Left to right: gear and throttle controls; steering wheel; wash basin in the heads4-cylinder 42hp petrol engine. Her fi rst owner was
Simon de Wit whose family founded a chain of Dutch
supermarkets. The boat was named after his daughter.
The de Wits owned Sally for about 50 years but then
she had a succession of owners over a relatively short
time: Mr Wieringa, who renamed her Costa Rica; the
Kok-Miedema family who bought her in 1971 and called
her Frederika; and then four years later, a boatyard in
Leeuwarden in Friesland which reinstated her original
name. At that point her original engine, having been
replaced with a Volvo Penta B-30 65hp diesel, was
purchased by the Daimler factory in Germany where it is
believed to be on display as a museum piece. Sally’s next
owner had a restaurant on the canal near to Schiphol
Airport and used her to provide commercial city tours.
In 1991, Cees Nater returned to his native Holland
from Hong Kong where he had been running his own
company Gaastra Sails making sails for windsurfers.
At that time, Sally had been out of commission for six
years and was laid up at a yard where the owner owed
money – that was where Cees fi rst saw her. “I fell in
love instantly,” he tells me. He soon bought her and
got her back in commission and over the next seven
years, he and his wife used her for their own purposes
and also, from time to time, for weddings.
“We used transport the newly married couple
across the waters to the reception, often with other
boats around us,” he says. “But we only ever did this
for friends, not commercially.” For one party there
were more than 30 people on board.