ANDY SCHELL BOUGHT A NEGLECTED EX-ROUND THE WORLD RACER TO TURN INTO HIS ULTIMATE OFFSHORE YAC H T. HE EXPLAINS THE REFIT PROCESS
“Wait, you bought that boat?!” That was 59º North’s bosun Adam Browne’s reaction when I showed him the Farr ‘Millennium’ 65 on the hard in Lymington, which we’d just closed a deal on. “The massive green one that looks a bit abandoned?”
Adam wasn’t referring to the paint job. Coated in algae and slime, Falken was green-hued, her tattered mainsail cover hanging limply from the boom, jack-lines from her last offshore passage still rigged to rusty shackles on deck, water nearly up to the floorboards down below. The boat was rotting.
That sailing yachts, particularly race boats, are often referred to as ‘thoroughbreds’ is an apt comparison. Race horses are living creatures and I like to think of sailboats as much the same. Falken began life with a promise by Bruce Farr to deliver a design that would be “faster on all points of sail than her peers,” as described in a 1998 Yachting World article. Ten yachts were originally commissioned for the 1999 Millennium Round the World Race, an event designed to compete with the likes of the Clipper Race and BT Challenge, but on a boat that more closely resembled a Whitbread 60 in performance.
But economics and luck dealt a tough hand to the fledgling event. Only four boats took the start, and the race folded after just one edition. The fleet were used as sail-training boats for various organisations over the next 20 years. And then, like a racehorse past its prime, too old to compete yet too beloved to put down, the 65 originally christened Spirit of Diana was put out to pasture, left to live out her days on the hard. Until we came along.
CUSTOM DREAMS
I’d previously entertained thoughts of building a custom yacht for 59° North Sailing, our adventure sailing charter business. What sailor doesn’t dream of building their own boat one day? But besides the cost, which would have been substantial, something about building a brand new boat just didn’t sit well with me when there are so many great older boats lying in boatyards. Building a new boat would undermine one of my fundamental values – that of using what already exists. Enter the Farr. She was a stripped out, purpose-built racing boat that just didn’t have the charm or ‘soul’ of the cruising boats I’d grown up on, and which we’d had in spades in our first boat Isbjörn, a classic S&S Swan 48. But despite this, a
