DSK wrote:


... but the report was that too many of the steel frames
were rusted out, and it would have cost a fortune to make her
seaworthy. Fortunately, we had the sense to pass on the deal!


You could have gone ahead and laminated in sister frames, or gone to
night school and learned to weld.

We were willing to do a few, but there were sections where a lot of
frames in a row were bad. And the surveyor felt that the frames should
be removed for inspection ... it was just way too much.




It would have been horribly expensive anyway, think what a suit of sails
for this boat would have cost.

Some years later, I met a couple who had bought her and were living
aboard. They had dreams of long distance cruising but were realizing
the impossibility of resurrecting the old beauty. About 5 years after
that (1979?) I found the yacht aground on Spectacle Island in Boston
Harbor. It laid there, abandoned, for a season.


Did anybody ever restore it?

No, scavengers pulled off the teak deck pretty quickly - before I could
get back for a second visit, and the hull didn't survive the fall storms.

Spectacle Island has a long and varied history - It was an early
quarantine station, it had several gambling/bawdy houses around 1840, it
had the horse rendering facility for many years, and was a garbage dump
until 1959. When I used to visit in the 70's the ground was still
burning. In the 90's it was used as the dump for the Big Dig project,
and it has grown considerably n size and height.

It is now park of the Boston Harbor Islands national Park. The site of
the wreck is where they have built a marina that will be open this summer.


A long time ago, a friend and I were given an old (1930s) 6-meter. We
rebuilt it with a variety of less-expensive composites and put the rig
off a T-10 on it. Cool boat, I saw it for sale on Yachtworld a few
months ago.


Sounds neat! You can still get a very similar boat: the slightly
smaller International One Designs are still very active, and I think a
few of the original boats are still racing. I've heard they are a 5.5
meter, but I don't think that's exactly true. They were certainly
inspired by the 6 Meter class.


The M-Class is a variation on the J-class, though somewhat smaller.
It was used as a "club racer" in the late 20's through the 50's.


Yes, all the Universal Rule classes had letter designations.. the "O"
and "P" class was smaller than M, the "I" class (don't know if any were
ever built) were larger than the J-class.

Like the 6, 8, and 12-Meters, they were mostly used for round-the-bouys
racing but even the little ones tended to have at least rudimentary
cabins and were cruised in by some. I spent a couple of week long
cruises on my 6-Meter including some time singlehanding.


Over 90 S-Class boats were built by Herreshoff - they had a 60'th
reunion in 79 where over 20 showed up to race. You still spot them on
occasion in the traditional New England harbors.




There's a description of the M-class here. There's a picture of the
Prestige is about a third of the way down.
http://www.universalrule.com/page1/body.html


I think this guy is glorifying the class and the rule. A modern M could
in no way keep up with a sled and would be too much of a leadmine to be
really "seaworthy."

I'd agree with the first part, though not the second. Remember, the
Universal Rule was created, in part, so that racing boats would be more
seaworthy - before that designs are only limited by SA and LWL trade
offs, and they were getting rather radical.

It'd be a really pretty boat though. Both the
Universal Rule and the Int'l Rule (used for the meter classes) tend to
produce very heavy boats.