Andrillot is the original \u2018Vertue\u2019, the design which launched Laurent Giles\u2019s long and illustrious career in 1935. Nic Compton reportsGerman boatbuilder Uli Killer was looking for a boat to sail while he was working on a big restoration project when he spotted Andrillot, a 25ft wooden cutter for sale in Dartmouth, UK.
\nThe boat had recently undergone a three-year restoration and was said to be in very good condition for her age. The ad claimed the yacht was \u2018an important part of our maritime heritage\u2019 and that she and her sisterships had \u2018become legends in their own right\u2019. But to Uli, a relative newcomer to the classic world, she was just a pretty boat at the right price.
\nAndrillot as she was built with a gaff rig.
\n\u201cShe looked pretty and was affordable for us. I knew nothing about her history, and I had to ring a friend to ask him who Laurent Giles was!\u201d Killer recalls. \u201cThen I saw articles in English and American magazines and realised she really was such a famous boat, and hundreds of them were built. Being No 1 makes her more interesting.\u201d
\nThe boat Uli had inadvertently stumbled across was Andrillot, best known as the \u2018original Vertue\u2019, the first of a class which, 85 years after she was launched, is still going strong and now numbers around 200 boats. More by chance than intent, Uli had discovered a unique piece of maritime history, which he was able to buy for less than the price of a new VW Golf. He could hardly believe his luck.
\nIt was in 1935 that Guernsey solicitor Dick Kinnersly commissioned British yacht designer Laurent Giles, then at the start of an illustrious career, to design a cruising boat for him.
\n\u201cI was ignorant of yacht design but I knew what I wanted; a boat that would spin on a sixpence and I could sail single-handed,\u201d he told British journalist (and fellow Vertue owner) Adrian Morgan 60 years later. \u201cI don\u2019t mind a transom, I said, and a good entry. I couldn\u2019t afford an engine, so I needed \u2018plenty of air\u2019 aloft, which meant a topsail.\u201d
\nThe result was a modest 25ft 3in cruising yacht with a wide, distinctive sheer strake inspired by her working boat origins, and a manageable gaff rig (described by some as the \u2018pinnacle\u2019 of gaff rig design).
\nThe hull shape was moderate in every way, and Giles himself was reticent about his achievement, saying: \u201cThere was nothing very special about the first conception, simply a contemporary interpretation of the Pilot Cutter theme with the same sort of displacement and general arrangements whittled down suitably to the very small size.\u201d
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The boat\u2019s capabilities were soon put to the test by Giles\u2019s colleague Humphrey Barton, who borrowed Andrillot soon after she was launched and sailed her from Lymington to Concarneau and back, covering 855 miles in 23 days. The voyage, almost unheard of at the time on such a small boat, earned him the 1937 RCC Founder\u2019s Cup.
\nMore orders for the design soon started trickling in although, strangely, the class didn\u2019t get its name until 10 years after Andrillot was launched. One of the boats built to Laurent Giles Design No.0015 (as it was then known) was Epeneta, which won the Little Ship Club\u2019s annual Vertue Challenge Cup in 1939 for a 745-mile cruise of the English Channel. When Giles came to naming the class after the war, he chose the name Vertue in honour of that achievement.
\nAndrillot has been converted from gaff to Bermudan rig. Photo: Nic Compton
\nOther epic Vertue voyages soon followed, including notable transatlantic crossings. One, by David Lewis on Cardinal Vertue, was made while competing in the first OSTAR in 1960. He finished 3rd, behind Francis Chichester and Blondie Hasler.
\nOver the years, there have been several changes to the boat\u2019s superstructure and rig, but the basic hull shape remained unchanged (indeed Giles believed it couldn\u2019t be improved) until the design was adapted for GRP construction in 1976.
\nReconfigured with slightly more beam and a higher freeboard, more than 40 Vertues were built in GRP, mostly by Bossoms in Oxford.
\nWooden Vertues continue to be built to this day, both in carvel and strip-plank construction, and the company recently sent out plans for hull No.249 \u2013 though not all the plans sent out have been built.
\nAs for Andrillot, the progenitor of this remarkable explosion of small boat sailing, she was owned by Kinnersly until 1947, after which she went through a succession of owners (seven in all) until 1982 when she was spotted by father and son Peter and Tim Stevenson.
\nBy then Andrillot was in a dilapidated state. Peter and Tim had to tow her across the Solent and had her transported to a hay barn on the family farm near Lyndhurst.
\nThe chart table was completely rebuilt for her new owner, including the non-original inlaid compass rose. Photo: Nic Compton
\nThere, over the next two years, they gave her a full restoration, gutting the interior, doubling up several frames, and replacing the old Stuart Turner engine with an 8hp Bukh. By then, the yacht had already been converted to Bermudan rig and her coachroof had been extended, with the mast stepped on top of the coachroof rather than on the keel, as original. Peter and Tim kept the Bermudan rig but reinstated the bowsprit.
\nAndrillot across the channel
\nFor the next few decades, Peter and Tim sailed extensively from the yacht\u2019s base in Lymington to both sides of the English Channel. When Peter died in 2002, Tim took over the boat and based her on the River Exe in Devon. But eventually, the wear and tear of 35 years of sailing took its toll \u2013 particularly on the extended coachroof, which was creaking under the strain of the rig.
\nTim entrusted the job of repairing the boat to Dartmouth-based boatbuilder Michel LeMoigne, whose CV includes working on major restoration projects such as the William Fife sloop Rosemary. He duly opened the coachroof up and replaced two deck beams, fitting three hefty posts under the mast step to transfer the load to the keel.
\nIn the process, he had to rebuild the foc\u2019s\u2019le bunks and lockers. Once that was done, it was clear the rest of the interior needed to be updated, soon followed by the cockpit. And so one job led to another\u2026
\nAndrillot in Darmouth where she was given an extensive refit. Photo: Nic Compton
\nFinally, near the end of the summer 2019, Andrillot was ready to be relaunched, but any hopes Tim might have had for a late season\u2019s cruise were crushed when the surveyor spotted a crack in the mast \u2013 which had been there for years and never caused a problem \u2013 and condemned it.
\nIt was the last straw for Tim and soon after Andrillot was put on the market. By the time a new mast was made and a buyer was found, the UK was deep in Coronavirus lockdown, so Andrillot wasn\u2019t launched until August 2020 \u2013 three years after she\u2019d been taken out of the water for repairs.
\nUli Killer was in some ways a surprising buyer. A former CEO of a finance company, he quit his well-paid job in 2010 after becoming ill with the stress of work. In a dramatic change of life, he decided to pursue his lifelong love of boats and trained as a boatbuilder at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis.
\nHe then set up shop at his home in southern Germany where, alongside building bespoke dinghies, he embarked on a major project restoring an 1884 gaff cutter called Wild Duck. But, as it became clear the restoration would take longer than expected, he decided to buy a smaller boat to sail in the meantime. Which is when he discovered Andrillot.
\nClose encounters
\nUli only had time for one trial sail on his new boat, before he and his son Moritz set off from Dartmouth to Vlissingen, Holland, at the end of August.
\nThey were pushed on their way by strong following winds, with a dramatic wind against tide run past the Needles, a boat crashing into them in the middle of the night in Lymington, and a close encounter with a military firing range near Dungeness.
\nThe RCC Founder\u2019s Cup was awarded to Andrillot after she sailed 855 miles from Lymington to Concarneau and back. Photo: Nic Compton
\nIn the end, it took them two weeks to make the 380-mile trip \u2013 including a week\u2019s stopover in Cowes for repairs \u2013 averaging 50 to 60 miles a day. Yet, despite the drama of the trip, Uli was euphoric about his new acquisition.
\n\u201cThe boat felt really safe. Several times, we made 7-8 knots. It\u2019s amazing such a small boat goes so fast \u2013 more than the theoretical hull speed. With the white cliffs near Eastbourne to one side, it was really beautiful. And when you go into harbour, people are interested in the boat and want to talk to you \u2013 we met such nice people all the way. In the evenings, it was so cosy and nice to snuggle in there and have supper.\u201d
\nIf Uli was ignorant of the boat\u2019s importance when he bought her, he is certainly fully appreciative of her now. He is talking about taking her back to her gaff rig one day \u2013 perhaps in time for her 90th birthday \u2013 and hopes his son will take over ownership once Wild Duck is restored.
\nOnce again, it seems, Andrillot will be handed down from father to son, as it was under the Stevensons\u2019 long tenure. Almost by accident, it seems, the little boat with a big heart has reinvented herself and found a doting owner to take her to the end of her first century. Laurent Giles himself could ask no more.<\/p>\n
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Andrillot is the original \u2018Vertue\u2019, the design which launched Laurent Giles\u2019s long and illustrious career in 1935. Nic Compton reportsGerman boatbuilder Uli Killer was looking for a boat to sail while he was working on a big restoration project when … <\/p>\n