August 2026  Almanda de Quack

By Paul Thompson

Le Canard Bleu as she was originally called, and later Almanda de Quack, has always been known as Ducky, to her friends.   She is an interesting and rather different sort of boat.  You either love what she is or you hate it.

Ducky's builder, Brian Owen was a well-known local (in New Zealand) character who for many years used to single-handedly sail a self-built, 80ft schooner, known as Maggie, in the Hauraki Gulf.  When approaching 72 years of age, he decided he wanted something smaller and Ducky was the result.

A much-loved feature of his schooner was the magnificent wheelhouse, with a table which could seat 10 around it in comfort.  Brian enjoyed company and a good party, so the new boat had to have the equivalent wheelhouse; Ducky was the smallest boat which could take a wheelhouse of the required size.  Not a man to do anything by half measures, if the boat was going to be different, then it would be different in nearly every way possible, so Ducky had a huge wheelhouse, a sponson hull giving less than a metre draught, a dagger board, a standing lug rig and a Gardner 2LW diesel engine. 

(For those who are wondering, a sponson hull is normally seen in the modern plastic beach kayaks, where it adds some directional stability.  It is basically a wide shallow keel added to a flat hard chine hull. In Duckys case, it also enabled the builder to get the engine and tanks lower down. The large hull above the sponson keel, also acts as a large end plate and that resulted in a very flat wake. Since all waves produced by a hull moving through the water represent a loss of energy that should  be moving the hull, that is a good thing.)  The end result was satisfactory: the boat sailed well, was as stiff as a catamaran and could host a decent gathering.

After the 2017 Mahurangi Regatta, I was chatting with Brian in Ducky’s wheelhouse, when he causally mentioned that he would like to pass the boat on to someone else.  Ducky had been attracting my eye for a while, and with my wife saying that she’d be willing to become a liveaboard if we had a bigger boat, I had already put La Chica on the market.  In the strange way that these things often happen, two weeks after that conversation with Brian, La Chica found a buyer and was soon on her way to Christchurch.  To be honest, after 26 years with La Chica, I was heart broken to lose her, but if it would get my wife on the water, I was willing to do what was needed, so I approached Brian and pretty soon we had a deal.  Sadly, my wife died before we ever got to live on Ducky.

For all Ducky’s charms (of which there are many), she did not have a junk rig and that had to be remedied, although for a number of reasons (a full order book for sails did not help!) it was three years before I got down to the conversion.  In keeping with the “why be normal/” philosophy of the boat, this junk rig would also be somewhat different.

Ducky had three masts and I was keeping that arrangement because it is very convenient,  but the masts also had to remain in the same positions.  However, the CE with the original foremast was too far aft, so I raked the foremast forward 10°, which kept the deck partner where it needed to be, while considerably improving the position of the CE of the combined rig.  Of course it also gave the boat a more Chinese look and was very in keeping with the “different” theme.

I’d been wanting to try angled shelves in a shelf-foot sail for some time, and since this was a sail that I was making for myself, the time was right.  I first made paper models of the panels to confirm that my geometry was correct.  The models showed that the angled shelves would work and so I decided to go ahead with it, settling on an angle of 45° for the shelves which has worked well, but in retrospect I think 30° would have been better.  Nowadays I mostly use 30° or 35° and that seems to be correct.

Another “different” aspect, was that I made the sails (except for the mizzen, which is flat and in one piece), with each panel being completely separate and a complete sail in its own right.  This was done because I only had a small space to work in, and the main, at 620 sq ft/57.6 sq m, was rather too large for the space.  I did the same for the foresail but there it was simply to keep them matching in appearance.  In retrospect I would have saved considerable time if the sails had each been made in two pieces, rather than from seven separate panels.  The amount of time, both to make the sails and then to assemble them was extraordinary.

The end result has fully met my expectations, Ducky sails well with the junk rig, the angled shelves worked as I hoped and I have a spacious liveaboard home.  Despite the changes, we still had a constant stream of visitors asking if Brian is on board, so I changed the name from Le Canard Bleu to Almanda de Quack (Donald Duck’s auntie if you remember the comic) and made the colour scheme more interesting!

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