Joshua

Bernard Moitessier will always be remembered as the strange Frenchman who might have beaten Robin Knox-Johnston to be the first man to sail singlehanded non-stop around the world. Instead, on the last leg of his journey, when heading North in the South Atlantic towards the finish, he put the helm over and headed back into the roaring forties on a second lap of the globe.

At the time, in March 1968, he had been closing rapidly on Knox-Johnston, who was sailing a much slower boat but had started ten weeks before Moitessier.

Moitessier's powerful 39' ketch "Joshua" - named in honour of the first solo circumnavigator, Captain Joshua Slocum - was built in steel in France in 1962 to a design by Jean Knocker. Her immensely strong double-ended hull, welded, with minimum framing, in thick gauge steel plate, is clearly heavily influenced by Colin Archer's famously seaworthy norwegian yacht and lifeboat designs. By coincidence, Knox-Johnston's 32' "Suhaili" was also based on a Colin Archer design.

Joshua was not built specifically for the Sunday Times Golden Globe Challenge, the competition won by Knox-Johnston for the first non-stop solo circumnavigation. She was conceived and built, however, with shorthanded long ocean voyages in mind. Moitessier had already made a number of ocean crossings in home-built boats of his own design. As both his previous oceanic adventures had ended in shipwreck, he was no doubt keen to make sure that Joshua would be built as strongly as possible. Her construction was financed by the royalties from the book he wrote about his previous voyages, and by the time of the Golden Globe race, Moitessier had already tested her thoroughly, in ocean voyages from France to the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific to Tahiti, and back to France by way of Cape Horn.

After these voyages Moitessier wrote another book and many magazine articles about his experiences.

Although he became renowned as France's most intrepid ocean voyager, and financially comfortable as an author, Bernard Moitessier was a quiet man, never comfortable with his celebrity. It seems it was the anticipation of the public and press hullabaloo that would result if, or more likely, when he won, that persuaded him to abandon the race and continue sailing, just at the moment when victory began to look probable.

"I am continuing, without stopping, towards the islands of the Pacific," he wrote, "because I am happy at sea, and also, perhaps, so that I don't lose my soul". He sailed on as far as Tahiti, then spent many years living and sailing in the South Pacific, earning his living writing about his voyages.

Joshua became another of Moitessier's shipwrecks, when, ten years after his famous one-and-a-half times round-the-world solo voyage, he accidentally piled her up on the shore in Mexico. This strange man then gave the boat away to a couple of young men who helped to recover her. Later she was purchased and restored by the Maritime Museum of La Rochelle, where she remains afloat and active to this day.

Moitessier died in 1994 and is buried in Brittany.

Images: Wikipaedia

Links to more information about Joshua and Bernard Moitessier:

La Mer en Livres

Bluemoment.com

Muscadet - the French "peoples' boat"

Philipe Harlé's Muscadet is a French legend. In the early 1960s the Muscadet helped “democratise” the sport of sailing, making ownership of a real coastal cruiser affordable for the ordinary working man. There were, of course, other designs, many from the drawing board of J-J Herbulot, that were as affordable and as capable, but it is the Muscadet, with its instantly recognizable profile, its startlingly good offshore performance, its sheer numbers and its longevity that must take the honours as the real French “peoples' boat”.

What is most surprising about the boxy little Muscadet is that, as well as being a capable and roomy small family cruiser, it turned out to be an exceptional mini ocean racer. Its outstanding successes in this field could be compared to a VW Beetle winning the Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Heures Du Mans. (Yes, I know about Herbie, but that was Disney comedy, the Muscadet is a real life champion!).

To start at the beginning, Philippe Harlé was working at the Glénans Sailing School where he was in charge of boat maintenance. A new motor supply shuttle was needed for the cash-strapped, island-based school, so Harlé designed it and oversaw its construction himself. Naturally he was then the obvious choice to manage the construction of the school's new offshore training yacht, Glénan, designed by the great John Illingworth.

These two projects provided Harlé with such fulfillment and excitement, that he recognised his future lay in yacht design. At the end of the proving voyages of Glénan, trials which involved taking part very successfully in a couple of RORC races (9th and 2nd places – in spite of the boat starting its first race two hours late, its fit-out still unfinished, and the boat so underprovisioned the crew all lost 7 or 8 pounds in weight), Harlé bumped into Louis Blouet, a businessman and enthusiastic offshore racer. Blouet mentioned that he was about to commission Illingworth to design a new ocean racer, and the young Philippe impulsively offered to design the boat himself. Blouet, rather surprisingly, agreed. This was 1962 and Philippe Harlé was now a naval architect!

In spite of this encouragement, Philippe was still working at the Glenans when the prototype of his next design, the Muscadet, was launched at the Aubin yard in Nantes during February 1963. Built in plywood with a single hard edged chine, its reverse sheer and high slabby topsides unrelieved by ports or other features, she must have looked unusual to say the least. Claude Harlé, Philippe's wife, thought it ugly, and taking a tin of anchovies from her larder as a template, she traced three oblong porthole openings on the Muscadet plans. With these windows and a broad contrast stripe painted under the sheerline, the Muscadet's looks were marginally improved, and the boat sailed, with little further preparation, across the Bay of Biscay from Nantes in heavy weather, to take part in a One-Of-A-Kind Rally organised by a yachting magazine at La Rochelle.

The crews of the competing yachts may have laughed at the little "soap box” as they called the Muscadet, but they stopped laughing when she outsailed bigger and much more expensive boats and left them all with a good view of her most boxy feature – her almost square transom. That year two further Muscadets sailed to the Glénans, where they were trialled by many of the staff and trainees and excellent reviews were published in the Glénans journal. Muscadet's performance both on and off the wind, especially in a choppy sea, was judged outstanding, and her fine seakeeping and sailing qualities, together with her low cost, soon led to a very full order book for the builders, Aubin, and to Philippe giving up his job and setting up shop as a Naval Architect in his Paris apartment.

You have to like a man who names most of his work after alcoholic drinks. Philippe Harlé started this sequence in 1963 with the Muscadet. By the time of his untimely death in 1991, more than 50 of his designs were named in this fashion, including Armagnac, Cognac, Scotch, Aquavit, Gros Plant, Cabernet, Sancerre, Pineau, Sauvignon and Sangria.

At any time in the 1960s or 70s, a yachtsman visiting France would have noticed the proliferation of the Muscadet class. it was taken up by individuals and clubs all over France, and its amazing ability to make fast passages in rough water, often with 4, or even more, on board (the French love to sail in company) impressed the crews of larger, more traditional British cruising yachts who would find Muscadets turning up in the Channel Isles, the Scillies, the English south coast ports, and even the south-west of Ireland.

The combination of good performance and low initial cost was unstoppable. Young people could afford to buy boats that were equally as capable of winning races and of making offshore passages as the larger boats that had hitherto been thought the minimum requirement. In 1977 when already around 750 Muscadets were afloat, the first Mini-Transat singlehanded race for yachts of 6.5 metres overall length was announced. This race, though conceived and organised in Britain, attracted a large number of young French entrants, and 6 out of the 26 starters were sailing Muscadets, even though the design was already 14 years old.

5 Muscadets finished the gruelling race from Penzance to Antigua in the West Indies. The first 3 of them finished 4th, 6th and 11th. The last of them was in 16th place. Muscadets were still well represented in the 1979 race in which Philippe Harlé himself came fourth, sailing a Gros Plant, a slightly modified and modernised version of the Muscadet design. Another Gros Plant finished 2nd, while the lowest placed Muscadet was in 17th place out of 32 starters.

Although the Muscadet continued to prove its ability in offshore races throughout the 1980s (there was at least one Muscadet in every Mini-Transat up until 1991), the new generation of Mini 6.50 offshore racers, including designs by Harlé, eventually made it uncompetitive. However, the class remains, to this day, highly popular in French waters as a family cruiser and one-design regatta racer.

The strict one-design class rules include two unusual stipulations. First, the crew must be good company and willing to take part in parties and social events organised by the regatta committee. Second, the boat must have at least one full bottle of Muscadet on board at the start of the race, and one full bottle on crossing the finish line.

Muscadet designed by Philippe Harlé
Built 1963 - 1979, over 750 produced by Aubin, 1000+ examples in total.
LOA 6.4 m
LWL 5.6 m
Beam 2.26 m
Draft 1.12 or 0.75/1.25
Displacement 1200 kg
Ballast 520 kg
Sail Area 25.05 m2


Sources, Photo Acknowledgements and Links:

All Boats Avenue, Association des Propriétaires de Muscadet, Ouest-France, A & P Aubin Brochure, and the official biography "Muscadet, Armagnac, Sangria... : Philippe Harlé, architecte naval", by Claude Harlé and Dominique Lebrun.

Golif - the first all-plastic sailing yacht?

The 23ft Golif was built from 1962 by the Jouët works at Sartrouville. Jouët claim she was the first production small offshore cruiser to be entirely built in GRP, and she caused a stir on her introduction at the first Paris Boatshow in January 1962.

The unusual name comes from a famously ruthless, daring, and reportedly amorous 17th century French pirate, Louis Adhémar Timothée Le Golif, also known as “Borgnefesse”. Since his nickname means something like "one-eyed-arse", you would probably have been wise to address him, at least until you got to know him well, as Captain Golif.

Golif was designed by Jouet with one eye on the American market, where the management believed they could sell a lot of boats. They had probably been helped considerably in their objective by the earlier successful transatlantic voyages of Jean Lacombe, in a plywood Jouet Cap-Horn. Apparently the company's market research suggested that the Americans favoured rather more interior comfort than the European market was used to, and that stiffness under sail and transportability by road would be important qualities for US buyers. Some of the Golif's characteristic features, such as its panoramic cabin window, shoal draft, relatively light displacement and high ballast ratio, stem directly from these market-related requirements.

Even today, Golif's looks seem rather quirky, though the underwater hull shape and the rig appear conventional. At the time, however, Golif's rig was considered rather tall and narrow, and the aluminium mast was in those days quite an innovation on a small cruising yacht. The odd pinched shape of the coach roof seems to have been intended to maximise the width of the side decks, but without sacrificing headroom in the places below where you might want to stand. Thus, with perfect French logic, there is low headroom over bunks and seats, where you sit or lie down, but there is plenty of headroom over the central passage and galley area, where you stand or walk. As the Jouët company said, this deck was designed from the inside!

Unusually for such a small boat, Golif had a decent chart table at which you could comfortably sit and work while facing the direction of travel, as you might in a much larger yacht. This was achieved by making the chart table swing down from the cabin deckhead right in the centre of the boat. Another innovation was a hinged and sliding hatch (visible in the colour photo of a Golif recently for sale in France)

Some versions of the Golif were delivered with an optional deeper keel for racing performance. These boats were excellent performers in offshore races and won many prizes, but it was a perfectly standard Golif that achieved the greatest fame for the class. In 1964, Jean Lacombe who had been France's sole entrant in the 1960 Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR), returned to repeat the feat in a Golif, once again the smallest boat in the competition. This was the year of Eric Tabarly's first triumph, so Lacombe's achievement was rather overshadowed by the acclaim and fanfares garnered by the winner. Nevertheless, Lacombe's Golif took joint pride of place, alongside Tabarly's Pen Duick II at the centre of the 1965 Paris Boat show. (see photo)

There are varying estimates of the total number of Golifs built by Jouet and also by the Dubigeon yard in Normandy. The total number certainly comes to over 1000.

Jouët Golif
LOA: 6.50m
LWL: 5.92m
Beam: 2.22m
Draft: 0.96m
Displacement: 1200Kg
Ballast: 480Kg (cast iron)
Sail area: 23.2sqm

Many thanks to the French Golif owners website for all the b&w images and much of the information used in preparing this post. Colour photo of a Golif recently for sale in France from an advertisement on www.leboncoin.fr

A scanned copy of the original 1963 Jouet Golif sales brochure is available in .pdf format from Yacht Brochures.co.uk

"A" ~ the spectacular mega yacht designed by Philippe Starck

The French designer, Philippe Starck is best known for his furniture and kitchen gadget designs, including his iconic lemon juicer. He is not, as far as I know, a naval architect, yet the most exciting and, to my mind, most beautiful of the world's billionaire mega-yachts has its origin on Starck's drawing board.

Starck, whose work ranges from designing boutique hotels, the Virgin Galactic “spaceport” as well as that stylish juicer, claims to have come up with the idea for “A”, as the yacht is called, in 3½ hours. Naval architects, including Britain’s Martin Francis, and Blohm and Voss, the German shipbuilders, then took over and adapted the design project.

Starck always insists that form must follow function – in other words the purpose for which an object is designed should dictate its shape. This 5,900 ton, 390 ft. yacht's shape is reminiscent of a battleship crossed with a submarine. Evidently Starck appreciated that a yacht is, in essence, a big boy's toy, and that for this big boy, Russian billionaire owner Andrey Melnichenko, 36, only the biggest, “baddest” looking toy battleship on the boating pond would do.

Apart from sheer stylish looks, the clean lines of the exterior answer another function – that of security. The lack of any external features such as rails, handholds, or openings makes it very difficult for pirates or other undesired visitors to board the ship. For the same reason, the helicopter pad on the bow is easily rendered unusable by extending a telescopic mast through the deck. Clamshell doors hide all the access points, including the garage for the 2 launches, extending harbour gangways and even the anchor cable fairleads.

The yachts twin engines deliver 24,000 hp for a 24 knot cruising speed and a 6,500 mile range. Accommodation includes a palatial (quite literally) owners suite, 6 luxurious double guest cabins, and quarters for 37 crew plus 5 of the owners personal staff, secretaries, assistants, etc.

The yacht is variously said to have cost $200 to $300 million. Crew salaries, maintenance and running costs are unlikely to be less than another 5 to 10 million a year. So, it's not enough to be very rich indeed - Wayne Rooney rich, for instance - to own this yacht. You need to be able to spend twice Wayne's annual salary, every year, just to run it. Fortunately for Mr. Melnichenko, whose wealth is conservatively estimated at $2-3 billion, he can.

Obviously the interior décor is super palatial. I won't even try to describe it. You can find more details in the Wall Street Journal video and on the sites to which I have linked below. But the accessory I really like, and which makes me warm greatly to the scarily rich Mr. Melnichenko, is the uncompromising design of the yacht's twin 30 ft. motor-launch tenders. He could easily have bought a couple of off-the-shelf plastic speedboats, and in spite of the fact that each one of these beauties probably cost as much as a very nice house in Torremolinos, he clearly would have nothing that was not rare and spectacular for his yacht. This, for Mr Melnichenko was probably no more of an extravagance than my purchase of a pair of shiny bronze rowlocks, instead of perfectly serviceable plain galvanised, for my 10 ft rowing dinghy.

As another great designer once said, “God is in the detail”.

Links:

Italian saint-andres blog story

Sunday Times Article

The Jouet "Cap-Horn", designed by Jean Jacques Herbulot

When stories are told about the early days of short and single-handed long distance ocean racing, the names of Chichester, Hasler and the French hero Eric Tabarly are the most easily remembered. It's often forgotten that only one Frenchman took part in the first Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic race - and it wasn't Tabarly.

The lone Frenchman, Jean Lacombe, sailing the smallest boat in the race, the tiny plywood “Cap-Horn,” was, in fact, probably already the most experienced single hander among the 5 men who took part in the first OSTAR. Although up against more famous adventurers like Francis Chichester and Blondie Hasler, by the time the race started Lacombe had already sailed the Atlantic single-handed from East to West and back again, as well as cruising a great deal of the Eastern seaboard of the USA. He had done all this in his simple 21 ft centreboarder, Cap-Horn, designed by J-J. Herbulot as a low cost weekend cruiser.

(photo: Jean Lacombe's Cap-Horn after the 1960 OSTAR - still with race number - Jouet Cap Horn brochure)

Lacombe had actually been in New York with his boat when he heard of the race. He entered late and set sail for for the start line 3000 miles away at Plymouth to arrive 4 days after the others had departed. His participation went, therefore, almost unnoticed by the British and foreign press who had been in Plymouth covering the race preparations but had already left the scene.

Staying only long enough to fill his water tanks and buy a few provisions for the return voyage, Lacombe calmly set sail into the prevailing wind for another 3000 mile Atlantic crossing.

Lacombe's “Cap-Horn” was a compact weekend family cruiser of 21ft overall, built by Jouet, a well established boat building firm in Sartrouville, on the River Seine. It was a design that, though simple, was rather more sophisticated than the type of basic small cruising boat that was becoming popular in France in the 1950s, when the influential Glenans Sailing School began to turn out a few dozen enthusiastic young sailors every summer.

The yacht's designer, Jean Jacques Herbulot, had designed most of the Glenans school boats, so this new breed of French sailor was already programmed by training and experience to appreciate the simple rather “boxy” plywood hulls he had produced previously. The Cap-Horn, however, was not hard-chine ply-over-frame construction like most of his earlier boats. It had a nicely rounded cold moulded hull, though it retained the typically Herbulot wide, clear decks and minimal raised coachroof. The Cap-Horn is now quite a rare boat, and it's difficult to find much information about it, but, at the time it must have seemed a more sophisticated design than most others in its class.

The plywood Herbulot designs of the day, simple, compact, practical and inexpensive, were emblematic of French sailing in the '50s and early '60s. Just a year after the first OSTAR, however, France's first all-GRP production cruising boat emerged from the Jouet factory, and Cap-Horn's strong and lightweight cold moulded construction suddenly seemed old fashioned and labour intensive compared with the new high-tech material. (colour photo: the varnished hull of this 1964 Cap-Horn, recently for sale in France, has been well maintained and preserved.)

Jean Lacombe did complete that first OSTAR, finishing in last position after 74 days. He went on to take part again in the 1964 race (Tabarly's first win) in another Jouet-built boat, the Golif, a landmark (seamark?) design in French yachting history which I'll write about in another post soon

Cap-Horn built by P. Jouet & Cie, designed J. J. Herbulot

LOA 6.50m - (20.90 ft)

LWL 6.00m - (19.67 ft)

Beam 2.16m - (7.08 ft)

Draft (max) 1.20m - (3.94 ft)

Draft (min) 0.70m - (2.30 ft)

Displacement 907kg - (2000 lbs)

Footnote added 13\03\2020

SEARCH FOR CAP HORN

A comment on this post by “floridafred” suggests that Lacombe’s original transatlantic race boat might be in dry storage in St. Augustine, Florida, USA.  This boat may have been renamed YAVASH at some time.  

A French journalist and yachting historian, Eric Vibart, who writes for VOILES ET VOILIERS magazine, has assembled a great deal of archive material on the life and voyages of Jean Lacombe and would dearly like to discover the whereabouts of this historic boat.  If you have any information that might be helpful, or if you know how to contact “floridafred” please get in touch with Eric Vibart.  

Any information could be send to Eric Vibart : evibart@club-internet.fr

Love-Love, by Julien Berthier

French artist Julien Berthier created this boat. According to him, "Love love is the permanent and mobile image of a wrecked ship that has become a functional and safe leisure object".

I'm not sure the Health and Safety Executive would agree with him about the last part.

Here's what the gallery that displayed it said.

"For this piece he adapted an abandoned 6.5 meter yacht so that it appears to be perpetually sinking. To create this, the vessel was split and a new keel was constructed allowing it to be sailed by Berthier at a 45 degree angle off the coast of Normandy. Love-Love, like much of his oeuvre, is impressive, poetic and humorous.

In this project, the artist invests his energies and resources into creating an art of fiasco, aiming in his words to “fix an object at the moment of its deregulation.” The image, and metaphor of the sinking ship is an iconic one – it signifies death, lost hope and sinking dreams. Berthier’s Love-Love freezes those sentiments permanently both celebrating and overturning them. On display in the gallery will be the boat itself as well as a series of accompanying photographs and documentary video showing the performance in Normandy."

Mr Berthier knows something most of us don't, though - how to make money out of old boats. He is reported to have sold this one for £50,000.

Love Love from julien berthier on Vimeo.

Sylphe – by André Mauric - Sunk before Launching!

André Mauric was the most prolific and best known of France's 20th century yacht designers. His career started in the 1920s with radical designs for racing yachts to the International Metre Rule in the days when the bermudan rig was still considered new-fangled and fragile, and carried on well into the 1980s when, among other winners he designed the the highly successful Atlantic crossing record breaker Kriter VIII. In between he designed dozens of great boats, including Pen Duick VI for Eric Tabarly, the 1972 Half Ton Cup winner Impensable, the popular and successful First 30, and Sylphe, a classic yacht hidden for 5 years underwater.

(photos: Sylphe racing at St Tropez: www.sail-in-style.com)

Sylphe (originally Ariel) was commissioned by Paul Blanchet, an owner who wanted a yacht to win races under the British RORC rating rule. His timing was not good – it was 1939 when Mauric started designing the boat, and she was still unfinished on the slipway at Chantier Pharo, her builders in Marseille, when the Germans invaded France. In the days of uncertainty and chaos after France's surrender, believing that the Germans would steal the yacht's ballast keel – a 13 ton lead casting (imagine the price of that today!) - Mauric ordered the yard to sink the unfinished hull in a deep part of the harbour.

So it was that Sylphe spent 5 years in hiding under water before she was even launched. Many of the Marseilles shipyard and dock workers knew the secret, but no-one breathed a word, and Sylphe remained safely concealed with all her ballast until the war was over.

After the war Sylphe was recovered and completed. Her long submersion had done no harm – indeed it may have further improved the seasoning of her timbers and made them less liable to distort, crack, or split in later age. She was finally launched in 1947, and though Mauric had designed her with one of his trademark tall bermudan cutter rigs supported on a slender mast, her sailplan was modified in 1953 to give her a larger and taller foretriangle, its foot extended by a short bowsprit. These modifications were no doubt intended to keep her competitive with the latest offshore racing boats which, encouraged by the allowances in the old RORC rating rule, had begun to sport big overlapping genoas and high aspect mainsails.

During the next 50 years or so Sylphe was sailed and raced in the Mediterranean. It seems she was well maintained, with Mauric himself advising on a number of alterations and small repairs. Her original mast was replaced with a new hollow wood mast in the 1980s, and an engine was fitted at some time (she had been designed and launched without one). The teak deck was also renewed during this period. So when she came up for sale in the south of France in 1999 her new owners found her to be in reasonably good structural order, but scruffy, dated, and in need of a lot of attention.

Her new Dutch owners sailed her to Turkey and set about a 7-month total overhaul to make her more suitable for Mediterranean charter use. Although the interior had mostly to be stripped out and rebuilt to provide more comfortable charter accommodation, the original hull timbers and planking, having endured such a long submersion so many years ago, were found to be in excellent order. Only a couple of rot-infected frames had to be replaced. Her owners are proud to claim that Sylphe still has none of the steel bracing and reinforcement that many other yachts of her day now need to keep them in sailing order. They are equally proud that she retains her original mast winches and her unique, custom made, cockpit sheet winches.

Now equipped with all the modern trappings of a top-quality charter yacht, including satnav, full B&G sailing instrumentation, water-maker, autopilot, etc., Sylphe is currently believed to be available for charter in the Mediterranean. She is also occasionally to be seen taking part in classic yacht regattas at St Tropez, Cannes, and at other glamorous yacht harbours.

Sylphe - a classic Andre Mauric design:

LOA: 18.50m
LOD: 17.25m
LWL: 12.68m
Beam: 3.95m
Draft: 2.50m
Air draft: about 23m, masthead 21m above deck
Sail area: Main 84 m2, Yankee 29 m2, Genoa 78 m2, Spinnaker 205 m2, Reacher 105 m2

Link to Sylphe Charter site

Jean Marie Finot's "Ecume De Mer"

In 1967 Jean-Marie Finot, who had recently married, decided to give up the idea of becoming a yacht designer so that he could concentrate on earning a reasonable living. As he is now one of the top half-dozen yacht designers in the world, this was very nearly the biggest mistake of his life.

As a sailing instructor at the Iles de Glénan school - “the only place in France you could really learn to sail, at the time” according to Finot - he got to know Philippe Harlé, the chief instructor, who was leaving to set up a yacht design practice. Jean-Marie, too. wanted to learn about yacht design, so he took a lowly position as Harlé 's assistant in order to pick up some experience.

The apprentice Finot did actually design a couple of boats for the Harlé practice, but as a recently married man he wanted a career that would support a family, so he gave up his yacht design ambitions and left Harlé . However, as a favour to a friend, he agreed to design one last boat, Ecume De Mer, a small cruiser/racer of which it was intended only two would ever be built – one for the friend and one for Jean-Marie himself. This would be, he decided, his last design.

The pair looked around for a French yard to build the hard-chine plywood boats, but none seemed interested. Finally a Dutch builder, Walter Huisman, heard of their project and, impressed by the young designer, offered to build one boat at a reasonable price, provided they would campaign it in a number of races, including the International Quarter Ton Cup competition. Although this entailed modifying the plans to create a slightly larger boat, agreement was reached.

In the Spring of 1968 Huisman delivered a bare painted hull. Finot and his friend went to Holland, and spent some time fitting her out with deck gear and rigging, before launching just in time to enter, as agreed, the Quarter Ton Cup. (photo: Huisman prototype Ecume De Mer in hard chine plywood) With such a lack of preparation and tuning they couldn't hope to win there, but later, with a fully sorted boat, they won the important Delta Race. Their success attracted an Australian, Eric Bradley, who took home modified designs for the boat with slightly reduced freeboard and a coachroof, retaining however the plywood hard chine hull. Several were built in Australia to this specification.

The following season, back in France the prototype boat won race after race, and even returned briefly to Holland to win the Delta race again. Soon this phenomenon caught the attention of the French boatbuilder, Mallard, who contracted to build a series of boats to the design, in GRP. Once again the drawings were modified. Away went the chines to be replaced by a rounded hull shape. The stepped sheerline and flush deck were replaced by a conventional sheer and a short coachroof. Though the efficient racing deck layout was retained, with halyards and controls led aft to the cockpit, on the inside the accomodation was re-designed for comfort in harbour rather than racing. There would now be standing headroom, a dinette, a toilet, and a separate forecabin.

The production Ecume De Mer (colour photo from Mallard 1969 brochure) was a sales success from the start and remained in production, unchanged until 1975 . A 100% standard production boat won the Quarter Ton Cup in 1970 against strong international competition, and a modified, but nevertheless series-produced regatta version with a flush deck won again in 1972. Hundreds of owners had countless successes in offshore and club racing, while hundreds more enjoyed family cruising in a robust and capable boat.

Further modifications were made to re-style accommodation and coachroof, giving more headroom in the heads in 1975. This version won the 1977 Boat of the Year title and was chosen for the 1978 "Tour De France" race. It continued in production until 1980.

Eventually 1385 boats were built to the Ecume De Mer design. Examples of this fine boat, that was supposed to be Finot's farewell to yacht design and of which there should only ever have been two, can still be seen in almost any marina in France as well as in many other parts of the world. This great boat - that launched a lasting career for its designer - has itself lasted pretty well.

Ecume De Mer (Mallard, 1969 version)

LOA: 7.90 m
Beam: 2.65 m
Draft: 1.25 m
Ballast: 720 kg
Displacement: 1.800 kg
Max Headroom 1.72 m