I’m sitting in the cockpit of a pretty little wooden yacht moored up in Dartmouth, on the south coast of England. All around me are many varieties of wood, lovingly fashioned into various components and finished off with an array of bronze and galvanised steel fittings. Amidst this highly traditional boat setting, the conversation is rather surreal. The boat’s owner and builder John Levell is a structural engineer who has worked with many of the great and good on a number of high-flying racing projects, calculating loads and stresses to create lightweight structures that fly across the water at more than 30kts. Yet Alka B, the boat he has built for himself, is a design based on working boats from more than a century ago, which will struggle to reach 6kts on a good day.
The clues are there in the rig detail: most of the running rigging runs through modern ball bearing blocks; the dead eyes and lanyards are not made of wood and hemp but of aluminium and Dyneema; likewise the inner shrouds are not made of galvanised steel or even stainless steel but of Dyneema too. And the mainsail – well, we’ll come to the mainsail in due course, but you might guess it’s not the regular gaff main you’d expect on a boat of this kind.
Like many engineers drawn to working on racing multihulls, John started his career working on aircraft before switching to yacht masts, where his knowledge of wing stresses meant he was able to push tolerances to the limit
