'Wind-Driven Locomotive'

That’s how The Who guitarist Pete Townshend described the Jack Laurent Giles sloop Pazienza. After a long-term refit by her current owners, has she still got the magic?

- Nigel Sharp

When Benjamin Franklin suggested that he who can have patience can have what he will, he was not talking about a 60ft Jack Laurence Giles sloop built in 1956 in Italy. Franklin’s quote applies so neatly to Pazienza [‘patience’ in Italian], however, that it’s hard not to make the connection. In an age when boats are almost exclusively built for one purpose, be it short-handed cruising, or offshore racing, it is refreshing to go back 60 years and find one whose abilities span multiple disciplines with style. Soon after she was built, her designer Jack Laurent Giles described her as “a good example of a comfortable short-handed cruising boat, with a first-class performance under power, yet able to take part successfully in ocean races”.

In her six decades afloat, Pazienza has indeed been cruised double-handed, raced inshore and offshore. She has been sailed single handed and she has crossed oceans. She has endured the whims of various owners and on voyages far and wide she has put up with one or two travails. History does not relate why Pazienza’s first owner named her after the greatest of virtues, but it seems he named her well.