All our boat CE certification jobs are important to us … but sometimes a job is just that little bit extra special.
Scaramouche Sailing Trust has inspired hundreds of young people from Greig City Academy to challenge themselves, learn to sail, tackle the Rolex Fastnet Race Cherbourg, and discover new career opportunities. But the iconic Scaramouche has not just motivated the students at the school. It’s the boat our CEO Alasdair Reay says also helped inspire him to become a naval architect with a specialist interest in stability, the area which he now leads an ISO – International Organization for Standardization working group to update the sailboat stability standard, ISO 12217-2.
Alasdair explains: “I was a sailing-mad 11 year-old in 1981, living in Kuwait and dreaming of the very glamorous business of Admirals Cup racing. You can imagine how I was lapping it all up: the next Admirals Cup after the big 1979 race… my dad in it, competing with all the best in the world. I studied every boat in the Admiral’s Cup program and read books on boat design. Of all the boats there, however, I become a particular fan of Scaramouche – maybe it was the name, but I also liked her shape. She drew my eye. I followed her progress closely through that summer.
“I’d say that it was that summer, and to some extent, Scaramouche, which started me on the course that led to Fellowship of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. The Admirals Cup is run every two years and so the 1981 Fastnet was the first in the Cup after the ’79 race and there was much discussion about boat stability at the time. I read it all and surely this is how I came to be leader of the ISO working group, currently updating the sailboat stability standard, ISO 12217-2. When I saw the BBC reports about Greig Academy in 2017, using the donated Scaramouche to teach a crew of kids who had barely seen the sea, to qualify and complete the 2017 Fastnet, I was delighted at the sailing story in its own right but was also overjoyed that Scaramouche should come back from my past, to be at the heart of it.”
Now a new vessel – re-named Scaramouche 2 – has been donated to them. Built in 1984, it has to be commercially coded and made compliant with all of today’s requirements of the Recreational Craft Directive, even those that were not standard practice when it was first built, as well as any components on it. Because of Alasdair’s longstanding attachment to Scaramouche, and the brilliant work carried out by Jon Holt and the Scaramouche Sailing Trust, HPiVS is proud to carry out the necessary PCA assessments for free to enable the Trust to safely continue the legacy.
Alasdair concludes: “I am chuffed to bits to play a very small part in the continuation of the amazing program that Jon launched. To others it may just be a Beneteau, but for me it’s history!”
