Traditional Boats & Tall Ships magazine
August/September 2003
Moosk – A Class Act Reborn
John Worral unearths the history of a classic yacht
Down on the south coast these days, there lives a nonagenarian with a new lease of life. She is a lady of some mystery with probably enough stories attached to her sheets to keep the bar open in the bar open in the yacht clubs from the Channel to the Clyde If they were to get an airing – some will have involved an MP and others a Scottish earl – but she is not letting on and has now gone to work with children.
Moosk – even her name begs explanation which is not forthcoming – was born in 1906 in a Falmouth boatyard, specifically the now defunct boatyard of W E Thomas. She is 37.9ft stem to stern and 45ft on deck, an auxiliary gaff yawl, built of teak on oak, and history, up until a few years ago when she was found on blocks in a Glasgow lorry car park, is at least obscure. All that is known is the list of owners’ names registered at Lloyds and that she was de-registered in 1966 when she probably came out of the water.
There is little other documentation save for copy correspondence at Lloyds which, in some beautifully arcane English, shows acid dialogue between the registrars and the first owner, one SH Beard of Barcombe Hall, Paignton. The dispute arose from the fact that Moosk was originally certificated as 16 A rather than 16 A1 because she made her maiden voyage without anchors and chains of the right weight. Mr Beard, seemingly a man not favourably disposed to views at variance with his own, argues the relative merits of 2 ½” short-link cable – which he had – and the specified 4 ½” manila rope which he didn’t, and, he says, could not stow. In a letter of 14th July 1905 scattered with splenetic underlinings, he adds: ‘I trust that you will not withhold the Figure 1 because of red-tape technicalities.’ Frustratingly, there is no clue as to who gave way but by 1907/08, Moosk was 16 A1.
Not Seaworthy
Much more frustrating again, however, is the complete lack of anecdote for the next 80-odd years. From 1915 to 1928, she was owned by Robert Armitage MP, resident of Farnley Hall, Leeds and in the early 1930s, by the Earl of Glasgow. Other owners were based respectively in Southampton, Monmouth and Renfrewshire, and in Brooks Street, W1 which, even in the 1920s, probably meant an estate agent. The last owner was Mr Mitchell of Netherlee, Glasgow.
But there isn’t a single recollected sighting of her anywhere during all that time, not until she was spotted in the aforementioned Glasgow lorry park from where she was rescued by Andrew Thornhill on behalf of the Percival Trust, a Bristol-based charity established by a former headmaster of Clifton College, Bristol to which it is still closely connected. The signs were that she may have been lived in at some stage, in or out of the water, but she was anything but seaworthy by then.
And it took a while to get her so. Andrew first took her to Lowestoft, but her refurbishment and restoration failed to happen for a number of reasons and based in London and Bristol, he wasn’t well placed to chase progress. But he had previously met Dominic Bridgman at the Festival of the Sea in Bristol. Dominic, a skipper with a background in sail training, particularly for those with special needs, was at the time skippering the mumble-bee trawler and nowadays sail-trainer Golden Vanity, and the two of them got talking. It was one of those occasions and conversations where, in the festival atmosphere, wilder dreams and aspirations tend to get free rein.
‘Let’s get on with it’
‘Andrew was looking over Golden Vanity,’ recalls Dominic, ‘and he started talking about getting a sail-trainer for the Trust at sometime and putting together a skipper and crew to run it and I sort of said, ‘Great Idea’ and he sort of said, ‘Well, it will happen sometime.’
‘Well, when people say that sort of thing, you can only bear it in mind and get on with what you are doing and take the view that it might happen or it might not. So I carried on with Vanity, sailing out of Brixham and with another Designated List trawler, Provident, for a while, and then I had a year delivering yachts.
‘But then in 2000, out of the blue, Andrew got in touch and said, ‘Right, let’s get on with it.’ Moosk was still in Lowestoft and not progressing and he took me on partly to get up there and sort it out. So that was how I got involved. I found the Southwold ship builder, Gary Brown- or he found me. We moved Moosk down to his yard later that year and he got started.’ Gary, fro his part, was pleasantly surprised when he got down tow work. ‘She wasn’t in such bad condition, despite her recent history. Although she is teak on oak, some boards down by the garboard were of elm, but they were not rotten, surprisingly. But we still had to put quite a few frames in.’
And that took time, with the result that Moosk didn’t get into the water until late summer 2001. But by then she had her strength back and that strength had been supplemented by a Ford New Holland four-cylinder diesel tractor engine adapted by Lancing Marine in a package capable of holding 8km/h for four days, just in case trainees ever needed tog et home against the wind.
In Trust
After some shaking down and a haul out at the Excelsior Yard, Lowestoft for final adjustments in September, she headed off to the West Country where she joined the Trust’s flotilla. The Trust, which, as a classic yacht charter and sail-training organization, trades as Clifton Sailing, now has four boats. One of them, an Uffa Fox one-off design Flying Thirty, called Huff of Arklow, works on the West Coast of Scotland but others work from Plymouth. Together with Moosk, they include Sirius, a 30ft Fisher motor sailor, and the original condition – and Designated List – gaff cutter, Marigold, (see TB&TS – December200/January 2001 Issue) which Clifton Sailing leases from its owner, Glen Allen. Marigold had also been considered as a sail-trainer but Dominic had taken her across to Brest to see how she would work, and he had concluded that as a sail-trainer, she probably wouldn’t.
‘It would have been quite inappropriate, really,’ he says. ‘She’s not a good boat for sail training. She’s very hard to sail, with sparse accommodation and oil lamps throughout. She was built in 1892 and has been restored to very original condition, even down to the varnish recipes. She was a classic racing boat of her time, so she is much better suited to sailing as a day-charter boat. We have an Edwardian motor yacht, Bounty, which goes with her and all the catering is done on her. Moosk, on the other hand, is a full-on sail-training boat. She is STOPS category: 0, Wolfson category: 0&1 and Final category: 0, all of which allows unrestricted service.’
Last year, in her first season, she worked out of Plymouth, crew by Dominic and mate, Barbara Simi, who brings authentic Italian pasta cooking to the package. There were trips to the Scillies, France and the Channel Islands and shorter excursions along the coast.
Limousine of the Sea
By then, she had already proved her codings, not least when Dominic and Barbara were bringing her down from Lowestoft for the start of the season.We were approaching Plymouth,’ recalls Barbara, running before a Force Nine easterly with just the mizzen and a reefed staysail and we were still making 12 knots. And we were happily chatting in the cockpit when this huge wave threw us flat on the starboard side and suddenly the mast was touching the water. But she came straight up as though nothing has happened.’
And, says Barbara, the pattern for the sail-training trips has now established itself and the common thread is the progress the children make from initial seasickness and sometimes desperation of the first day to the love that they develop for Moosk. ‘They clean and tidy her; write songs to her and they make her feel more alive than she has probably ever been, this old lady. And then they don’t want to leave her after have found such great friend.
‘Lat summer, one nine-year-old came sailing with her siblings. We were getting into Salcombe and she was looking at all the other boats in the harbor and then she turned to me and said: ‘None of them is as beautiful as Moosk: she is the limousine of the sea.’
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The article was written by John Worral and appeared in the Aug/Sept 2003 edition of Traditional Boats & Tall Ships Magazine. For more information visit www.tallship.co.uk
