Racing On Thalia

Sailing en famille at Hamble Classics on an 1888 gaff cutter...with a puppy dog?

- Rob Peake

Piercing screams, then a roar of dismay, echo up the companionway. “Are the galley crew revolting?” wonders helm Bill Blain.The gaff cutter Thalia, which in her 129th year is playing host to a raucous children’s card game in the middle of the first race at Hamble Classics, heels with the breeze and sails on.

Owners David Aisher and Kristi Roger have invited me to join their family outing on the boat, one of the oldest and finest classic yachts in British waters. We’re lucky to have her – she was saved from the axe, literally, by 11th hour reprieves in 1969 and then 1997, when previous owner Ivan Jeffries undertook a restoration that we celebrated back in CB165. David bought her in 2010 and gave her a new mast, boom and sails. These days, Thalia is just your average family cruising boat – as far as average cruising these days comes with block and tackle and a tiller the size of a table leg (but considerably more elegant).

If Thalia is spectacular, our crew for the two-day regatta is hardly average. Jane Coombs, known as co-chair of Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta, owns a Harrison Butler, Cora, which is 80 years old and safely tied up somewhere in Antigua, a far cry from the sunny but nippy Solent today. Calling course is Wendy Laynton, who spends most of her summer, she delights in telling me, racing from the Hamble. She has that ‘comfortable on the foredeck’ look to her.

And then the aforementioned Blain, the man behind the Batfish series of Solent race yachts that have twice been RORC champions and won a fair bit in between. Bill, who gave each of his Batfish yachts the tag ‘scourge of the Solent’, as he set out to demolish all opposition, brings a degree of boisterous IRC-mongering to Thalia that the old girl might not have experienced in Victorian times.