Our featured boat for June is ‘Concord of Mersea’, with her story told by James Boyd in two parts. In this first instalment he tells how he was drawn to Scotland where he found her, then known as ‘Penelee’.
I was on passage from Fowey to Falmouth when I first saw her: a grainy photograph in the back pages of a dog eared Classic Boat magazine. She was leaning to a press of wind on her starboard quarter and she looked powerful and pretty. I peered more closely but the capture concealed as much about her as it revealed; an enigma, just out of my budget but calling to me with a siren song from where the advert said she now lay on the West Coast of Scotland.
A shout from the skipper brought me to the moment and I trimmed the mainsheet of Pilot Cutter ‘Eve of St Mawes’, scanned the horizon and found my eyes slipping back toward the page now lying on the side deck. There was something about that boat . . . ‘Penelee’ she was called . . . an unusual name . . . I clambered down below to the galley and brewed tea. ‘Eve’ gave her little pigeon nod along a wave crest and I rolled with her motion watching the boom swing above the gull wing skylight as I fell into a reverie . . .
I’m a musician; a concert guitarist, producer and director. I had recently emerged from a recording project at Snape Malting’s Concert Hall and had sold my international 5 metre yacht ‘Indian’ to help underwrite the production costs of the album. The recording had been a success with great reviews in the national press and now, with a few collected laurels of my profession and the satisfaction of a creative dream made real, I was yearning for a boat of my own. I dreamed of going to sea in carpet slippers, having the west in my eyes and becoming the happy bargee and £200 millionaire of Weston Martyr’s short stories that were waiting for me in my pilot berth.
A few days later I was on the sleeper train rattling towards Loch Creran and the vast sheds of MRC marine where ‘Penelee’, dismasted and forlorn, was lying in the shadows amongst the detritus of industrial shipping. My first view of her was like a jolt between the eyes. She was painted a horrible blue and festooned with loops of wire, a broken spar jutting out from her stern. And yet I barely noted this for nothing could hide the poetic beauty of her sheer line and the power in her shoulders. That bow was made for long voyages and when I went down below there were salt crystals everywhere; evidence of recent rough passages to Norway and Orkney. On a shelf, water stained and bent, was a small greenish book ‘Pitmans Guide to Sailing’. I didn’t know it then but that book would send me on a trail to the golden age of yachting in the tideways and byways of East Anglia. It had been illustrated and penned by a man called Archie White and, underlined in ink, were passages detailing adventures in Brittany with a boat called ‘Concord of Mersea’. The drawings looked very like the yacht I was now aboard and that was winding herself into my heartstrings.
Fate watched me and winked. I threw caution and common sense to the winds. A surveyor was engaged who proclaimed her to have many problems. Undeterred I travelled to the other end of the country and bent the ear of Bodinnick boatbuilder Peter Williams. ‘Penelee’ nee ‘Concord’ was casting her spell and Peter drove up to Scotland to look at her on the strength of my excited babbling and the photograph that had sent me on the trail. I met him at the yard, bum up with his head in the bilge. When he emerged he said one thing, “Just buy ‘er! She’s bloody brilliant!” Time compressed. I packed a sleeping bag and spent a week living on a rocky outcrop on the edge of the loch while I prepared ‘Penelee’ for her journey via low loader to the West Country. At night a sea otter, irritated by my invasion of his domain blew bubbles at me through his whiskers and I would lie with eyes half closed watching him posturing on a rock silhouetted against a vast moon. When I left the camp to work aboard, the little devil came and marked his territory with great vigour on all my equipment.
And then it was time. ‘Penelee’ began her road journey, I jumped back on a train, my family drove down from Norfolk and eventually we all convened at the China Clay docks just outside Fowey, ready to launch her and take her over to Tom’s of Polruan for the winter before moving her to Bodinnick for work to begin. For the next two years I lived in the sail loft of Peter Williams yard. As I removed everything that was standing in the way of her original beauty ‘Penelee’ became ‘Concord’ again. Her name boards were hung up in the rafters, and that wandering period of her history where she had sailed from the Clyde to the Golden Horn was replaced with a restoration to bring her early spirit to life.
In part two we see the transformation of ‘Penelee’ back into ‘Concord’
In 2010, ‘Concord’ won the Classic Boat Restoration of the Year Award.
Words and photos: James Boyd
@jamesboydproductions
www.jamesboyd.co.uk
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