CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2018 71R
eports had reached the Irish coastguards of a
small yacht in distress in heavy seas. Now the
men, with their rocket gear and lifelines, had
taken up a position on the beach about a mile
south of Malahide, County Dublin. Blinded by rain, they
faced seawards into the teeth of a Force 9 gale that had
torn a path of devastation the previous night along the
English and Irish coast. About 1.30pm a body was
spotted in the surf. Two coastguards ran in and hauled it
from the sea. It was wearing a lifebuoy that bore the
name Oona RUYC. Frederick West, the 18-year-old
ship’s lad, had been dead for some two hours.
Two hours later some yacht spars and then fi nally the
wreck of the Oona itself were thrown ashore by the
waves. The coastguards made a line fast to her stern and
pulled her up the beach as she was lifted by successive
waves. Of the crew of fi ve, there were to be no survivors.
Oona’s designer, William Evans Paton, was born in
Glasgow in 1862, the son of an insurance broker. Like
GL Watson, he trained in the drawing offi ce of
A & J Inglis, where he came under the infl uence of John
Inglis Jnr, a keen amateur yacht designer. Paton then
spent a further three years studying naval architecture at
the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, before moving to
Armstrong Mitchell & Co, the great Tyneside
shipbuilders, to design mainly naval vessels.
A keen yachtsman, in 1879 he became a member of
the Royal Clyde Yacht Club. That same year, aged 18, he
designed the 5-tonner, Trident, which had the longest
waterline of any boat in its class. Although not successful
as a racer, she was found to be a very good sea boat.FIRST SUCCESS
His fi rst major success was the 5-tonner Olga (1883),
designed in accordance with the latest scientifi c
principals for Joseph Plunkett of Belfast. Olga won 15
fi rst prizes and two others out of 19 starts in her fi rst
season, despite having been run down and sunk.
Then in 1884 Paton designed the celebrated 3-tonner,
Currytush, which won 16 fi rsts out of 22 starts. It turned
out that owners were not prepared to compete by
building boats that were even longer and narrower than
Currytush, so the 3-tonner class in the south collapsed.
But no matter, Paton was now seen as a rising star in
British yacht design, with a string of winners in the small
classes and with his designs winning prizes at the annual
Shipwrights Exhibition in London. Plunkett now asked
Paton to design a 5-tonner, with the aim of winning the
prestigious 1886 Queen’s Cup at Cowes. The new boat
would need to beat the existing class champion, the
Watson-designed Doris, the most extreme and successful
plank-on-edger then in existence.
The rating rule then in force severely taxed beam, but
put no tax on sail area. In order to design a yacht with a
better rating than Doris, Paton gave his new boat a
narrower beam and even larger sail plan, offset by a keel
that was two tons heavier and carried one foot lower
than her rival. In working up his concept, Paton built a
large scale sailing model to test his design. Like Watson,
Paton was making use of the latest fi ndings in
hydrodynamics. Oona was built by JG Fay & Co of
Southampton, a fi rm with a solid reputation. Designers
CP Clayton and the American William GardnerThe wreck of Oona on the beach at Malahide, north
of Dublin, in 1886, with her keel and stern post torn
off but hull largely intact