Noss Connections
Alister Harbord meets an unlikely Yachting Legend who has a connection with Noss:
At the end of July 1973 a young man had his 1908 gaff cutter hauled up the slip at Noss works to have the urgent work done to her leaking hull that was needed to pre- vent her sinking. The owner and the boat had just been towed into Dartmouth after making passage via the Azores from the West Indies after having suffered a knock down and total engine electrics failure. They had also survived going aground during the early hours of Christmas Eve on Buck Island Reef while making for
St.Croix in the Virgin Islands. Luckily the emergency flares that the owner deployed were seen and the badly pounding boat was rescued and towed over to Christiansted in
St.Croix for temporary repairs. Damage to the hull was such that in places the two inch planking had been ground away to an inch of thickness by the sharp coral and the caulking had sprung. Repairs took until May of 1973. Intentions of passing through the Panama Canal and then cruising in the Pacific and ending up in Australia were thwarted and the pair limped back to their home port.
The boat was the ‘Golden Vanity’, a thirty- nine foot copy of a Brixham trawler which had been built at Galmpton on the Dart for the marine artist Arthur Briscoe. The owner since 1970 was twenty-nine year old yachting journalist Peter Crowther and he and his ship had finally returned home after competing in the first Ob- server Single Handed Transatlantic Race from Plymouth to Newport, Rhode Island in 1972. Not only did he have the largest number of cats taken on any boat in the race (Gypsy, the ship’s cat had given birth to five kittens the day before the race) but he also made the slowest crossing: eighty eight days (Peter is immensely proud of both records which stand to this day). The bright yellow and orange ‘Golden Vanity’ was the oldest boat in the race and it is a testament to her original builders that she survived the rigours of her passage (and indeed survives to this day: she is now a sail training vessel with Brixham’s Trinity Trust.)
Golden Vanity in Newport at the end of the race
Peter went on to compete in each of the eight subsequent single handed transatlantic races and has only failed to complete two, once due to gear failure and on the other occasion when the famous ‘Galway Blazer’ sunk beneath him. ‘Galway Blazer’ struck
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