Hay Tor: a tale of resurrection
Tim Knight, Don Sargent and Ken Pohl found Hay Tor sitting unused on the island for the better part of a decade. They cleaned her up, redid some rigging, replaced some gear, and had the perfect post-Covid club race boat.
Then, on the way out to a Wednesday night race start, a puffy start on the Rum Race on Boxing Day 2022 nearly ended her for good. Rounding Discovery Island counterclockwise with a fleet of twenty or so, including four Hotfoot 27s, the wind gradually died and then shifted 180 degrees. Hay Tor and Fetish had worked in along the north edge of Chatham Islets chasing favourable current — an oh-so-familiar rock-hopping scramble where boats end up pointing in every direction, waiting for the next puff.
The combination of little steerage and strong current put Hay Tor too close to Strongtide. Bang. "There's only two types of boats," as the saying goes, "those that have run aground, and those that will." It wasn't fun, and it wasn't subtle: a 30-footer T-boned her.
Back at the club, Hay Tor was hoisted onto slings, which seemed odd for a boat that wasn't normally dry-sailed. Then came the collective expletives. As the hull cleared the water, the crew could see that the keel simply was not there anymore. The inspection found a large hole where the keel had been, and the remnants of the keel stub. Credit to the crew — they somehow stemmed the inflow of water and nursed her back to the hoist.
An insurance adjuster looked at the damage and evaluated the cost of repair. Hay Tor was clearly a write-off — the economics of a professional yard repair didn't add up. It's always sad when a good boat's sailing days are done. But this time there was another way.
Full credit to the people who saw the opportunity, when most would have just let Hay Tor go to the scrap bin: salvage the keel, acquire the boat from the insurance company, and bring in the experts — Campbell Black from Blackline, Dave Richardson and Doug Hemphill himself — to survey and evaluate the possibility of repair.
Then came the real work: recruiting people with the skills and the time to rebuild the keel stub and repair the boat. Vidas Stukas, Dennis Woodward, Ken Pohl, Paul Gibson, Dave Vogelaar, Ben Power, Nick Banks, Gerry Weisgerber and more all pitched in. There were skeptics, understandably, but once the ball started rolling, support for the reclamation project grew.
Some 600 hours later, under a team headed by Vidas, the keel was back on and the rudder and transom were also repaired and upgraded. The whole project cost between $3,000 and $4,000 in materials. A week before Swiftsure, Royal Victoria Yacht Club's commodore, Stephanie Bacon, decided she would sail Hay Tor in the Inshore Race.
On Monday the boat was launched. On Tuesday the rig went back on. On Wednesday the survey was completed — the verdict was that she was better and stronger than new. On Thursday, new insurance was acquired, and on Friday the PHRF certificate was issued. The outboard went back in, the safety gear was stowed, the sails were inspected (some patching required), and the boat was ready to go. Whew.
Stephanie assembled a crew: Connie, a first-time racer; Matt, a new member from Kingston; Roger, a long-time racer; and Alex himself. Motoring out to the start, it was hard not to notice how wonderful it was to be part of such a positive project — it would have been easy to just let Hay Tor go, and that would have been a shame. This is a story of resurrection and rebirth: a locally designed and built boat living to sail and race another day, thanks to the extreme efforts of the sailing community at the club.
When the wind came up, the genoa grew a few more holes, so Matt and Connie patched them on the downwind leg — but the crew found their footing and sailed well as a new team. The boat was solid and performed just like it could, and they won the day.
The hope is that this boat, which refused to die, will provide RVYC's members and friends a boat to learn on, day sail, cruise, race and experience the sport for a long time to come.