June 2025  D'accord

By Richard Oates

50 years ago I sailed a wooden Wayfarer. I realised years later that it was rather too big for me as I’m only 9 stone.

No wonder I was often reefed.

The Wanderer seemed a good alternative, being a couple of feet shorter though still with a good beam.

I bought this Wanderer with a plan to convert it to junk rig. 

I have long been interested in the junk rig, probably mainly due to the simplicity of reefing, which was important to me owing to the situation described above, but also owing to the simplicity and lack of stress in the components.

The boat was in first class order with little sign of hard use. I followed some of the advice given by Martin's blog (www.mwbrown.org) in deciding the size of the various components. The lower mast is a 100mm aluminium tube and the upper a 75mm tube, both obtained from the Aluminium Warehouse. It turns out the one is a perfect fit inside the other. I got a local metalworker to turn a fitting to give a smooth transition between the two. He also made a top mast fitting to take the main halliard pulley.

The tabernacle took quite a bit of work. I was happy that the deck would have sufficient lateral strength to take the load from the mast. The foot obviously needed substantial reinforcement, and this was a matter of judgement. I ground the paint finish off the hull with a power tool and fitted hardwood sections that filled the floor void at this point and screwed and glued the sections you can see in the photos to this. I designed the tabernacle so it could take either mast.

I didn’t use Martin's Split Junk sail plan, but a conventional one. The sail was made from light weight rip stop polyester fabric, and the battens are 25mm powder coated aluminium.

The coating was important as raw aluminium can discolour fabric. The mast was coated with Protecta Clear Everbrite Coating to seal it and prevent this, 

I also fitted new hardwood rubbing strakes so she really looks the part now. I also purchased a brand new (and expensive) trailer from Hartley Marine as the original was pretty useless in my opinion.

Unfortunately the poor summer last year meant I didn’t sail her much. The times I did get out I found the rig quite successful and tacking didn’t seem to present a problem at all.

I seem to be a bit more into working on boats than actually sailing them these days (I’m 75) and I have now moved on to other boating projects so the Wanderer is for sale on EBay and Apollo Duck.

[A further photo gallery is available here].

Our "Boat of the Month" Archive is here, and the forum discussion for comments and candidate suggestions is here