**NO RESERVE** Lot #183 - 1987 International Offshore Racing Sailboat

The Sailboat Victory (aka Jameson Whiskey)

Victory is a 1987 International Offshore Racing (IOR) Sailboat, 1-Ton class.  She is 40 feet overall with a waterline length a bit less than 34 feet. She is 13 feet at the beam, drafts about 7 feet, and weighs 10,000 pounds empty.  She has an elliptical keel that is very narrow, like a dagger board.  Victory has a fractional rig.  The mast top is 64 feet above the water and the boom is 20 feet long. 

Victory’s hull is a multi-sandwich construction composite.  The outer hull is 8mm of vinyl followed by 20mm Kevlar foam and Kevlar honeycomb followed by a carbon fiber laminate inner hull.  The keel box is constructed from aircraft aluminum and extends from the mast to the propeller shaft strut.  All areas of the keel box that touch the hull have a layer of Kevlar laminate between carbon fiber and aluminum.  All of the stanchions and tiller are titanium.  The standing rigging is discontinuous alloy solid rods.  The running rigging and life lines are Amsteel.

Victory can go to weather better than any boat I’ve sailed or crewed on.  I have been able to put the boat on a plane going to weather with tatty storm sails.  There are some tips I have and modifications I was going to make to take advantage of Victory’s sailing characteristics (learned through sailing and talking to Ed Dubois).  I spoke to Ed Dubois a couple of times about Jameson Whiskey’s design.  He mentioned a couple design elements he thought would provide better performance than what occurred at the Admirals Cup.   Full Pelt did great.

Victory is a Documented Vessel with the Department of Homeland Security, United States Coast Guard, National Vessel Documentation Center (you still have to register her at your port of call).

A little history about Victory (aka Jameson Whiskey est. 1780):   

Victory’s Naval Architech was Ed Dubois and she was built at his Yachtyard near Cowes Isle of Wight as Victory.  A deal was struck and the buyer agreed to a deep discount to have it designed as a one ton IOR sailboat for the Irish entries in the 1987 Admirals Cup and Fastnet Race.  It raced as Jameson Whiskey with its sister ship Full Pelt Irish Independent and another Irish boat, Turkish Delight (it floundered and nearly sank).  Full Pelt did very well winning the Fastnet overall but the combined scores of all three did not allow them to place.  

Jameson Whiskey was placed on a container ship and taken to San Francisco.  She was renamed and documented at the National Vessel Documentation Center as Victory.  In San Francisco, Victory only had moderate success.  I feel a wing keel may have been replaced with the elliptical keel during this time.

Years later it was purchased with a loan, moved to LA and later it was moved to Encenada.  The later move was a dark period for Victory south of the border that ended with some brave repo crew snatching it back to Newport, CA.  The bank that held the loan and ownership decided, after attempts to sell it, that they did not want to be in boat sales so they wrote it off and donated it to the Angel Care Children’s Fund.

 In Des Moines I changed out the cutlass bearing and stuffing box, did some work I was in San Diego just looking at boats in the Bay Club Marina and America’s Cup Harbor when I ran into a former Americas Cup crewman Vic MacQuade who was a boat broker and told him I was looking for an old warhorse that I could convert into a fast passage cruiser.  He showed me a couple of old IOR 1-ton boats in San Diego but they been poorly maintained and poorly modified.  He said he had one he had just been told about in Newport and it would only take a couple of hours to travel there and back.    I had to tell him that I was in San Diego for my anniversary and would be having dinner with my wife that night and returning home to Seattle in the morning.  I followed with I sure wish it had been in San Diego it seems like what I was looking for.   A few weeks later Vic rang up and said he had moved the Victory to San Diego and did I want to look at.  I reminded him I was in Seattle and told him I would call him back.  I rang my son who worked at Horizon Airlines to see if he could get me on a flight to San Diego in the next couple of days and he said only if I took him to look at the boat.  A couple days later we flew to San Diego, met Vic and he took me through the boat and started the engine.  I told my son to get ready to cast off the mooring lines.  Vic looked at me and said he didn’t bring a crew to sail the boat and I pointed at my son and told him no problem I brought my own.  The sails were tatty and bits were blowing off of them but we still blew by every boat in the bay.  No sailboat could catch us.  After the ride, it only took me a short time at a pub in the marina to decide to make an offer (heavily encouraged by my son).   Vic was still stowing sails when I went down on the dock.  He accepted my deal which included paying for Angle’s Care back Newport moorage (wow), getting the boat hauled and surveyed, and having the boatyard pack it up for a truck ride to Des Moines. on the folding propeller, stepped the mast with a two pound coin from the UK and tuned all of rigging.  The following week I sailed to Tacoma.