The Old Girl’s Ready to Dance Anew

I asked Ed if his attitude has changed about racing. He said Bolero is back on the Classics circuit and doing well in her duels with another Sparkman & Stephens oldie, Black Watch. And Marty has become more competitive. “She steers the boat a lot and buys so many new sails that she’s a sailmaker’s dream customer,” he reports. They’ve even added a spinnaker, an asymmetric, to the sail inventory after losing a race in Europe to two boats that had them.

“We went around a point and the wind went aft, and they set spinnakers, but we didn’t have one, and they were gone,” he recalled.

All the same, I didn’t have the sense that sailboat racing was getting Kane up in the morning in 2010, any more than it had in 2004.

I had one last question for the owner of this classic yacht: “Is Bolero’s transom still finished bright?”

Kane the contrarian laughed at this reminder of his old stubbornness. “It’s black now.”

That pleased England, who is one of those restoration-minded fellows who likes to keep things the way they were. “We won on a couple of original things. We got the cedar deck. And we got the transom painted black.” Not bad for a boat in her seventh decade.

Besides In a Class by Herself: The Yawl Bolero and the Passion for Craftsmanship, writer and sailor John Rousmaniere has written The Annapolis Book of Seamanship; Fastnet, Force 10; After the Storm; A Berth to Bermuda; and, most recently, histories of the Shelter Island and New York yacht clubs.