NIMBUS II – 50th Birthday Party

Just before Christmas I was chatting to Allan Hooper regarding 23’ yacht Nimbus II that he built in 1970 and how Allan and his wife Pamela were planning ‘re-union’ of previous owners (details below). I asked Allan to drop me a note with details – in typical Allan Hooper style, the subsequent note is both perfectly written  and very informative, so I reproduced it below.

The photographs above show Nimbus II sailing off the Northland coast in 1971, on her mooring earlier this month and the original construction drawing complete with glue stains 🙂

Allan has an armada of vessels, in a later WW story I will expose his addiction 🙂

Nimbus 11 Built by Allan Hooper

When I met my wife Pamela I was building Nimbus and when she said she would like to help I thought this is my kind of girl. So we have spent more than 50yrs building and sailing a succession of yachts and we now own a little launch which I have just finished altering.

We thought a get together next year of previous owners of Nimbus 2 would be a nice way to celebrate, if anyone is interested please contact Allan Hooper at hoopersnz@gmail.com

Brief history:

Whilst serving my apprenticeship I started building Nimbus 11. She is 23 feet. She was designed by John Hakker in 1957 while he was working on a hydro scheme in the South Island. I opted to cold mould the hull using 3 skins of 3/16” kauri. Each skin was glued with resorcinol glue and stapled using a hand operated staple gun. Each of the 250,000 staples was then pulled out again when the glue was dry. The finished hull was then skinned with glass cloth. There are laminated frames around the bulkheads and the floors and knees etc are generously proportioned.

I modified the keel and had a spade rudder which reduced the wetted surface, greatly improving her performance in the light and made the yacht easy to handle.

With no engine we had a lot of fun sailing everywhere. Once we dropped the spinnaker in the Town Basin Whangarei and rounded up onto a pile after carrying it all the way up the river.

The water tank was a 20L container under the sink with a pump up to the sink. Before we sold her I fitted a toilet, the new owner was insistent that his wife would not go without it.

Subsequent owners have sailed her offshore including New Plymouth to Moololaba singlehanded race and Chris and Tracey McGuire cruised as far as Vanuatu. Chris fitted a small diesel inboard and all the equipment required to go offshore.

Currently Nimbus 11 is on a mooring at Scotts landing on the Mahurangi. Although the varnished coamings have gone almost all of the deck fittings are original.

WW READERSHIP OVER THE XMAS / NY PERIOD

Incredible numbers of Woodys logging in and following the WW stories over the past 2 weeks, I thought I’d be able to lie low for a few days but with the numbers showing up each day, I was encouraged to keep taping the laptop keys. I think its a reflection of the uptake in mobile devices in the last few years – everyone now seems to have a device that allows them to keep in touch via the on-line platform. Thats good and bad – we all need to relax more. One of my new year resolutions is to switch all my social media (twitter, facebook,messenger etc) to pull only on messages. That means I have to check in to see if I have new content sent to me, as compared to the social media channels pushing content to me automatically. Note: I still get emails and WW alerts ‘live’ 🙂