It is surely not uncommon for people to find themselves buying a very different boat to the one they had first envisaged: and while that might often prove to be a mistake, it certainly wasn’t for the long-term owners of the 1904 Fife Mikado.
In the mid-1990s, Michael and Beverly Briggs owned a 1905 24ft (7.3m) cruising Falmouth Working Boat called Little Apple. With their four children growing up it was time for bigger boat, so they went to Peter Gregson of Wooden Ships and said “we want a Big Apple.” They looked at various bigger gaff cutters, none of which seemed to fit the bill. One day Peter casually mentioned that he had just seen a “drop-dead gorgeous” boat called Mikado, but that she wouldn’t do for the Briggs family because, if anything, she had less room inside than Little Apple. Michael thought nothing of it for a few months until one day he happened to be near where Mikado was lying at Cobb’s Quay in Poole, so he went to look at her. “She was sitting there demurely under a deck-tent and it was love at first sight,” he said. A trial sail followed in Poole Bay where there was “a teeny bit of breeze and we were up to five knots before there were any ripples on the water. And I thought, OK, this will do.”
