HARDY 36 COMMODORE
t’s a pocket battleship” is Anthony Purnell’s perfect summation of his rock-solid Hardy 36 Commodore. Anthony has owned the 1998 example you see on these pages for five years. It followed his first boat, a Hardy 20 Fishing, kept on the Medway. “I actually wanted this boat for my retirement, but they don’t come up for sale very often so when I saw it advertised a year before I actually needed it, I went for it. At the time, I lived in Warwickshire and was working in London, so I kept the boat in Gillingham Marina and stayed on it. It meant I finished work with a smile on my face knowing that I was going to my boat every evening”.
Designed by Andrew Wolstenholme and launched at the London Boat Show in 1996, it was at the time the biggest boat that Norfolk-based Hardy had ever built. An ‘evergreen’ design, the solid upright trawler yacht style was never a fashion statement and therefore has never gone out of fashion. It’s still in production. “We’ve updated the boat a little with things like bonded flush-fit tinted windows in the superstructure instead of
