'Fiery Cross' - NZ's first Canting Keel Boat

by Jim Young on 5 Aug 2010 Jim Young built 'Fiery Cross' in the late 1950's after being inspired by a design from L. Francis Herreshoff in his famous book 'Common Sense of Yacht design. In this extract from his yet to be released autobiography Jim re-lives some of his experiences with 'Fiery Cross' and provides an authentic account of life as a boat builder in the 1950's.

Jim Young is now 85 and resides in Takapuna.

'Anyway on a long boat you get on a reach and up to speed and you just bowl along - and that was one of the things that I had in mind for Fiery Cross with its swinging keel. I thought we could have a fast boat, a pleasant boat to sail and that is how Fiery Cross turned out to be - she was just lovely - and so narrow it didn't matter which side of the boat you sat on.

I'm used to sitting on the lee side of the cockpit and you can put your hand over in the water because the rail would be just above the surface - and this water is going past at about 9 knots. So you really feel as if you're going fast and the sensation of speed is as important as the speed itself.

At that stage I'm a contracting boat builder and I wanted to design the boats I built as well. The market was very small in the 1950's, not long since the war and it was illegal to use native timbers. There was all sorts of restrictions, people didn't have much money; you could build boats for people but only for those who had an import licence, to bring in a motor, or something like that, for a powerboat.

So it was very hard to get work, as I have said. I needed to attract attention to myself through this canting keel boat. So I decided I'd race her, but I'd race her with the keel fixed. I was actually required by the yachting organisation to provide a statutory declaration that I wouldn't swing the keel while racing.

Well, as it happened when I launched the boat, I had run out of money, so I couldn't spend money on making the keel move anyway. So she sailed for years with a fixed keel. The gear was all in there but I couldn't move it, because it was all legally locked up. But after a few years, I decided that I'd have to sell Fiery Cross, because she was a very unusual boat – and I was concerned that people were going to think that's what I did, build unusual boats – and thought I should get back to something a little more conventional if I was going to make a living.

I used to go cruising with Des Townson; he had his own 26 foot design Serene which he said, was inspired by the Stewart 34 Patiki (Maori for flounder or flatfish) which appeared in 1960. Serene was quite beamy, long waterline, vertical ended, powerful little boat with a fair amount of sail - a good looking yacht that was typical of all Des Townson's designs. He was a great admirer of Bill Couldrey, as I was too, because Bill was a real artist who created works of art that did something. If we were anchored in a bay there'd be people coming along, Des would be on our boat, and there'd be a bit of a chat and they'd say: 'Can I have a look at this boat here?'

They always wanted to go look at Des's boat. They never wanted to look at Fiery Cross. Des would be purring away at everybody looking at this boat because it was quite a fast boat. It was of a size that people were more interested in. After all you've got 45 feet of boat in Fiery Cross, that's 90 feet of topsides you've got to keep up. And she only drew 6 foot 3, you know, these days she could afford to have drawn about 8 feet but in those days, you had to grid boats to clean them and the antifouling was such that you had to antifoul on a tide - and so it had to be designed to go on a grid. That was one of the big factors as to why the keel was like it was and straight on the base.

Fiery Cross had a dreadful spinnaker. That's the way they made them in those days, just bags. All those sails on Fiery Cross were made by Leo Bouzaid. The order had been in for a while and I phoned him up wanting to know when I was going to get them; I needed them before Christmas. So he had to suddenly rush around and grab the first bolt of material he had because that mainsail was of such heavy cloth that if it got damp and stiff in the dew, you needed to furl it with a four by two.

The canting keel, well, I decided I was going to finally swing this keel so I'd been talking to Des about it and I met him in his Serene when he anchored it off Bean Rock lighthouse. It was a light breeze from the north-east and I was determined to release this keel - but I thought the rig and everything else was going to flop over. We both had this idea, so we very gingerly released the keel and waited - and nothing happened. The boat just stayed upright. And of course once you released the keel, you effectively transferred the weight of the ballast from the bottom, six feet down, to where it became the equivalent of internal ballast. With 2 ½ tonnes of lead inside it, we were still going to have plenty of stability. So we had to bar this arm around to one side to get the boat listing. We started sailing and laying over in this light breeze the first thing that happened, if we allowed the boat to go into the wind, she would stop, she'd stall. And you couldn't get her sailing again with the rig yo one side and no way on. You couldn't get her to move.

As soon as the wind got into the sails, she'd turn round up into the wind. You couldn't get enough way to steer her away. Later on the breeze freshened and that was okay. So the boat started sailing, right, but, we found that when the boat was upright or slightly leaning to windward, she'd develop lee helm. We now know today all these things, they're obvious, but nobody then told us what makes boats tick. And you can see it all now with windsurfers. I mean a wind surfer puts the rig out to one side and it rounds up, pulls it to windward and it bears away. Push it forward and the boat bears away, bring it aft? Its all there. But it wasn't obvious then.

So, it really taught me the fact that if the boat lies over too far and gets way out of balance, you have to put far too much helm on to hold her on course. And before that people used to believe that the more a keel boat leaned over, the more it wanted to come upright, which is quite obvious. It developed the most power that way. But this power was eaten up by the fact that the centre of drive was so far to one side that the correcting action of the rudder to hold the boat on course created more drag than the developed power. It ate up all the speed, the power to go fast.

And if it went over far enough the rudder would stall and the boat would round up, which is what happened to Tango when she was first built. It's amazing how you don't see things that are so simple. I mean you see it in everyday life.

Somebody thinks of something, so absolutely simple, you think, 'Why in hell didn't I think of that?'

Simplicity is the hardest thing to find.

Another time, in the early spring, working down Birkenhead Wharf, I had Fiery Cross tied in and was painting her because the weather was calm and rather than putting her back on the mooring, I had her tied with her nose close to the wharf plus having a stern anchor out. I knew that I had to be careful because the tide would be rising next morning so I was going to get up at 5 am and go and check; I lived nearby, but when I got up I was an hour late, jumped in the car and roared off down to the wharf - and as I got closer I could see the mast beyond the trees, angled the wrong way so I knew the worst. Sure enough, she's got her nose underneath the wharf, the tides come up and the bow is way down with a tiny bit of freeboard showing for'ard and the stern is sticking out of the water showing most of the rudder - and the mast is angled forward and she's sort of wobbling, because the complete boat is balancing on the top of the stem head fitting. And I'm rushing around whimpering, how am I going to fix this?

I'm going to have to get a timber jack, and I'm going to tie a rope onto this timber jack and get it onto the bow of the boat, and I'm going to wind this timber jack and push this boat out - and when the boat comes out, the timber jack is going to fall down, but it will be tied on with a rope so I'll be able to get it back, yeah. A timber jack, they're an old thing, used for rolling logs, boatbuilders used them for shifting boats around, they've got a handle you wind and a spear which timber workers poke into logs and they wind these things and get an enormous amount of power, and they're quite heavy and it goes without saying that there is a technique in using them.

But as I'm rushing around with this timber jack, I suddenly hear a crash and a rattle of rigging - and there she is floating normally - but with her stemhead fairlead pointing in a strange direction, ripped nearly off. Well, it was still held on being a brass casting, It was just bent – but it could have been very much worse.'