Back in February Matt Hommel posted a message on the Westerly 22 Yahoo Group saying he had acquired and was rebuilding a Westcoaster. When we got to Banff I emailed him and we agreed to try and get together. It isn't often two of Denys Rayner's pre-Westerly designs get close together!
Matt came to see us at Lossiemouth and offered to take us to see the Westcoaster at his house in nearby Pluscarden. He had a good look around
Robinetta and recognised many features the Westcoaster has in common.
Matt is a forester and expert in all things wood. He lives with his wife and family in a croft he rebuilt. It is a really special place and they are a lovely family. He doesn't have much sailing experience but is developing an obsession with wooden boats. Quite right too! Many of the features of the Westcoaster were unfamiliar to him and we were able to explain some of them.
The Westcoaster was Rayner's most successful design before the foundation of Westerly Marine and around 60 of them were made and sold by Beacon Boats. Matt's is number 48 and is in remarkably good condition for a 50 year-old plywood boat. The hull is sound and Matt is repairing many rotten parts in the superstructure. The mast, boom and gunter yard are good but the bowsprit was rotten and he has made a new one.
She is much smaller overall than
Robinetta and truly transitional in design between the gaff / carvel Robinetta and the gunter / fibreglass W22.
The plywood construction forced a number of hard chines which Rayner disliked and were a factor in his becoming one of the early experimenters with fibreglass. For this reason or others, she also lacks
Robinetta's excessive tumblehome and the too steep double camber of the W22's cabin. Perhaps Rayner wasn't trying so hard to squeeze a quart into a pint bottle with the Westcoaster and I think she is quite the prettiest of his designs that I have seen.
It was a real privilege to meet Matt and his family and see the wonderful home he has made for them. It is wonderful to see another of Rayner's early boats being made ready to sail again.
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Rayner was my first sailing tutor, in a Westcoaster. My stepfather commissioned Rayner's last plywood design, the Corvette, where by bending marine ply in both dimensions, he made greater reductions in the remaining hard chine. After that it was GRP and the W22. I find it amazing and impressive that Rayner's first design, Robinetta (on which I had a day sail a few years back) is being discussed along with the Westcoaster, and the Westerly 22 - all still shipshape. Onluy 2 Corvettes were made. I don't know if any of them still sail. Ours was called 'Danica'. I and my skipper Chris Jameson sailed her from Lymington to Athens and back.
Hi Simon, great to hear from you. Someone saw a boat on eBay a couple of years ago claiming to be a Rayner Corvette but we don't know what happened to it. I didn't know there were two built.
Good sailing, Julian. I love the sense of continuity that comes with the link between you, Rayner and Robinetta. Brian Easteal observed that it was perhaps not surprising that Elizabeth Rayner never sailed with Rayner on Robinetta - the name of one his earlier girl-friends. On the other hand it might be she was just that enthused about small boats. You know the Westcoaster was designed by Rayner for a customer who wanted a boat for the north coast of Devon. A right nasty stretch - 'twixt Hartland Point and Padstow Bay is a sailor's grave by night or day'. I've been down it from the R.Axe to the Scillies in a W22 with Lin. Leave a harbour in good weather, tide ebbs, weather gets bad. You can't return whence you came. No harbours on that rocky coast are open at all states of the tide and it can turn into a lee shore v.swiflty and gets the ocean swells from which the south coast of Devon and Cornwall are protected from by the Lizard Peninsular. Rayner said "If you can sail the Bristol Channel, you can sail anywhere!" The gunter rigged twin keel (not bilge ballast unlike the W22) Westcoaster was designed with that opinion in mind! She's a sweet sturdy little boat that will as Rayner said 'look after you' - like Robinetta, and indeed all the boats where Rayner truly controlled the design. I should know (:))
Wonderful stuff about the Westcoaster. Elisabeth Rayner did sail in Robinetta, in Scotland in the summer of '37. Robinetta Cooper sailed with Rayner on Pearl, his Tredwin barge yacht. She married John Carlisle and they took Robinetta over from the Rayners for their honeymoon that same summer in Scotland. I always wondered what 'E' as Rayner calls her, thought about all that.
I didn't know that. Nice detail. Have you read the article - in, I think, Yachting World - about the terrible gales that Robinetta was caught up in when her post-war owners, Gordon and Audrey Parker, sailed her from her wartime berth at Beaumaris to her new mooring at - I think - Salcombe? If you ever needed a guarantee of Robinetta's seaworthiness in a tempest, that voyage would provide it.
Audrey Parker's "Once Round The Land" is a wonderful piece of writing and reproduced courtesy of Yachting Monthly here: http://robinetta-log.blogspot.co.uk/p/once-round-land.html We hope to have all the old articles linked to from here: http://robinetta-log.blogspot.co.uk/p/history_3.html (the History tab at the top of the home page) eventually. We have the 1937 RCC annual but not online yet.
You can still feel the wrath of the weather that assailed Robinetta and her crew in those few days in 1947, around the time Princess Elizabeth was getting married to Philip (I watched some of the celebrations as a 5 year old from a room in the Foreign Office across from St Margaret's overlooking Parliament Square). What a poignant and understated paragraph near the end of the YM article (if you know Rayner's and Parker's service records) "... We had both had a lot to do with the operation of little ships during the war"https://flic.kr/p/vqUZz
Denys and Elisabeth Rayner's 1937 cruise now up on the site http://robinetta-log.blogspot.co.uk/p/log-of-robinetta-1937.html
Hi. I bought the Westcoaster Grampy Rabbit from Matt last year and she has been sitting at Findhorn since then until yesterday. She's now at Peterhead marina awaiting a tidy up before going back into the water. Does anyone know the previous name/s she has been called? She's number 48. bigdaveftw@outlook.com
Hi Dave, great to hear from you. I think the best place to ask you question is here: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/WesterlyNomadand22/info.
The other possible place is http://sailingraynersboats.blogspot.co.uk but it doesn't seem to have been touched for a while.
Sorry I can't be of more help.
Good sailing!
Julian & Alison
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