Solid as a rock
Fifty years ago Peter Poland sailed his own Wind Elf MkII
transatlantic, so how did it feel to be back aboard a MkI version?
USED BOAT TEST
F
or the sailing world, 1968 was
an exciting year. It heralded
the Sunday Times Golden
Globe Race – a memorable
and news-grabbing demolition
derby that was eventually won by a
young Robin Knox-Johnston – but it
was also special for me because it
featured a trip from Emsworth to
Barbados in a wooden 25ft yacht.
The yacht was an Alan Buchanan-
designed Wind Elf MkII and the pair of
loonies at the helm were university friends
Anthony Brunner and myself. We’d never
sailed outside the English Channel and
knew precious little about offshore
navigation.
Just over 50 years later I found myself at
the helm of a 25ft Wind Elf once more. Itwas a trip down memory lane as well as
an opportunity to compare a wonderful,
wooden golden oldie with the ‘plastic
fantastics’ – GRP boats that I’d spent 30
years building and the last 15 years sailing
and testing for yachting magazines. Plus I
was curious to fi nd out why a 21st century
fi rst-time yacht buyer would decide to go
for a 1950-built ‘classic’.
Brunner and I came upon our Wind Elf
Josa II in 1968 largely by accident. We’d
spent many hours together at University
poring over books by Joshua Slocum,
William Robinson, Eric Hiscock, Peter Pye
and Adrian Hayter – all of whom covered
prodigious distances in small, simple
wooden yachts. But the most inspiring
book of all was Desperate Voyage by John
Caldwell. He set sail from Panama in 1946bound for Sydney with no knowledge of
boats or of sailing. What’s more his only
crew was a brace of cats. Despite
adventures and mishaps galore he very
nearly made it. Sadly he and his 29ft yacht
Pagan were fi nally shipwrecked in the Fiji
islands, but he hitched a ride on a steamer
for the last leg to Sydney.Into the blue
We reckoned that if this guy could spend
a few days learning the basics of
navigation and sailing from a book before
setting off across the Pacifi c, the two of us
should be able to cope with the Atlantic.
We’d both sailed regularly as crew – albeit
never as skippers or navigators; I had
raced offshore on JOG and RORC events
and the yachts I sailed on had long keelsIN
ASSOCIATION
WITH