VAGABUNDO II


Above: Owner, restorer and now skipper: Robbie Fabre at the helm


T 10 CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2012


he water was getting darker and more mottled by the second, as the wind, blowing from the north, descended over the Gulf of Saint-Tropez at a rate of knots. Yacht Vagabundo II, the 42ft (12.8m) German Frers ketch built in


1945, was heeling over but not hard pressed. I’d been up the mast for 20 minutes waiting for more wind to ensure a good shot of pressure in her sails. It was uncomfortable – and then it all got a bit too much. My leg was pinched between a shroud and the spreader in order to make my two hands available for my camera; I’d got the shot but the mainsail had been eased in order to depower her, which wasn’t great for me. The wind was getting up – my ‘exit strategy’ needed to be put into action. Robbie Fabre, the 23-year-old skipper and new owner, delegated the job of easing the halyard in order to get me down, to his end-of-season crew, younger brother Henry and Tano Noblia (his regular crew having gone back to their universities in the UK after Les Voiles de Saint- Tropez), and I was on deck in a flash. We were in company of the mistral – the dry, strong wind that blows offshore in the south of France. Robbie and crew all went from aviator sunglasses cool to getting soaked on the foredeck, knocked by every wave but not blinking an eye. This was a small fraction of what this


yacht may have experienced in her early life off Argentina during the war, when her home waters were not littered by mines, like Britain’s, but clean, in the South Atlantic. Her history is quite unusual for a Saint-Tropez classic. It is rich in racing, in particular the unofficial 1940s races that helped develop the endurance-based 1,200-mile, first Buenos Aires-Rio de Janeiro race in 1947, in which she came second overall. From these races her lines were chosen for the Frers-designed Boreal class. Robbie and his crew were working hard together to get the foresail down and at least secured by a sail tie as the wind was becoming overwhelming. Meanwhile his mother Caroline was left in command of Vagabundo, also getting soaked but stoically helming us homeward.


FAMILY OF SHIPOWNERS The Fabre family, which has a history of shipping and ship-owning that dates back to the 15th century, lives in Bristol and has a house in Port Grimaud, near Saint- Tropez, where I had arrived the day before to meet them. Inside, Philippe Fabre sat in his round lower-level drawing room with a coffee in one hand and the other casually referencing the 20- or 30-something books, magazines, and naval drawings that were strewn over the coffee table in front of him. The family’s vivid Fabre Shipping colonial-era posters, their bows floating proud,


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