“How many more voyages Veritas will make and how many more tales she’ll have to tell is impossible to prophesy…; She has been becalmed and assaulted alike by the elements, and weathered all. She has been raced and cruised, loved and abused, yet above everything she remains a ship capable of sailing anywhere in the world…; Can you wonder that I love her?” These words could have come from any of the 10 people who have, to date, owned Veritas – originally named Manuela II and now Plym – but they were actually written by Stephen Wiest whose father was her fifth owner. And how much more of the world she will sail in the future is anybody’s guess, but she has certainly covered a lot of it so far.
was designed by Swede Erik Salander and built – engineless, and with Honduras mahogany planking on oak frames – by August Plym in Saltsjobaden near Stockholm in 1948. Salander specialised in designing yachts to the Scandinavian Square Metre rule, producing a great many designs between 15-and 120-Square Metres. was commissioned by Alf Nobel – an heir of Alfred Nobel who had invented dynamite and established the famous prizes that bear his name – who asked Salander to design something and sailed her to New England with his wife, their son and a paid hand. At some point he sailed her back to Sweden and then to the USA again. In the late 1950s, he sold her to a Chicago yachtsman called Peacock, who renamed her and took her via the New York canal system and the Great Lakes to Lake Michigan (by now her first engine had been installed). She was then based on the Great Lakes until the late ‘70s, during which time she had two more Milwaukee owners: Joseph Bonness, a construction company owner – who already had a 22 Square Metre – who renamed her ; and Irvin Wiest, a watch maker and former navy submariner who renamed her and replaced her petrol engine with a Westerbeke diesel. During this time she was extensively raced and cruised throughout the Great Lakes.
