Marga, the CO Liljegren design gaff cutter 10-Metre will soon be in the water and will be rigged before June, Enrico Zaccagni reports. I doubt that she (or the crew) will be ready to race this season but we will be practicing . There are no winches on board and everything is by block and tackle. The mainsail alone will be 125 sq.m and the boat is only 2.60 m wide!
Built in 1910 by the Hästholm Boatyard of Sweden she competed in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Her lines are extreme for a metre class yacht and more similar to that of an English linear rater. A Swedish magazine of the time described her as having “a strong hull with aggressive forms, even a little brutal, but with a sail plan more beautiful than any other Swedish yacht”.
Marga is a yacht I really love very much, as I feel very unusual and eclectic about her aggressive hull design, but at the same time, analyzing curves, lines, surfaces I always feel amazed and surprized by the research of harmony and ratio in all of the geometry, despite the essential simplicity of a pure racer .
Before beginning the operations in the boatyard I dedicated a great deal of time to the yacht’s historical research in the hope of finding drawings, images and documents. Thanks to friends with greater experience of Scandinavian racing yachts like John Lammerts, Ian McAllister, Ron Valent and David Vieira, I received some documents and a few pictures that enabled us to understand the boat and to plan the restoration and partial reconstruction.
More to come…..
