30 CLASSIC BOAT JANUARY 2018
LAKE CONSTANCE PILOT CUTTER
Above, left to
right: halyards
are Dyneema-
cored, with
modern blocks;
low profi le sliding
hatch with
mahogany hoops
for sprayhood;
retracting keel
and housing runs
up to deck levelsketches and list of characteristics into CAD drawings.
“Combining classical looks with a modern underbody
shape, thus getting good performance, has always
fascinated me,” Jonas tells me later. “Perhaps the most
tricky part was to get the right balance of the gaff rig
with the modern lateral plan and fi nding a way that it
would fi t with different sail conditions. I think, along
with the very nicely cut sails, we got that pretty well.”
Though the boat was to be Stefan’s own plaything, he
wanted to build more of them, so he made some
compromises to broaden her appeal. “I wanted a simple,
painted deck, but in the end I laid larch planking,” he
said. It was a good decision – the light grey weathering
of the wood combined with its straight fore-and-aft
planking gives a hint of the traditional.
The second compromise was to design the lifting
keel around a hydraulic system. “My idea was for a
rope coming onto a winch on the keel casing, but then I
thought that is not so good for older sailors.”
Here you can sense the tension, because Stefan later
tells me that he sees the boat appealing to ‘rich, young’
people, but he recognises that the Swiss Franc 220,000
(c£176,000) price-tag is likely to be out of reach for
most younger buyers.SIMPLE IS BETTER
Hydraulics aside, the boat’s other guiding principle is
simplicity. As this was to be Stefan’s own boat, he built it
as simply as he knew how. That way it would cost him
less, and it would be completed sooner – vital for a man
about to become a father.
He took the CAD fi les to a local fi rm, who cut the
bulkheads out of 10mm (^3 / 8 in) plywood sheet with a
laser, as well as some of the boat furniture. Stefan
describes the result as resembling a giant jigsaw puzzle, a
world away from the usual painstaking process of
shaping frames from solid wood. ‘Framing’ took just a
day-and-a-half and left Stefan with the six partial
bulkheads – providing latitudinal stiffness – positioned
on station, but upside down.
Then he could start strip planking – the source of the
boat’s real strength. Using^3 / 4 in-thick strips of Western
red cedar pre-shaped with one concave edge and one
convex, he glued and clamped each one in place,traditional air, but this is very much a modern classic
design. Back in his boatyard – a series of large
workshops in an old industrial plant just off the south
shore of Lake Constance – Stefan explains his vision.
He built his fi rst boat at the age of ten, and by the
time he left school at 15, he had built two more and
restored fi ve. After his apprenticeship, he set up his own
small yard, which has grown over the past 15 years and
now employs between fi ve and seven skilled workers.
The idea to build a pilot cutter grew out of two
decades of boat ownership. From a tiny sailing canoe, he
progressed to a shorter but roomier 19ft (5.7m) Hansa-
Jolle, then his beloved 19ft Golant gaffer Eilean Mor.
Stefan cruised all these boats widely, towing them to
Brittany, Ireland and Norway.
And he experimented with them, storing away lessons
for the future. When he bought Eilean Mor, for instance,
she could tack through around 140 degrees, making
upwind work diffi cult. He commissioned various
different mainsails, fi nally alighting on one with less
draft to it. He shifted the sheeting points and had a
genoa cut to replace the existing jib, getting the tacking
angle down to around 100 degrees.
“I was very happy with the boat – she was very
seaworthy,” said Stefan, who completed a 2014
circumnavigation of Ireland in her. “She had a low
draught, could dry out and was very simple to run. But
I wanted to sail faster and higher.”
He loved the looks and performance of pilot cutters,
but reckoned they were built too heavily. So he set about
designing a boat with pilot cutter looks that could fulfi l
his need for speed and preserve his racing pride.
From the start, there was an ‘envelope’ that the boat
had to fi t inside. She had to go on a trailer, so had to be
no longer than 30ft or wider than 8ft 8in. The all-up
towing weight couldn’t exceed 2.8 tonnes for the benefi t
of his Land Rover, requiring a displacement of no more
than 2.3 tonnes. “I started drawing plans, and, when I
had something that fi tted, I took it to a naval architect.”
At fi rst he approached a German outfi t, who set
about telling him why he couldn’t have a boat with no
coachroof. “I was supposed to be the client,” he laughs.
Instead he went to one of Switzerland’s rare naval
architects, Jonas Panacek, who helped him turn his