Stern first

Sunday 26th June

Victoria may be the only one of the many hundreds of boats travelling to Brest this week and next which will do so stern first. Howard is now busy converting the back of her lorry for this purpose.

There's a nice "back to front" story about Thomas Poole, the Police Inspector who commissioned Victoria to be built in 1897 for the Colchester Borough River Police. (The beginnings of our boat are well documented in the Minutes of the Watch Committee of the Borough but the Inspector's acquisition of her, for himself, for racing, at around about the time of his retirement (and hers) in the late 1920s was not quite so transparent).

Poole was quite a character and owned or part-owned so many boats in his lifetime that when he tried to compile a list (for the author Hervey Benham who tells this tale in his book "The Last Stronghold of Sail") he gave up trying to remember them all and threw his list in the bin. Benham recounts that one of the boats Poole owned was a double-ended sailing boat which had been tender to a larger vessel. Poole got the boatyard to re-rig the boat back to front, renamed her "Vice Versa", and went on to win races in her with what had been her aft end first. So he clearly had an eye for boats, though what he would make of us carting his Victoria around in this fashion we shall never know.

Victoria weighs 3.2 tons which is rather a lot for a 21 foot boat. It's partly down to her double hull as she was built clinker and then "carvelled over" a few years later. The reasons for this are not stated in the Watch Committee Minutes, the expense is just cited as being for "major work" or words to that effect, but I like to think it was for stealth, that for her work in those days before many boats had engines it was useful to be able to move about quietly. She also has a very heavy lifting keel made of iron. 

When we last took her to France on the lorry (for the Semaine du Golfe du Morbihan in 2011) she went on bow first with her nose poking through the V which Howard cut in the metal plate - see photo below. The truck drove OK but it did look a bit back-heavy and the hope is that with Victoria on stern first we'll be better balanced.

So what Howard has now had to do is to rearrange those 2 diagonal black bars from their previous vertical positions and he will then cut a new transom shape in that plate for her rear end to sit as far forwards (or do I mean backwards?) as possible. Our friend Pete the Knife did some of the heavy welding for us and we'll be calling on him again to help finish off these modifications.

There used to be a ladder built into the bars on the left - not sure how I'll clamber up onto the boat without it

Luckily only one of these extra supports, the short bits, added in 2011 will have to be moved forward.

Note the smart new red paint job - I am working on tarting the boat up a bit now - more of this tomorrow