During Phase 1 Cariad was owned by Stuart Williamson, a British businessman residing in Kuala Lumpur. Half a world away in Italy the famous yacht Lulworth was being restored. Des Kearns, project manager and Jory Lord, design and engineering, were at Finnegan’s Irish Pub drinking a pint of Kilkenny. The phone rang. It was Stuart. Where are you? In Finnegan’s Pub. Stay there I am sending over the Lulworth book. It was the long-awaited glossy account of the Lulworth restoration spanning five years and a cost of $21 million. We single out Lulworth above the others because she is the closest in design to Cariad and identical in construction.
Our budget to achieve the same objective was $2.5 million - a hard act to follow. Budget aside, our true challenge was to produce a quality of workmanship in Thailand that would be judged favorably by our peers in Europe.
My involvement began thirty- three years ago when I carried out a routine survey on Cariad in Singapore. Sixteen years later, I was asked to do a follow-up survey while the vessel lay derelict off the port of Laem Cabang, Thailand. It took 30 seconds to sum up that she was uninsurable. The potential buyer, Stuart Williamson said he would purchase her anyway and accept the cost to restore this piece of British maritime history.
As Project Manager I was privileged to manage a team of diverse people performing tasks and achieving standards beyond their wildest imaginations. Our project was about ordinary people stepping up to the mark when opportunity knocked. You saw the spirit in their eyes. In Mike Howett’s eyes you could almost see the finished boat. The
same spirit and pride could be seen in the eyes of all our carpenters, steelworkers and artisans, meaning we chose our team well.
For me, restoring Cariad was an opportunity to leave behind something tangible.
The word spread like wildfire. By the time we finished casting our recruiting net most of the region’s best boat builders were now employed on our project. Twenty- one steel workers and twenty-eight carpenters along with their tools, arrived in fleets of pick-up trucks. Without briefing or time-consuming meetings, they started work in earnest. They knew what to do.
There are no benchmarks when it comes to restoring a 100-year-old classic yacht like Cariad. We had basic 1895 naval architect plans drawn in pencil and a Beken & Cowes 1896 photo of Cariad under full sail. For the rest we had to rely on creative talent and good boat building practice to make it work. We began by sketching basic conceptual drawings then converting them into AutoCAD.
Our project was a journey in time, a look into a bygone era. Our brief was to duplicate the craftsmanship not from the last century, but the century before.
You only get one of these jobs in a lifetime. We built a wooden access ramp up to the deck and called it The Ramp of Opportunity. Each of us who daily walked up that ramp was being given the chance to achieve or exceed our personal best.
Before any antique vessel is restored it must be dismantled. We removed the hull interior, all the planks and 90% of the iron frames under the watchful eye of the Thai King Rama
IX whose photo was on display above our materials container. Our workshops were painted yellow in respect of the Monarch. Sadly, when we finished dismantling the derelict, there wasn’t much left.
The hull was of composite construction, meaning, teak planking over iron frames. Each iron frame had to be removed and copied individually. Then we got lucky. The keel was found in sound condition. Replacement could have been the final straw for Stuart Williamson to stop funding.
We started with a shell and soon the project took on a life of its own. Steel was fabricated into complicated frames and each welded in place to return the wineglass shape. A ten-man team secured huge Takian Thong planks, a greenish oily timber from Laos, using top mauls and drove home 5,500 silicon bronze bolts coated with oakum and red lead. The bolts were custom-made in upstate New York by a company that guaranteed flawless bolts.
Burmese teak was fashioned into deckhouses, skylights and hatches to match the original 1896 design. We heard the throbbing of the British classic 8LXB Gardner engine. Carpenters completed their fine woodwork, then laid quarter- sawn teak decking. We fashioned Canadian Douglas Fir and Sitka Spruce into fine masts and spars. To me personally the highlight was the staccato ring of caulking mallets. When the job was done, we walked the new decks and allowed ourselves a moment of reflection.
In 2008 we launched a perfectly restored Cariad. Unfortunately, this coincided with the world financial crash and Stuart was forced to sell.
This is what we delivered in 2008
The Report • June 2023 • Issue 104 | 87
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