In 1969, Lloyds Yacht Club approached Camper & Nicholsons with a view to commissioning a new yacht to replace Lutine, the Laurent Giles-designed yawl which the company had built in 1952. The result was the in-house designed GRP Nicholson 55, of which the new Lutine was the first of 26 sister ships which were built with various rigs and deck layouts over the next decade. The third of these was Quailo III which was built in 1971 for Donald Parr, who would later become commodore then admiral of the Royal Ocean Racing Club. Parr was a loyal client of Camper & Nicholsons – his first Quailo was a one-tonner that had been designed and built as Yeoman XIV by the company in 1966, and Quailo II was a 1969 Nicholson 43 – and, having done a lot of business in Hong Kong, had chosen the name for his three boats from a Chinese derogatory term for westerners.
Parr’s primary aim in ’s first season was to gain selection for the British three-boat Admiral’s Cup team. Competing against 26 other boats in the trials throughout May and early June, had some early successes, with reporting partway through that she “laid a firm claim to being best of the big league.” However, the selectors decided that the best way to win the Admiral’s Cup was with a team of small boats with low had to make do with being reserve boat. “That made us determined to prove the selectors wrong,” Peter Nicholson, principal helmsman on at the time, told me recently, “and we did so very successfully.” Those successes included winning the New York Yacht Club Cup in Cowes Week and coming second overall in both the Channel Race and the Fastnet Race, all of which were part of the Admiral’s Cup series.
