This is a post for sailors, mostly.
Lucinda has trouble coming to terms with the number of boats I sailed with in my past. And no, I don’t remember all their names.
So, while we’ve been waiting for Lucinda to be processed into NZ, we head off to Auckland harbour. It’s a nice harbor, but nothing special. Small, it’s hard to get a great shot
But as you’d expect there’s a lot of carbon, more than a few maxis, and lots to see, including a couple of AC45’s and dismantled Cup boats, which is a bit sad
Fays’ AC epic boat, KZ1, which Connor dealt with in the worst AC of all time
Then into a fantastic boat museum, which is right behind the viaduct events centre
Inside there are some amazing things. First a cold-moulded International 14. Not only World Champion in 1958, when I was 1, but one of the first cold-moulded hulls ever built. The hull shape is so full up front she must have been like a hobby horse. Imagine being the first guy to say to himself hey, why don’t we make that narrower and see what happens
This sexy R class 13 footer was built by Macintosh in 1981
She’s a dream of clean inside
Then there was a boat that I was so focused on getting detail shots of I forgot to take a photo of the whole boat, a clinker built X class from 1965, but I got this picture off the web
Then there was the tuning stuff.
Nice vertical rudder housing, cool for 50 years ago
Simple and powerful shroud tensioner. Not sure where the fine tune is. This is antique
Then they had slot control, for a wooden mast. Here is the deck fixture at the lower shroud. The bullet is hand made, click for detail
And it was tightened/loosened off this by the driver, on the floor. All great stuff for 50 years ago.
Then we went to see the Kiwi prize, one of the greatest boats ever built, NZL32, Black Magic. She was better to look at than I had imagined
And this was stunning. I could imagine Butterworth and Coutts at work here
They had a few small but well-done exhibits about the team and crew: Peter Blake, Coutts, Butterworth, Schnachenberg, Daubney, Fluery, household names now. It’s like King Peter and Knights of the Round Table and this weapon of a machine.
It was also nice seeing her among the dinghies, seeing as she was the revenge of frustrated trickle-up theory.
Comments
Wow – some beautiful machines here.
A bit different then current AC “boats”!