Why a design by Manuel Campos?

Please view the first entry in this blog if you are a potential buyer of our boat.  Photos and specifications, along with contact info is in the entry titled: Sail Sale Sail Sale Sail.

ON WITH THE STORY ...
Current situation:            

Richard and I migrated to the Southern Hemisphere in late October to reunite with our boat here in Puerto Montt, Chile.   ABRAZO showed a bit of oily scum on the waterline … somebody at the marina must have had a spill … but otherwise she’d weathered the winter well.  Richard had the marina crew haul the boat out of the water so he could clean and repaint the waterline, repaint the bottom and renew the zincs.  ABRAZO was back in the water in three days.

Last year we managed to get her officially “imported” into Chile, paying the taxes and completing all the bureaucratic forms.  Now, we mean to market her and sell her.  Maybe a new captain will sail her to New Zealand, or to Japan, or to some other place she hasn’t seen yet.  Maybe a new captain will sail her back to the Pacific Northwest, where she was built.  It’s possible a Chilean captain will value ABRAZO’s strength, her comfort and her sustainable nature.  She was designed down here in the Southern Cone, after all, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Back to the Beginnings 

What comes first when the story of a boat is to be told?  Chileans here ask why we named the boat ABRAZO.  Because of her Spanish-speaking designer, we answer.   We built the boat ourselves in Bellingham, Washington, and one of the earliest challenges in her construction was the exchange of letters, in Spanish, with her designer, Manuel M. Campos of Argentina.  By the time we wanted a name for the new boat, that well-worn Spanish-English dictionary seemed a likely place to find one.  Start with the A's ...

 abrazo  warm-embrace, with arms.

Why did Richard choose the Argentine, Manuel Campos, to draw the plans for his new boat?  

In the 1970s, among a certain group of sailors in the Puget Sound region of Washington State, Manuel  Campos’ reputation for seaworthy designs blazed with legendary force ... for two or three particular reasons:

1)      Some of these Puget Sounders lived aboard their wooden boats; they sailed their own and each others boats into the San Juan and Gulf Islands, out the Straits of Juan de Fuca, or down the coast to California ports; they loitered on docks from Bellingham to Port Townsend to Shilshole and the Duwamish River in Seattle.  Adventure lovers, skilled shipwrights, fishermen ... they all enjoyed a good story.  A few enjoyed reading certain back issues of SEA magazine one summer.  SEA had published excerpts from a book called Alone Around the Roaring Forties, in which Argentine sailor, Vito Dumas, regaled them with his stories of sailing the huge waves of the Southern Ocean.  

Richard, back then known as Dick Baila, has vivid memories of reading Dumas' exciting descriptions of surfing down the face of a ninety-foot wave.
Dumas had accomplished a single-handed circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean, making only three landfalls, in 1943, in his boat, the LEGH II, designed by Manuel Campos.  Inspired by the SEA series, one of these Puget Sound sailors bought the book and shared it around.  They all read Dumas’ book, admired the boat, came to revere the designer. 
  

2)       A couple of sailors from Argentina, Julio and Pepe Ozan, bought the Campos-designed double-ender, IRUPÉ, in Buenos Aires.  They changed the boat’s name to VITO DUMAS and sailed her to San Diego for an adventure, with hope of reselling her.  One of our Puget Sound sailors bought the VITO in San Diego, and began to discover what repairs were needed. Within a year, he sold the boat to a young Californian named Alex Spear.  Alex and his partner restored the boat completely, and sailed her to Mexico, French Polynesia, Hawaii, Southeast Alaska and down the coast of British Columbia to Port Townsend.  Alex has maintained the beautiful VITO DUMAS ever since, sailing her in Port Townsend's Wooden Boat regattas every year since 1980. 

       Meanwhile the Argentine, Julio, connected with a Puget Sound sailor named Diane.  Together Julio and Diane travelled to Buenos Aires to find another Campos-designed boat.

3)      S/V GAUCHO might have been a factor.  I’m suggesting that because I know that at least a few of the starry-eyed dreamers in that Puget Sound sailing community were great readers of everything they could find on cruising the world’s oceans, and on designing and building boats for sail.  Seems likely that along with their Chapman, Slocum, Illingsworth, and Bowditch, they might have read about GAUCHO.  

According to author Thies Matzen, in his article,
“Manuel Campos, Argentinian Yacht Designer”
 (Wooden Boat Magazine, May-June 2007): 

 “GAUCHO is one of Manuel Campos’s most renowned designs.  Like LEGH II, she won the Blue Water Medal of the Cruising Clubs of America after completing a two-year circumnavigation.  Built in 1943 … Her entertaining owner, Ernesto Uriburu,  wrote a lovely book about this early voyage, the very readable classic, Seagoing Gaucho.  Other voyages followed and in the 1950s, she was one of the most well-known boats in the cruising world.”

Lyle Hess, Bill Garden, and Jay Benford, among others designed fine wooden boats, and there were plenty of boats around by older classical designers like Nat Herreshoff and Colin Archer.  Manuel Campos was one of the big names in the Puget Sound boating world in the summer of 1978, when I first met Puget Sound sailor, Dick Baila.  Baila, 32 years old that year, had an impressive boat shop, a valuable collection of air-dried lumber, and artistic carpentry skills.  He’d been making his living as a shipwright for some years, working on wood boats owned by fishermen and yachtsmen.  He’d actually been repairing and remodeling boats since he was a kid, and that's another story ... but he'd learned a lot in the course of rebuilding his schooner, SEA LARK, designed by Bill Garden. 

Dick had been living aboard SEA LARK for almost ten years, and now he was ready to build a boat of his own.  What he wanted was a Campos design.

Diane Ozan arrived in Bellingham Bay that summer of 1978.  She promised to provide Dick with a mailing address for the famous Argentine designer.   Before the end of the year Dick had written to Campos to request a design for a 10-meter vessel patterned after the LEGH II.   

At left, a note from Campos that came along with the plans, at last.  Señor Baila gladly received these plans in the mail about the middle of October, 1979.  He'd already built the "loft floor" in his shop.  The "loft floor" had to be big enough so he could draw out the lines of the boat full size.  He suspended the plywood floor from the ceiling, over the top of his lumber collection.  The floor measured about 10 by 13 meters. 

Thies Matzen: 

“For (Campos) it was not speed but             seakindliness that rated high, his designs following the edict of ‘Who will take care of you if not the boat?’”

Manuel M. Campos:  

 

“You can’t eat your soup at more than twenty degrees of heel.”

Matzen's article for Wooden Boat Magazine