A matter of Honnor

Honnor Marine was one of the companies which made Drascombe Luggers and they were definitely the company that made mine. It was delivered on the second day of December, after the Covid lockdown delayed getting it. It was pouring with rain when we went to find it and it’s freezing fog today, the first time I’ve had a chance to have a look at it at my house.

It isn’t new, and at £16,000 for a new one there’s never going to be one of those in my yard, but I can’t understand why anyone would pay that anyway. There are some things to do, but nothing major. The most ‘structural’ thing is a crack in the gunwale about six inches long where someone obviously messed-up docking.

This is clearly not what anyone would call a big deal.

As you can see though, at some point someone decided the original GRP hull was the wrong colour, so they painted it. And predictably, the paint needs sanding off and putting back on again. I’m thinking white, the proper colour for a boat, but maybe the top strake should be a pale, pale green and the lower strake white. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe. Whatever, the anti-foul should be black. Mainly because I have a brand new un-used tin of it.

So what else? The very first job was to get a lock for the trailer and a lock for the outboard, to stop someone borrowing either or both of them. The GRP lugs surrounding the ends of the traveller bar are a little bit chipped, which isn’t a huge job but because it’s small is going to be a fiddly one. I could just do some fancy rope work on the traveller bar and cover that over. That needs to be done anyway to stop the main block banging into the side of the boat. If that had been done in the first place it wouldn’t need to be fixed now, but who knows when it happened between now and the mid-1970s when it was built?

Or was it? There’s no serial number I can find. They used to have a number stamped into the bronze stem head, but there certainly isn’t one on mine – I checked, despite the freezing fog. All I could find is this little circular disc, with the number 46093. Right now I don’t know whether that’s the number of the boat or the makers, like a membership number for the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights. Or this federation.

Either which way, as soon as the fog’s cleared and the temperature rises some way above the zero it’s hovering around today a little bit of renovation will see this boat shine again. And then the Spring and then the Summer and then the Autumn, all to be spent sailing. 2020 hasn’t been all bad.

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