THE BIG SECRET

his is the story of a boat that has – twice in her life, at the very beginning and very recently – been a big secret, although the circumstances could hardly have been more contrasting. She was designed by André Mauric and built by Louis Grossi in Marseille in 1939. No one knows, so it would seem, what the boat’s original name was but her first owner was a Portuguese nobleman called Manuel de Carvalho de Ávila, the third Count of Ávila. It is thought that the boat was sailed for the very first time – with the owner, his wife and Mauric on board – on 3 September 1939, and that when they returned to the builder’s yard afterwards, they heard that France and Britain had declared war on Germany earlier that day. It was soon afterwards that the boat was kept a secret for the first time although the story varies as to the extent of this. One version is that her ballast keel was removed and hidden under a pile of coal for the remainder of the war, but it could be that it was