CENTREBOARD KETCH

The story of Saecwen of Lymington begins in 1962, when the first Saecwen was built by Priors of Burnham – one of about 25 Alan Buchanan-designed Saxon Class sloops, all given Anglo Saxon names. Saecwen (pronounced saykwen) is Anglo Saxon for sea queen. In 1970, Saecwen was bought by Captain Colin McMullen, whose grandson Charles was born the same year the boat was built.

“My earliest memories were on that boat,” Charles told me recently. The Watson family kept Saecwen for 28 years and she was, at one stage, co-owned by three generations – Charles, his parents and his grandfather. They regularly sailed her across Biscay to Spain and they took her across the Atlantic and back six times. “Summers were spent afloat,” said Charles. In 1989/90, Charles took a ten-month sabbatical and sailed her to Venezuela’s Orinoco Delta, back up through the Caribbean, then home to the UK again. By this time he was the ‘main owner’ of the boat but it wasn’t long before “small children and incredibly busy career periods took over” and that was clearly incompatible with the time-consuming nature of owning a wooden boat. “It was with great sadness that we decided to sell her,” he said.

Over the next quarter of a century, Charles did some sailing in friends’ boats including numerous Round the Island Races, but he mainly got his “adventure fixes” from mountaineering and off-piste. A couple of years ago the idea started to bear fruit after the sale of his PR company. “I woke up in the middle of the night and said ‘right, we’re going to do it’,” he said. “It was easy to say it but I had absolutely no idea what to do!”