Missing the boats

.


By Kristin Tillotson,

Todd Warner has spent nearly four decades finding and restoring more than 100 historic wooden boats. Next weekend, his beauties go on the auction block, and he hopes some of them stay in Minnesota.


To modern-boat enthusiasts, the cavernous warehouse in tiny Winsted, Minn., might look like it's filled with 40-foot-long dinosaurs. Sleek, swift, gorgeous dinosaurs, maybe, but creatures that belong in the past.

To Todd Warner, owner of the largest private collection of vintage wooden boats in the country, they are objects of unparalleled beauty, timeless enjoyment and rich history.


Warner has spent 37 years collecting and restoring more than 125 boats, from custom-made power racers and runabouts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to beat-up rowboats and canoes worth the sweat equity needed to restore them.


Next Saturday, he'll be kissing many of the fruits of his life's passion goodbye. His beloved Chris-Crafts and Hackercrafts, runabouts and launches, boats with names like Thunderballs, the Gerry Lo and the Sugar Lady are being auctioned to raise capital to restructure his business, Mahogany Bay... Read more



.

HMS Hermes

.



HMS Hermes (R12) was a Centaur-class British aircraft carrier, the last of the postwar conventional aircraft carriers commissioned into the Royal Navy.

She was laid down by Vickers-Armstrong at Barrow-in-Furness during WW II as HMS Elephant. Construction was suspended in 1945 but work was resumed in 1952 to clear the slipway and the hull was launched on 16 February 1953. The vessel remained unfinished until 1957, when she entered service on 18 November 1959 as HMS Hermes after extensive modifications which included installation of a massive Type 984 'searchlight' 3D radar.



A 1966 review indicating that Hermes was surplus to operational requirements and was offered to the Royal Australian Navy as a replacement for HMAS Melbourne. In 1968, Hermes took part in a combined exercise with the RAN, during which the carrier was visited by senior RAN officers and Australian government officials, while RAN Skyhawks and Trackers practiced landings on the larger carrier. The offer was turned down due to operating and manpower costs.



Hermes served as one of four Royal Navy strike carriers mainly in the Indian Ocean area until 1970. She could have seen action against the Egyptians when Egypt closed off the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping in May 1967. The UK and US contemplated forming an international fleet to open the strait with force if necessary, but the idea never materialised.



Hermes was due to be decommissioned in 1982 after a defence review by the British government, but when the Falklands War broke out, she was made the flagship of the British forces, setting sail for the South Atlantic just three days after the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Hermes carried as many as 26 BAe Sea Harrier FRS.Mk.1 jets of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, Harrier GR.Mk.3 4 jets of the Royal Air Force, and 10 Sea King MK4s and MK5s as well as a troop of Special Air Service (SAS) and Royal Marines. As she was the RN's largest carrier, she was considered too valuable to risk close into the Falklands, due to the possibility of Argentinian AF attacks. Her Harriers therefore operated at the limit of their endurance radius, but were very successful in keeping the enemy aircraft at bay. After her return home from the Falklands conflict Hermes entered into a much needed 4 month refit until November 1982. She then took part in NATO exercises in the North Atlantic, and the Med Sea as a Commando Carrier. In the autumn of 1983 she took part in her last exercise, Ocean Safari, where she reverted back to a strike carrier role, embarking 12 Sea Harriers, 10 RAF Harrier GR3s and 10 Sea King MK5s. After this exercise she returned to the UK for a minor refit and into maintain reserve in February 1984.



In 1983, when the proposed sale of HMS Invincible to the Royal Australian Navy was cancelled following the Falklands War, an offer was made to sell Hermes and a squadron of Sea Harriers to Australia. However the new Hawke government decided against purchasing a replacement for HMAS Melbourne.
She served with the Royal Navy until 12 April 1984. She was paid off in 1985 and in April 1986 she was refitted and sold to India and recommissioned as the INS Viraat in 1989.



Her typical aircraft complement in the late 1960s consisted of 12 Sea Vixen FAW2s, 7 Buccaneer S2s, 4 Gannet AEW3s, 1 Gannet COD4, 5 Wessex HAS3s and 1 Wessex HAS1. She was recommissioned as a commando carrier in 1973, as an ASW carrier in 1976 (carrying around 20 or so Sea King and Wessex helicopters), and then as a V/STOL carrier in 1981. Hermes initial complement of aircraft as a V/STOL carrier was 5 Harriers and 12 Sea King helicopters, though she had the capacity for up to a total of 37 aircraft.


.

William Fife

.




William Fife III OBE (1857-1944), also known as Wm. Fife, Jr., was the third generation of a family of Scottish yacht designers and builders.
Fife was born in the small village of Fairlie on the Firth of Clyde. His father and grandfather (both also named William and often referred to as Fife I and Fife II) had also been designers and boatbuilders in Fairlie. The family business operated from a yard on the beach in the village. Fife began building yachts in 1890 and soon surpassed the achievements of his father and grandfather and became known as one of the premier yacht designers of the day.

Fife designed two America's Cup yachts for grocery and tea magnate Sir Thomas Lipton who challenged for the cup a total of five times. The Fife-designed challenger Shamrock I (1899) lost to Columbia (Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, 1899) and Shamrock III (1903) lost to Reliance. After the establishment of the first International Rule in 1906, Fife became a prolific designer of meter boats, designing and building several very successful 15mR and 19mR yachts in the years leading up to the Great War.




Éric Tabarly, the famous French sailor, two time winner of the OSTAR and owner of the Fife design Pen Duick (formerly Yum, 1898), writing on the designs produced by Fife during the first few decades of the century noted that: "the great designers of the period were Herreshoff, George Lennox Watson, Nicholson and William Fife. Amongst these, Fife has acquired a particular reputation thanks to the sheer artistry and balance of his designs. Furthermore, those of his designs which took shape in his yard were of unmatched construction."



While Fife established a leading reputation on the yacht racing circuit, his work also included a number of fine cruising vessels. Dr. William Collier of Fairlie Restorations in Hamble, UK, writing on Fife's work in the 1920s, noted that during this period, ”[Fife] designed and built not only smaller Metre boats but also a series of fine cruisers. This combination typified the inter-war era of the Fairlie yard. Like the schooner Altair (1931), many of the cruisers echo his turn of the century designs such as Cicely (1902) or Suzanne (1906); similarly there were few fundamental differences in his ketch designs spanning this era. Perceived by some as anachronistic, these yachts were considered by many to represent some of the greatest refinements of the auxiliary cruising yacht ever achieved.” Id.
The Fife yard also had a reputation for the extremely high quality of the craftsmanship of the yachts built at the yard. Today, it is thought that there are somewhat less than 100 Fife designs still in existence. Of these, there are around fifty still sailing. Of the larger vessels, the schooner Altair (1931) and the keel cutters Cambria (1928), Hallowe'en (1926), The Lady Anne (1912), Moonbeam of Fife (1903), Moonbeam IV (1920), Mariquita (1911) and Tuiga (1909) grace the classic yacht circuit in Europe. In North America, the ketchs Adventuress (1924), Belle Aventure (1929) and Sumurun (1914) are located in New England waters.



Fife once said that the secret of a great yacht was that it should be both "fast and bonnie".

Fife was awarded an OBE for his work. In 2004, he was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame.

Shamrock & Reliance

Fife died in 1944, never having married and without an heir. He is buried in Largs. The yard was continued for some years after his death by his nephew, but never achieved the renown known under Fife's ownership.


.

The Christina O

.





Christina O is one of the world's longest private yachts at 325 feet 3 inches (99 m). She was originally a Canadian River class frigate called HMCS Stormont and was launched in 1943. She served as a convoy escort during the Battle of the Atlantic and was present at the D-Day landings.



After the end of the Second World War she was one of many surplus naval vessels and Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis purchased her for just $34,000. He spent $4 million to convert her into a luxurious yacht and renamed her Christina after his daughter. Apart from Onassis's mistress Maria Callas and his wife Jackie Onassis other celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Eva Peron have sailed on her. She was one of the most famous society venues of the mid 20th century: John F Kennedy first met Winston Churchill on board in 1957.



When Aristotle Onassis died in 1975, he left the yacht to his daughter, who gave her to the government for use as a presidential yacht in 1978. She was rechristened the Argo but was allowed to decay and was put up for sale at $16 million in the early 1990s, but found no takers. In 1996 a sale to an American fell through (he was later convicted of wire fraud in relation to his attempt to purchase the yacht).



Finally in 1998 she was purchased by Greek shipowner John Paul Papanicolaou who had sailed on her as a child. He changed her name to Christina O and undertook a major refurbishment between January 1999 and April 2001. As of 2006 she is available to charter at between 45,000 and 65,000 Euro per day.



Christina O has a master suite, eighteen passenger staterooms, and numerous indoor and outdoor living areas, all connected by a spiral staircase. Compared to a typical 21st-century superyacht, her staterooms are small and Christina O lacks the indoor boat storage that is now standard; but on the other hand, the number of living areas is large, and the amount of outdoor deck space is very generous.
The aft main deck has an outdoor pool with a mosaic floor that rises at the push of a button to form a dance floor, and there is a helicopter platform on the promenade deck. In Ari's Bar, the barstools retain the original upholstery made from a very soft, fine leather made from the foreskin of a Minke Whale.

The rebirth of the Christina : The Christina O

.