Classic Sail 2025 Calendar

Sailboats featured in this edition include:

≈ The large and elegant gaff cutter Moonbeam of Fife III was designed and built in 1903 at the Fife boatyard in Scotland and measures 101′ long.

≈ The Six Meter World Championships took place in 2023 at the Royal Yacht Squadron on the Isle of Wight in England, with both a modern and classic division. Despite little wind and a similar appearance, they were fascinating to watch.

≈ Elona is a 40′ yawl designed by James McGruer in 1962. She was built at McGruer & Co. boatbuilders on the River Clyde near Glasgow, Scotland. The seven McGruer brothers constructed beautiful and successful sailing vessels for about 70 years from the 1920s.

≈ Three beautiful boats: the William Gardner designed P Class gaff sloop, Olympian, of 1913, the Fife designed gaff cutter Viola of 1908, and the more modern Marconi sloop Ikra designed by David Boyd in 1964. These vessels span not just the Atlantic but a wide arc of sailing history.

≈ Loosely based on a Swampscott dory, a traditional design from Massachusetts, 20′ long Jack sails on Loch Oich, part of the Caledonian Canal in Scotland.

≈ This newly restored staysail schooner, Spirit, was designed by John Alden and built in 1934 by Hodgdon Brothers in East Boothbay, Maine. She sails here in the Castine Regatta in Maine.

≈ Tuiga was designed and built in 1909 by William Fife at the firm’s boat yard on the River Clyde in Scotland. She’s a 15 Meter Class, 59’6″ long, with a huge gaff rig handled entirely without winches.

≈ The Eight Meter Class yacht Carron II was built in 1935 at the Fife boatyard on the Clyde in Scotland. She was restored by Fairlee Restorations in the 1990s and was owned by the Aga Khan for a time. She sails now mainly on the Swiss lakes.

≈ The three-masted gaff schooner, Shenandoah, has sailed the world. She was built in 1902 at the Townsend
& Downey shipyard in New York, inspired the design of German Kaiser Wilhelm II’s famous schooner
Meteor III. Here she sails in the Solent near the Isle of Wight in the new Richard Mille Cup.

≈ Two of the most beautiful of the William Fife yachts, the 15 Meter Class Tuiga, built in 1909, and the 19 Meter Class Mariquita of 1911, sail together on the Solent in England in the Richard Mille Cup regatta.

≈ Tigris was built in 1899, a 19th century gaff cutter designed by the renowned Alfred Mylne and built at the MacAllister yard in Scotland. She is one of the Clyde 20-ton cruiser-racer class. She was rediscovered in Southampton, England, in 2001, restored, and now races very successfully in the Mediterranean.

≈ The lovely Concordia 39 yawl, Swift, sails in the Castine Classic Regatta in Maine. She was launched in 1959, hull number 68 of the still strong Concordia fleet built by Abeking & Rasmussen in Germany.

About These Classic Boats
Few boats can stir the imagination as completely as the classics from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The racing yachts of this formative period have not only great power in their enormous sail area, but a grace and style of hull that has never been equalled. The finest yacht designers in the world strove to win the America’s Cup, and their names have become legendary: Nathanael Herreshoff, Starling Burgess, Olin Stephens, William Fife, Charles Nicholson and others. These supremely functional boats were also works of art, a creative marriage of form and line, of wood and cloth and metal, of great craftsmanship. If we widen the word “classic” to encompass other boats of enduring value, we find elegant cruising boats, some many decades old and some modern; magnificent traditional boats like the schooners and pilot cutters; and even humble workboats that were designed to face the harsh rigors of the sea and coastline, and yet were imbued with a timeless beauty. They inspire and appeal on many levels: the light on the wood and water; the skills of their boatbuilders, riggers, sailmakers, and sailors; their histories and stories. Yet many were abandoned when fiberglass and plastics revolutionized boat construction in the 1970s. Since those days, a new appreciation of these boats, their history, and craftsmanship has attracted enough interest that each year there are a few new painstaking restorations, each summer a few new launchings, a few more opportunities to enjoy the sight of these classically beautiful crafts. Let them stir your imagination.

About the Photographer
Kathy Mansfield comes from Massachusetts and lives with her husband in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, near the River Thames. After a career on the sales and marketing side of academic publishing, she returned to her interest in traditional and classic boats, writing and photographing for magazines such as WoodenBoat and Cruising World in the United States, Water Craft magazine, and numerous others in the U.K. and France. Her photography has also been used as book and magazine covers, in exhibitions, and on posters.