Wooden Drascombe

The famed Drascombe Lugger Beautifully restored daysailer takes to salt water

by Geoffrey Toye

The drive from my home in Wales across old Somerset and Dorset had taken me through an England as one imagines it: my trusty roadster with running boards and British Racing Green coachwork entirely in keeping with a picture-postcard countryside of thatched cottages and narrow lanes. The next morning would herald an appointment with a boat, her owner, the man who had restored her, and a very restless sea.

We were to meet for the first time at Hythe, a center for yachting on an inlet off the Solent, which serves the port of Southampton. Arriving early, I took a look around. In the distance was the aging skyline of a history of maritime industry across a roadstead still busy with shipping and glistening harshly when the low sun emerged between fast-scudding clouds. The sky looked as if it might clear but the autumn wind was keen, so I waited in my car near the public boat launch where the keel of the restored Drascombe Lugger, Guillemot, was to take her first-ever taste of salt water.

For a small boat, conditions were somewhat daunting. The wind was strong, verging on too strong for sailing, in my opinion, a view evidently shared by several skippers who were working aboard their boats or wrapping fingers around steaming mugs at moorings they had no intention of leaving that day. Two brave souls attempted a sail but found themselves on their beam ends. One soon returned chastened. A magnificent old ketch, all 100 or more feet of her, thundered by under full plain sail, the roar of her passing carrying across the gray and forbidding Southampton water, but even her lee rail was awash.

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Last updated: 18 September, 2006

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