Did anybody ever restore it?


Jeff Morris wrote:
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.


That's a real shame. One of the nice things that has happened over the
intervening years is that appreciation for the old classic yachts has
grown and a lot of new money is being poured into restoring them. It's
an expensive hobby though.


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.

Haven't been up there recently but I used to sail around the islands a
lot, we used to stop at Peddocks and hike up the hill. My nephew loved
the WW2 bunkers up there.



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.


Interesting... we'll definitely have to check it out next time we're up
there (which probably won't be for a while, gone are the days of taking
the trailerable for a 2 day trip to New England)



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.


Yes and so were the Shields. There was a similar class under the
Universal Rule called the'R' class but the ones that have survived tend
to be more extreme IMHO. They are 40-footers with roughly the same size
cockpit & all the luxurious accomodation of a Lightning.



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.


The S-boats are a legend. I've raced them and they are a lot of fun to
sail, good in light air... they take a lot of babying though. 'Way back
when, I made a friend for life in a boat basin in Marseille... as a
broke young squid wandering the docks, I spotted an S-boat and stood
there ogling her. The owner popped his head up and started interrogating
me. I had just enough French to convince him that I sincerely admired
his boat and asked if he had sailed it over himself...


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 "seaworthy" in the sense that it would have a very high LPOS,
but it would be more like a submarine than a sailboat. The very heavy
D/L ratio combined with low freeboard and the long overhanging ends
would bring a LOT of water onto & over the decks. Of course an 80+
footer is going to shrug off conditions that would be threatening to a
smaller boat of similar type. So I can see your point, but IMHO a boat
like this isn't going to be more "seaworthy" than a modern type of the
same LOA... rather less IMHO. Of course it would definitely be more
seaworthy than some of the big Edwardian era racing sloops that preceded
the original M-class... maybe that is what this guy meant?

Fresh Breezes- Doug King