THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL BOATS
f John Ruskin was right, that boats are the most beautiful things created by man’s hand, then the question I casually posed to 100 contributors, photographers, yacht designers, boatbuilders and general friends of CB carried a weight of agony I hadn’t thought through. Beauty can’t be separate from purpose after all, so what I’d really asked was: what is the best thing ever made? “Don’t do this to me again!” wrote back one correspondent, overflowing with the pain of selection and agony for those he could not list (“six votes max, still alive, and not your own” were the only rules). Another one prevaricated for a fortnight, then said “I’m sorry – it’s too hard. I can’t do this.” The art editor had anticipated the winner correctly. There actually is a winner, in the sense that there was one boat that was voted for over all others, by quite a margin (eight votes). She’s unsurprisingly from the hand of Wm Fife III, the naval architect who has dominated this list. Her win is as much a result of her regular appearances in the Med, her string of recent, enthusiastic, high-profile owners, and the fact that this yacht attracts photographers like flies to wet varnish. But, of course, she’s amazing too. The sail number is C1. Her name means ladybird in Spanish. It’s the 19-M yacht . The S&S yawls, as a class, garnered 10 votes, but and Fife’s 23-M yacht . Riva runabouts also got five votes, but split between three models. Olin Stephen’s came in with four, and the rest of the boats on this list received either two or three votes. Personally, I was disappointed to see nothing from the hand of Albert Strange – his little canoe yawls are poetry. And nothing from John Gale Alden, whose schooners had such a way of marrying the sobre good looks of a yacht to the schooner rig. What do you think we missed?
