SAVING ADLARD COLES’ YACHT

Siblings Jack and Erin Osborn (aged 16 and 14 respectively) have spent almost all of their lives waiting to go sailing on their father James’s boat. Jack did at least get to sail on her before she was laid up for 15 years, but he was too young to remember it. “I’ve only seen photos of this smiling ginger baby on board,” he said. The boat in question is the Nicholson 36 Cohoe IV, which has been in the Osborn family since 1989, when she was bought by James’s father Bob and his great friend Chris Morrow… but her first owner was Adlard Coles – the illustrious sailor, author and publisher – who commissioned her build in 1963.

The first of Coles’ four Cohoes was a modified Albatross (an extended Tumlare), designed by Knud Reimers and built by AH Moody and Son in 1946. She was already named which is an Indian name for a species of Canadian salmon and, as Coles later wrote, “is quite an appropriate name for a fast kind of yacht,, as it was for the 24ft waterline RNSA 24s; it was only when the boat was about to be shipped across the Atlantic for the start of the race that he discovered that it wouldn’t be. However, Moodys worked miracles to extend ’s bow in Birmabright alloy plating in just 24 hours, and she went on to win the race. “The 1950 event was an important pioneering race which had considerable bearing on things to come,” Coles later wrote. “Among others it led to the recognition of the ocean-going ability of small sailing boats.”