Invited to design a large racing monohull for the Swiss and Italian lakes, it was only natural that Jo Richards would come up with something a tad novel. His 42-footer Stravaganza takes the canting keel, adds Class A accelerators and ends up with what is effectively a continuous midships section that revolves within the rest of the hull, taking the large bulb keel with it. Stravaganza did not prove all that easy to master – but it certainly had its moments


‘Days. Weeks. Months. Who knows?’


Just as you’d expect, Eeyore’s voyage around the Isle of Wight last month was long, but fortunately it was not too long. Flying Dutchman Olympic medallist, dinghy designer and Formula 40 champion Jo Richards has seen the future


When I was young my parents owned a series of bilge keelers between 17 and 26ft, which we kept inland on the River Severn between Tewkesbury and Gloucester. Among them was a Vivacity 20 on which we, as a family of five plus two dogs, used to stay for a three-week summer holiday on the south coast – something you don’t


see a lot of these days! From distant memory the Vivacity sailed much better than the others. For nostalgic reasons I thought it might


be fun to get hold of a Vivacity 20 and an interesting challenge to try to race it com- petitively. I found a 53-year-old Vivacity advertised, with trailer, lying forlornly behind a power station in the Midlands. Inside it the boat had a foot of oily water and a lot of flaky paint – ‘a very gloomy place’. So Eeyore she now was. A deal was done, I bought the trailer


and the boat was thrown in. I drilled a few holes in the bottom and set off for the


‘We can’t all and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it’ AA Milne


south coast. The boat looked smaller than I remembered but, then again, most things do when you grow up. It was about three weeks later that I got round to putting a tape measure on it – 18ft 6in, an Alacrity not a Vivacity. Oh well. As luck would have it I had a deck in


the roof of the workshop from a previous project that fitted the smaller boat. The great scrapheap challenge began, using up the old resin, paint, fittings and so on that had accumulated over the years. I got most of the way through the project


with time not money as the main input. The carbon spars (cut-down RS Elite mast and National 18 boom) came from Selden’s scrapbox. Luckily they have good quality control so there are sometimes some inter- esting tubes to be found. I cut off the old bilge keels and initially


SEAHORSE 45


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