PATRICK SQUIREPAUL JANESCLASSIC BOAT APRIL 2016 51JONATHAN DYKE
conflict of interests – Dyke is an East Coaster born and
bred, having grown up boating with his father on the
Orwell. One senses he’s quietly happy the East Coast
doesn’t attract the crowds of the South. “There’s a
massive amount of activity just on this river, but it’s a
different sort of psyche here. You could spend years in
these creeks,” he says. “We’re pulling people in from
Cambridgeshire and across the Midlands, so we
probably have a more eclectic client base than some
establishments on the South Coast.”
While others abandoned traditional boat building
skills in the GRP boom, Suffolk Yacht Harbour retained
them and as a wooden boat owner himself, Dyke would
love to see the marina become a hub of all things classic.
It already has the right reputation – half of the work
done in the new state-of-the-art repair, maintenance and
refit sheds (see CB329) is on wooden craft and the
facilities have attracted classic yachts from the South
Coast. Meanwhile the acquisition of traditional
chandlers Classic Marine, which will operate from the
Suffolk Yacht Harbour site in its own dedicated shop as
well as online, means the marina now offers everything
from twine to mast rings to bronze cleats.
“My career started in all things GRP, but my passion
has always been wooden boats. I had a Merlin Rocket,
then in 1983 I bought a Stella. Three-quarter-rigged,
long-keeled boats have always been a thing for me,” says
Dyke. After the Stella, he restored a West Solent One
Design, Benita, before buying another in the 1990s.
Towards the end of that decade, he bought the Robert
Clark design Cereste, installing the three-quarter rig that
Clark drew for the boat but never saw himself. There
was an almost total rebuild, steaming in 110 new
timbers, before the boat launched in early August 2001.
“The following weekend we set off for the America’s
Cup Jubilee regatta in the Solent. And we got caught in
the mother of all gales,” he recalls.
The boat stood up to it and the regatta that followed,
for Dyke and others, was “a life changing experience”.
“It was a moment in time for classic boats,” he says.
“I watched that spectacle and thought: ‘This is fantastic’.
The next year, in 2002, I called a few people, inviting
them along for a few races in June. Twelve said yes but
we ended up with 20 boats. The next year it was 30.”
The Suffolk Yacht Harbour Classic Regatta (entry
£20 whatever your LOA) is now the biggest on the East
Coast for any kind of yachts, regularly attracting 60
crews, some of them heading south afterwards to Panerai
British Classic Week in a feeder cruise. “There is an
informal UK circuit now for classic boats,” says Dyke.
Cereste is a regular on the Cowes pontoons and last
year Dyke fulfilled an ambition to race in the Med,
tweaking the sailplan to suit the CIM regulations.
A British Classic Yacht Club member since its
inception, he is used to racing under IRC, but rubbishes
the idea of an “arms race” between wooden yachts.
“That’s a misconception. We’ve won the British Classic
Yacht Club regatta twice and we’ve only ever used
Dacron sails on wooden spars. Although some people
get a buzz out of it, personally I don’t like to see black
sails on a classic boat and Cereste is not maximised in
the way other boats are. More races are won off the race
track than on it. You have to prepare your boat well.
Sometimes you win because you turned on the mark.”
Dyke identifies a trend for the “engineered classic”, a
replica of a vintage design built using lightweight
strip-plank construction. “Where does it sit in a regatta?
An endorsed IRC certificate should deal with it because
it will recognise the weight coefficient, but it’s an
interesting conundrum going foward.”
He’s more passionate about encouraging people to
make use of the “fantastic stock of wooden boats that
are accessible in terms of price”. He says: “I try to be a
conduit for classic things, without it being about the
business. It’s like helping your mates out, in all honesty.
People don’t always have the time, but a half handy
owner can achieve a great deal with the right advice.”Above: the first
of the marina’s
classic regattas,
which now
attracts 60 boats
Below: the
marina sits
between salt
marshes, which
are maintained
using silt from
dredging