Oldest yacht still cruising?

Press, 20 February 1986, Page 5

Oldest yacht still cruising?

What could well be the oldest yacht still cruising New Zealand coastal waters is at Lyttelton this week.

At 92 years old, the 11.6 m sloop Atalanta has reached an age at which few boats remain intact. Most vessels of comparable age, such as Lyttelton’s 100-year-old Pastime, are in honourable retirement. They rarely leave their moorings and never venture out of sheltered waters.

Since being bought by her present owner, Julian Matson, of Port Chalmers, Atalanta has sailed an estimated 16,000 kilometres in only three years. That is an average of about 16 kilometres a day, which would be remarkable for a pleasure boat of any age, and is doubly remarkable for having been achieved without an engine. She is now on the way home to Port Chalmers after spending the summer cruising the Marlborough Sounds.

Back in home waters, Atalanta will return to the weekly work-outs that have earned her the respect of the local racing fleet. She recently led the annual White Island race until the half-way mark, when dying winds allowed more modem competitiors to catch up. The yacht has spent most of her life in Wellington.

“She was the boat to beat in the Wellington harbour races, right up to the 19605,” Mr Matson said. Atalanta has seen several modifications since her launch in 1894 at the Bailey boatyard in Auck-

land. She was originally a centreboarder, a boat with a lifting keel to deal with shallow water. Mr Matson has not yet discovered when she was converted to fixed keel, or when the present cabin roof was fitted. Judging by the style, it was probably in the 19505. The modem rigging, with alloy spare, was fitted in the early 19705. The original hull construction is her greatest strength. She has three skins of kauri, laid in different directions and held together by thousands of copper rivets. Mr Matson calls it the classic method of construction for New Zealand yachts of her vintage. It is immensely strong, requires little internal framework, and is somewhat ahead of its time. Modem boatbuilders have rediscovered its virtues. Using epoxy glues instead of rivets and renamed coldmoulded construction, it is responsible for a resurgence of interest in building wooden hulls.

Atalanta’s hull is so fair and her paintwork so good, in spite of being two years old now, that some Lyttelton yachties have mistaken her for a modem steel vessel.

Her strength was shown last year when she was driven on to a sandbar at the Otago Heads in a southerly storm — the same storm which claimed the lives of three Invercargill fishermen, whose boat was wrecked on the South Otago coast. Atalanta was towed clear by a fishing boat, with damage confined to the tiller, which snapped when the rudder grounded violently.