Westernman

Westernman is my boat. She was built for the family and me ten years ago in North America to a design drawn up by my friend Nigel Irens. Nigel is best known for his world-beating fast multihulls, but I remember him back in the late 1960s when he and I were impoverished sailors living aboard our old gaffers on the Hamble River, hoping the harbour master wouldn't notice us and come looking for his dues.

Nigel drew Westernman to a tight specification. She was to replace the 1911 pilot cutter Hirta which the family had owned since the early 1980s and which had carried us far and wide in safety, speed and comfort. She is constructed in wood epoxy and displaces 22 tons on a deck length of 41 feet. Over her spars she is more like 55 feet and she sets 1450 square feet of sail so, one way and another, she is no slouch. Heavy displacement makes her easy motion a revelation to many who have only sailed far lighter boats. Nonetheless, Westernman is surprisingly close-winded and has given many a modern yacht a shock! Her name, by the way, comes from the term used for the paid hands aboard the 19th century pilot cutters from the Bristol Channel. Often known as 'Westernmen', they kept the sea while their pilots steamed up-Channel then down again on the ships that paid all their wages.

Everything about Westernman has been thought out so that people watching her sail by can easily imagine her to be a vintage classic. Adrian Morgan commented in Yachting Monthly that she was 'artfully aged' and that from her looks alone could have been 'a hundred years old'. We had her accommodation built from 150-year-old pitch pine saved from a Liverpool warehouse. It's coming down nicely in colour after a decade and really looks the part. Here's a photo taken on board last Christmas.  Nowadays Roz  and I live on board for three or  four months most years. The boat gives us all anyone could ask for.

The experience that went into Westernman began in the early Seventies when Roz and I had Saari, a 1920 pilot cutter designed by the legendary Scots/Norwegian, Colin Archer.  We sailed her to Rio and back via the Caribbean and Canada, then home across the North Atlantic far too late in the year. We took a bad hammering, but she looked after us. We fell in love with the gaff rig then and despite my deep professional involvement with more modern arrangements our emotional attachment to it has remained strong. Our daughter was virtually born aboard Saari. The photo on the right was taken as she thrashed her way south across the line, closehauled in a heavy squall way back in 1975.

Hirta at speed (Photo by Kos).

Later, in the Eighties, our big 1911 Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter Hirta took us to the Greenland ice, Russia, the Caribbean, the States, Newfoundland and heaven knew where else as well. Hirta was home for five years; we had her fifteen in all. She was hard work in every sense, but what fun she was to sail!  

Westernman's genesis is hardly surprising against a background like this. In recent years, Ros and I have the new boat so well 'sorted' that we can comfortably cruise two-handed on quite long passages. The secret is partly our self-steering arrangements which are built around a Windpilot pendulum servo gear. I often drive this with an Autohelm rather than pure wind power so it can steer a compass course. Here they are working together as we thunder around Cape Finisterre with a gale of wind behind us. Roz is just handing out a mug of Tea. Happy days...