Boat International – June 2017

http://www.boatinternational.com | June 2017 http://www.boatinternational.com | June 2017

PHOTOGRAPH: XXXXXX

ilhouetted against the Mediterranean

sunset, Svea’s overhangs are awesome to the point of outrageousness. Her

original profile was based on an analysis of the development of the J Class

after the 1936 match racing series. The Swedish naval architect and

boatbuilder Tore Holm, famous for his Six Metre and Eight Metre class

racing yachts, had turned his pencil to the far bigger Js and he set out to

design to the longest LOA the class would allow. He had completed his

yacht’s lines and sailplan in 1937 just before the Second World War changed

the world’s priorities and, with it, sailing and the great and glorious

international regattas, including the America’s Cup. Europe would take

decades to recover economically and when it did the J Class seemed a

little anachronistic.

Holm himself was a proud Olympic sailor from a boatbuilding family in

Gamleby, Sweden. So it would not be a stretch to imagine him designing a

yacht for Sweden’s elite to take on Europe’s best. Even though he continued

designing boats into the 1950s, mostly Skerry cruisers and international

classes, his J Class plans remained in a drawer.

J-S1 probably would have remained a ghost except for a trio of

coincidences. The first was when the secretary of the International Eight

Metre class, John Lammerts van Bueren, received permission from Holm’s

heirs to comb through his drawings for plans of unbuilt Metre classes. In

the attic of the family home, he came across the unmistakable plans of a J

Class signed by Holm in 1937. The second coincidence was that Lammerts

van Bueren was good friends with Dutch naval architect Andre Hoek. Hoek

was fascinated by the discovery and assembled a group, including a

potential owner, to buy the rights to the design.

“We could see that there was a growing interest in the J Class,” says Hoek.

His firm had earlier been hired to analyse the 1936 designs Sparkman &

Stephens and Starling Burgess made for the replacement of Harold

Vanderbilt’s 1930 Cup winner Enterprise, an exercise that led to the building

of the original Ranger. Hoek’s task in 2005 was to find a design that could

be updated to the modern class rules. This became Lionheart, which was

launched in 2010.

“The discovery of the Holm J was exciting,” says Hoek. “We had developed

a velocity prediction program specifically to analyse the lines and sailplans

of classic displacement sailing yachts with long keels and attached rudders.

We ran the lines of every known J through the program. We took the five

designs that seemed to perform the best and subjected them to

computational fluid dynamics to simulate tank and wind tunnel testing;

then the data really got interesting! The Holm boat indicated it would be a

very powerful performer.”

His team set about modernising the design to the new class rules.

Construction started and with the two halves of the hull and deck

completed, the owner pulled out, leaving the builder, Claasen Shipyards,

with the unfinished hull and Hoek in search of another potential owner.

Enter coincidence number three – an avid racer who wanted to be able

to sail in the America’s Cup Superyacht Regatta and J Class Regatta in

Bermuda this year. The owner’s fleet manager picks up the tale. “He saw

five Js racing at the Superyacht Cup and that was pretty impressive and

twice we were involved in regattas where Js were competing. He sailed

Endeavour and had chartered Rainbow for the Cowes Centennial, but then

that boat sold,” he explains, adding that his boss also had the opportunity

to sail Lionheart and Hanuman.

When he learned of the opportunity to buy the hull and deck of the

Swedish design from Claasen, the owner took it, realising that that was the

only way he would be able to make the event in Bermuda on his own boat.

And so began the programme to finish a J Class from a bare hull in just

14 months. The build was completed at Vitters, which had arranged a

partnership with Claasen.

Tako van Ineveld, formerly a director at Holland Jachtbouw, had been

involved with the build and sailing of Rainbow. Now heading his own

independent project management company, he was the perfect choice to

direct the build of Svea as the owner’s representative. First on the list of

modifications for the new owner was the addition of a doghouse and a

revision of the deck layout.

Originally the wheel was mounted on deck like Endeavour’s and there

was no cockpit, notes Hoek. “But it is such a big wheel that it’s hard to put

a lot of pressure on it unless you are on the centreline, but at times you really

From bare hull to racer in just over a year – and Svea’s crew are working hard ahead of the America’s Cup Superyacht Regatta

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