep divisions in French politics and the overthrow of the government in a military coup detat seemed a possibility at times.

In this climate its not surprising that yachting was regarded as a minority activity. There were, anyway, few facilities for yachts except in places where foreign-owned boats came to visit. The idea of owning and sailing a yacht for pleasure would have seemed elitist, expensive, and impractical for the ordinary French man or woman.

If you sailed to any French harbour in the late 1950s or early 60s you would have seen no more than a handful of private yachts, most of them old and somewhat tatty. In Britain, yachting and offshore yacht racing was already booming, and British designers like Laurent Giles, Robert Clark, Peter Brett, Arthur Robb and C E Nicholson had become world famous for their robust and capable ocean racers and cruisers.

Then a Frenchman with a French boat won a famous French victory – and everything changed.

In 1964 Eric Tabarly with his remarkable ketch Pen Duick II (thanks to Remi Jouan for the above image) laid the foundations for the extraordinary boom in French yachting which has resulted, more than 40 years later, in France having a 37% share of the global market for sailing yachts, most of the worlds biggest yacht building businesses, many of the worlds most famous and successful yacht designers, a domestic leisure boat market of 8 million users - the second largest leisure boat market in the world after the USA - and a virtual monopoly on long-distance short-handed ocean racing superstars.

Eric Tabarly was a tough, handsome sailor, an officer in the French Navy, who was passionate about sailing and utterly determined to win the Singlehanded Transatlantic Race. Nowadays we think of “Le Transat” and other long distance races as French, but the original race in 1962 was an all-British idea, conceived by a British eccentric, Blondie Hasler, organised by the Royal Western Yacht Club, and sponsored by the Observer newspaper.

Francis Chichester had won the first race in 1960, and was favourite to win again. His yacht was a 40 foot Robert Clark ocean racer, solidly built and carrying a big cutter rig. Tabarly, an unknown in international yachting circles at the time, conceived a 44 foot purpose-built, light displacement ketch. She was built, simply but strongly in plywood with a double chined hull, and her rig was designed for power combined with good helm balance and ease of sail handling. However, no one had raced singlehanded in such a big boat before and most experts gave him little chance of finishing.

Tabarly stamped his authority on the race at an early stage. His determination to win was evident from the moment he launched an 900 sq ft spinnaker soon after the start (to the surprise of all who thought you needed a full crew for that kind of sail) and opened a huge lead over the rest of the fleet in the first couple of days.

He was handicapped by a number of gear failures. His self-steering gear jammed, forcing him to steer the boat by hand for many more hours than he had expected, his cheap alarm clock stopped working, making it difficult for him to keep to a sensible rest schedule, and his log rotor was bitten off by a dolphin. In mid-Atlantic his jib halyard block broke and he had to climb the mast to replace it. Nevertheless, Pen Duick II crossed the finishing line first in a record time of 27 days 3 hours, almost a full 3 days ahead of the pre-race favourite, Francis Chichester. Another Frenchman, Jean Lacombe finished in 9th place in his tiny GRP “Golif”. (More on this boat in a forthcoming post). (photo: Pen Duick II nears the finish line of the 1964 OSTAR: AFP/Getty Images)

France cheered the new hero. He was immediately awarded the Legion dHonneur and returned home with Lacombe to a rapturous reception. Suddenly the French media and the French people took an unprecedented interest in yachting, new small yacht designs appeared from new French designers and new factories, money was found to build sailing schools and marinas, and France set a course towards domination of the European yachting industry.

In the next Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic race, in 1968, there were no less than 9 French entries, then 13 in 1972 and 31 in 1976. In 1984 out of the top 10 finishers, 8 were French. These days the “Transat”, as the race is now called, is dominated by French sailors, French boats, and French sponsors.

After the 1964 victory, Pen Duick had a busy and wearing life as an ocean racer taking part in many fully crewed races, during which Tabarly trained a formidable number of apprentices such as Alain Colas, Marc Pajot, Olivier de Kersauson, and others. These graduates of his informal sailing college became the next generation of great French ocean yachtsmen. Eventually Pen Duick was sold to the Ecole Nationale de la Voile at Quiberon, but after a short time, and a serious grounding, she was taken out of service and laid up ashore at the school gates. It wasnt until 1993 that a campaign to restore this famous boat was mounted, and with financial support from the government, the French Navy, the regional council of Brittany and others, she was restored to perfect condition. (colour photo above with permission of Remi Jouan)

Pen Duick II is now based at Quiberon and is used as a busy training vessel during the summer months and an occasional exhibit at the Cite de la Voile Eric Tabarly centre at Lorient in Brittany.

Pen Duick II

Designer : Gilles Costantini, Eric Tabarly

Built 1964 by Costantini at La Trinité, Brittany.

LOA : 13 m 60

LWL : 10 m

Displacement : 6.5 Tons

Beam : 3 m 40

Draft : 2 m 20

Rig : Ketch

Sail area : 60 m2

Construction : Hard chine plywood

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