{Essex-based designers Holman & Pye were responsible for creating enduring British designs including the Twister, Bowman and Oyster models as well as the Rustler 36.}
I used to do a lot of skydiving,” Simon Mitchell told me. “While you’re still in the aircraft you have options but, once you leave the door, gravity takes over and you hope you make a safe landing at the bottom. But you can’t guarantee it.”
He likens the process of completing Cass, his blue-hulled 40-footer, to “financial skydiving”. But while with skydiving it’s the landing that’s tricky and the falling that’s supposed to be fun, in Cass’s launch, although the process might have been painful, the end result is, as Mitchell puts it, “an extraordinary statement of craftsmanship which needs to be told.”
In the early 1990s, house builder-turned-boatbuilder Barry Cass was keen to buy a 1968 Holman & Pye design called (later renamed ) but another buyer got there first. He instead decided he’d build another Holman & Pye boat, from a design originally conceived as a fast family cruiser for the Walker family to self-build. The Walkers did so in Ayrshire, completing their yacht in 1975 and naming her . Cass was to begin his build at the other end of the country: putting up a purpose-built shed on some friend’s land just outside Truro, Cornwall, and work on the yacht started in 1998.
