It took just one phone call to identify the mystery yacht and her owner – boatbuilder, designer, and sailor Dave Jackson.
“I call her Rose for no reason other than I liked the name,” Jackson told me in his deep, gravelly voice when we met at his shed a few weeks later. “It all started when I sailed a Herreshoff 12 ½ three years ago. A beautiful wee thing.’’
Designed by the late Nathaniel Herresoff in 1914, the Herreshoff 12 ½ had an LWL of 3.8m (12 ½ feet, hence the name) with an LOA of 4.88m.
Jackson loved everything about the 12 ½ is his interpretation of the 12 ½, designed to be lighter, easier to handle, and more importantly, have a dew-floating 225mm draft with her centreboard up.
