TASSIE TOO
In the early 1960s, the Royal Melbourne Yacht
Squadron encouraged the class to race again, and for
a few years up to nine boats competed. In the 1980s,
a handful of boats began to race in Goolwa in South
Australia, mostly with Bermudan rigs. By the late 2000s
the Goolwa fleet could boast double figures, including
two new boats designed by David Payne, one of which
was traditionally built and the other strip-planked.
In total, just over seventy 21 Footers have been built,
and 19 of those are known to have survived. Tassie
is variously reported to have sunk on her moorings
off Melbourne in the 1960s and also to have been burnt
in an accident in 2011, but neither report is certain;
Tassie III is known to have been converted to a cruising
boat in 1965 in Queensland, where she later met her
end in a fire; but Tassie Too survives – and has recently
come home.HEADING HOME
In 1955 the RYCT disposed of Tassie Too in a raffle,
which raised £310 – £30 less than her original cost.
The winner of the raffle lived in Launceston in the north
of Tasmania. The boat then had a succession of owners
in Melbourne, the last of which was Tony Siddons,
who bought her in 2000. At that point she had received
extensive modifications, including a deep external
ballast keel, a Stuart Turner inboard engine, increased
freeboard, a substantial coachroof, an extended stern- as much as 5ft (1.5m) – and a masthead Bermudan
rig. Tony carried out an extensive restoration that
included taking her rig and hull back to their original
configurations (luckily the original transom had been
left in place when the stern was extended), laying
a new King Billy pine deck and splining the hull. When
the work was complete, she was exhibited at the 2003
Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart, after which
she returned to Port Phillip Bay, where she was kept
on a mooring at Sandringham Yacht Club.
In 2017, Tassie Too was put on the market and a
group of Tasmanians saw this as a golden opportunity
to bring her home. They formed an organisation called
The Friends of Tassie Too, which managed to raise the
funds to buy her and transport her back to Hobart.
She needed a fair amount of work before she could be
put back in commission. The red gum used to renew
the rubbing strakes in the early 2000s proved
incompatible with the Huon pine planking due to
different expansion rates and had to be renewed again
in Celery Top pine. A leak around the stemhead fitting
had rotted out the bottom part of the stem, which was
replaced with a piece of grown Huon pine. And a long
section of the keel that had been attacked by worms in
Port Phillip Bay was replaced in Tasmanian blue gum
(and in doing so it was discovered that about 120kg
of her lead ballast was built in to her centreboard case).
With the work complete, she was relaunched in
February 2018, and since then she has been based at the
RYCT, which, in recognition of her history, provides free
marina berthing and other benefits.
Tassie Too was exhibited ashore at the Australian
Wooden Boat Festival in February 2019. After the
festival finished, I was keen to have a sail and take
photos of her before I began my 40-hour journey back
to Cornwall. I sailed with Kenn Batt, grandson of Harry
Batt and the current president of The Friends of Tassie
Too, Greg Muir, a member of a well-known Tasmanian
boatbuilding family and a Friends committee member,
and Greg’s brother John. With a maximum of three
of us on board at any one time – these boats used to
race with six crew – and a strong wind forecast, Greg
sensibly decided to set a smaller sail plan of about
325sq ft (30m^2 ), including a very old cotton jib. As it
turned out the strong wind never came, and we enjoyed
a gentle sail among the moorings in Sandy Bay not far
from the scene of some of the extraordinary triumphs
of this boat and her sister ships.Above left: Tassie
Too after her
conversion in the
early 2000s