I’ve always had a thing about Nelson 40s. The first one I bought back in the mid-1980s was an ex-Abu Dhabi police I launch that could only be described as a wreck. I found it lurking at the back of an industrial boat yard on Hayling Island. In fact there were two of them but one had a Nelsonshaped hole in the side from a previous encounter with its stablemate. Even the undamaged one was in a right old state; the hull was delaminated, the superstructure was rotten, it was full of water and none of its systems or fittings were salvageable – not even the machine gun mounting points on the flybridge and foredeck. More’s the pity – there were times when they could have come in handy on a summer’s day in the Solent!
Still, something must have convinced me to buy it and spend several years of my life restoring it to its former glory. I was a newly qualified airline pilot at the time and must have bored my colleagues witless with my plans. Even now when I bump into them they often ask me whether I ever finished “that MTB you were working on years ago?” Shows how much they were really listening!
FLYING ON FUMES
How I didn’t get tetanus from rebuilding that rotten old wreck, I still don’t know but a combination of youthful zeal and a bloody-minded refusal to admit defeat eventually paid off. The rebuild took five years and more money than I care to admit but it was done to a very high standard and the end result was a lovely boat that gave us ten years of safe, enjoyable cruising.
In that time we got through two sets of engines; initially a pair of secondhand 210hp Sabres and then, when the budget allowed, a pair of brand new Perkins Sabre M225Tis. Both gave us 21 knots flat out with a comfortable cruising speed of 18 knots. Although these figures are quite respectable in the Nelson world, I personally found it frustrating being overtaken not just by all manner of planing boats (planing boats are considered very inferior in the Nelson world) but also by the Portsmouth pilot Nelsons, which had been re-engined with more powerful lumps and ploughed past us at embarrassingly faster speeds.
At one point I actually considered fitting a pair of gas turbine engines to show them who was boss. An engineering contact had access to old helicopter engines; Allison 250s with 420hp on tap in a remarkably compact package. Imagine what they would have sounded like on start up in the marina! The only downside was the fuel burn at sea level – 37 gallons per hour per engine, roughly double the amount of a similarly powerful diesel engine. Fortunately, I had a very sensible co-owner, who vetoed the idea – hence the reason we ended up with the Perkins Sabre 225
