Two vintage wooden jewels among the CULTs of the VELAFestival: we present Ilda and Bufeo Blanco
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In parallel with our tribute to the
#plasticfantastic
which has really been a grand success as evidenced by the 110 boats registered on our online bulletin board, at the VELAFestival we will also have two vintage wooden jewels participating in the dock at St. Margaret’s as CULT boats. Ilda and Bufeo Blanco have a very curious story that we want to tell you.
ILDA, THE HISTORY OF THE BOAT WITH A CANOE STERN
When her current owner Gianni Fernandes (president of the Viareggio Historical Sails Association) first saw Ilda moored at Marina di Pisa it was 1976. “The first impact was a surprise because I did not expect to see a boat with a hull like that, or rather I had never seen any: the stern was not like most sailboats but was like a canoe and had the outer rudder continuing along the starboard line all the way under the waterline stopping at the beginning of the keel.” It took Gianni Ferndades 37 years to reconstruct the history of this boat, collecting small pieces of his life almost by accident during his sailings.
Piecing together like a puzzle the pieces of this story, we find important actors, such as Mr. Gitto, born Angelo Rosaguta, the last and only surviving shipwright from Recco, where Ilda was built in 1946 by the La Ligure Carpenteria shipyard. This 85-year-old man with great lucidity reconstructed the most important piece of Ilda’s history (length 11.29; width 3.05 m), finding two pages detached from a Motor Boating-era yachting magazine and written probably by the American designer Atkin, showing drawings of a 38-foot boat with a Colin Archer-style stern. Ilda’s lines traced this design with the only difference in the rigging: cutter instead of ketch like the original. William Aktin (1882-1962) made more than 800 boat designs in his lifetime, but the ones that most influenced his career were the so-called double – enders, boats with the bow similar to the stern, a feature this of all boats designed by the most famous Scandinavian architect Colin Archer.
BUFEO BLANCO, THE SANGERMANI WITH A LUCKY FATE
Among the vintage CULTs attending the VELAFestival (May 5-8 S. Margherita Ligure) will be Bufeo Blanco. Project no. 138 by Cesare Sangermani of 1962, made of planking of iroco, oak, and mahogany, was launched in 1963 under the name “Luima” commissioned by Sergio Rossi of Turin, who later changed its name to “Bufeo Blanco,” a peculiar white dolphin with an elongated snout that lives in the Rio delle Amazons and that according to Peruvian tradition, it brings good luck and prosperity to all who manage to touch it. And so far this has been the case, judging by the phenomenal palmares accumulated with her current owner Professor Giuseppe Marino, who has subjected her to major refitting in 2006 at Cantiere Del Carlo in Viareggio, and then in 2013 at Cantiere Palomba in Torre del Greco.
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