Mariette was one of three schooners at this inaugural regatta, all of which sailed up from the Mediterranean to race in the Channel. The others were Atlantic, a 2010 replica of the three-masted 1903 William Gardner schooner of the same name, and Adix, also three masted, built in Spain in 1984. Mariette was overall winner of the Richard Mille Cup, made by Garrard especially for this regatta. As well as racing inshore at Falmouth and the Solent the yachts raced to Dartmouth, and on to Cowes, and from there to Le Havre. It is hoped the Richard Mille Cup may one day replicate the travelling events of the Edwardian era, mixed-format regattas with distance races between historic venues including perhaps the Clyde and the UK east coast. Subject to today’s draft restrictions for berthing…
planking refastened with bronze. Her rig, redone by Fife in the 1920s, is like a missing link between gaff and true Bermudan, in that she has a gaff topsail but it runs up a track in her one-piece mast. This was called a Marconi rig at the time after the many radio aerials being installed across Britain. Mille brought Moonbeam IV to Brest
with two other large Fife gaff cutters that had spent decades in the Med – the 1903 design Moonbeam III and Mariquita. The three boats’ owners formed Team
Fife with their aim to bring classic big class racing back to a northern circuit. Their first outing was at the occasional Fife Regatta on the Clyde in 2022. The success of that led to the Richard Mille Cup. The organiser behind it is William
Collier, an expert and historian on classic yachts who curated the Fife design archive and who manages GL Watson in Glasgow. William spent much of his adult life dis- covering and listing many of these old boats, consigned to mud berths when it became too expensive to run them after the Second World War. He’d come across Mariquita as a child,
he says, when visiting Pin Mill, and been captivated by the sight of her being used as a houseboat with a ‘shed’ built over her
50 SEAHORSE
deck. In fact, it is the owners of these houseboats who largely prevented them rotting out, so that when owners with deep enough pockets to restore them took an interest often a lot of original materials and designs still remained. Most boats like this found in the UK
were restored here and then taken to the Mediterranean where a circuit of racing grew up in France in the late 1980s spread- ing to Italy, Spain and the Balearics. And now the Richard Mille Cup –
which is a solid silver trophy standing a metre tall made by Garrard, by the way – is coming to northern shores to race these boats in tidal waters. The organisers want it to be a yearly
event, perhaps moving to different ports to keep it interesting every year and to pro- mote lovely-looking boats by recreating the British yacht racing tradition. For the original ‘big class’ that usually
involved a season beginning at Harwich and then going around the coast to the Clyde, sailing at Cowes Week in August and then to the West Country before fin- ishing in Dartmouth in the first week of September. Various royal yacht clubs, of which there were no fewer than 46 by 1914, ran these regattas. The yachts were
usually crewed and captained by fisher- men, who returned to fishing in winter. These days very few people can take
three months off to go sailing like this so the new regatta reflects that with a two-week event. Boats have to be designed before 1939 and racing takes place under the Comité International de la Méditerranée (CIM) handicap system, which penalises equipment that was not on the boat origi- nally, like winches, say, or more obviously asymmetric spinnakers for downwind sails. The aim is to create, in time, a legacy, in
the British yachting tradition that pro- motes living history as these boats con- tinue to be campaigned, maintained and even attained by a new generation of sailors who like the way they look and the way they are. And hopefully there will be race officers like Charles, who are sympa- thetic to their design and can put on a race that shows them at their best.
Atlantic Atlantic is a replica of the schooner of the same name designed by William Gardner and built in 1903 at Shooters Island in New York. She was owned by Wilson Marshall and captained by the top Scots skipper Charlie Barr. In 1905 she set the 92-year
INGRID ABERY
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