There’s no doubt about it, testing second-hand boats is a fun job. You get to meet all kinds of people and sail all kinds of boats which you normally might not set foot on. But the more boats I sail, the more I realise it’s a subjective experience. So much depends on the condition of that particular boat, as opposed to the brand in general, from the state of the antifouling to the set-up of the rig, not to mention weather, tide, and whether everyone on board has had a good night’s sleep or not.

This was brought home to me recently when, after a couple of frankly disappointing sails, I stepped on board the Parker 275 owned by Jennie Fitzjohn and Graham Sykes. It so happened that the sun was shining on that day and a fresh easterly breeze had scrubbed the air clean and bright. Jennie and Graham had likewise scrubbed their boat and tidied the interior, and we soon settled down to a delightful cup of real coffee.

All was right with the world as we set off out of Dartmouth, not into the nasty swell and grey skies that had bedevilled my previous sail, but into the sparkling azure waters that give the English Riviera its name (on a good day). As the wind filled her sails, Sunbird quickly picked up speed and leaned gently into the waves.

Even when we got further out and met the bigger waves marching past Froward Point, she maintained her momentum, ploughing steadily on and, on the return tack, surfing enthusiastically down the waves.

It was the perfect boat test, the type a company salesman dreams of, and had I been looking to buy the boat, I would have signed on the dotted line there and then. But it got me thinking: how much was my positive impression of the Parker 275 determined because it was a brilliant boat and how much was due to those other, more random factors?

Some history

The origins of the design can be traced back to 1978, when Ron Holland – his career already in full flow having designed several Half-Ton Cup and Fastnet Race winners – drew the lines for a modest, shallow-draught cruiser/racer called the Super Seal 26. About 100 of these were built by John Baker in Devon before he sold the rights to GW Parker in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1983. Parker tweaked the design, including extending the coachroof further forward to give more headroom below, and renamed it the Parker 27 (to better reflect the length of the boat, including the transom-hung rudder).

The key ethos of these boats was to produce a fast, shallow-draughted yacht, which could be beached easily, and yet had accommodation for five people. Headroom on the Parker 27 was only 5ft 10in (1.78m), but what you sacrificed in accommodation space, you made up for in performance. And that 1ft 3in (38cm) minimum draught meant you could crawl up a leafy creek or dry out on a handy beach with minimum hassle.

The design was revised in 1990, with completely new moulds, but keeping close to the original Super Seal concept. The stern was widened and the transom made more upright to give more space in the cockpit, and the headroom below was increased to 6ft (1.83m). But perhaps the biggest difference was the increase in the weight of the lifting keel – from around 250lb (113kg) in the Parker 27 to 700lb (318kg) in the Parker 275.

The benefit of this was a lower centre of gravity and therefore better sailing performance; the drawback was having to wind up that big lump of iron by hand, requiring 180 turns of a winch handle and taking three to four minutes. For an extra £600, an electric winch could be fitted, which only took 30 seconds to lift the daggerboard. Thankfully, Sunbird was fitted with the electric winch.

It’s easy to lump together all the designs of a certain era and assume they are all much of a muchness, but the Parker 275 and its predecessors really did offer a different sailing experience to the heavy cruising boats that were commonplace in the 1980s and ’90s.

The boat’s displacement of 5,500lb (2,495kg) was a third less than the 8,500lb (3,856kg) of a Westerly Konsort, which says it all. These were boats intended for fun weekend sailing, rather than extended family cruising – though no doubt they did plenty of that as well.

Dinghy sailors

This new breed of yachting also attracted a new type of sailor – of which Jennie and Graham are in some ways typical. Both sailed dinghies extensively when they were young, and indeed met racing Fireballs on King George’s Reservoir in north London in the 1970s. They moved to Devon in the late 1990s and for a time raced RS200s. After their children were born, they bought a share in a Hurley 22, but soon decided that was too boring and switched to a Mirror dinghy, which all four of them squeezed into while pottering around on the River Dart.

Even when they did eventually decide to get a bigger boat, they weren’t quite ready to give up the adrenaline rush of dinghy sailing and opted for what Jennie describes as ‘a large dinghy’: a Parker 235, the smaller sister of the Parker 275 designed by Bill Parker himself and built from 1995 onwards. They sailed that boat quite happily for several years, based at Dittisham on the River Dart and ranging as far afield as Lyme Regis in Dorset to Fowey in Cornwall.

That was until December 2020, when Storm Bella hit the UK. Winds of up to 92 knots were recorded at the Needles, and even in the shelter of the Dart no-one was completely safe. Jennie and Graham’s boat was on her mooring off Dittisham and was hit by gusts of up to 80 knots.

‘If we’d left her with the keel right up, she would probably have just flicked around on the water,’ says Jennie. ‘If we’d left her with the keel right down it would probably have given her enough balance to stay upright. But we left her with the keel half down, as a compromise. When she was pushed over by the wind, the daggerboard slid down and she lost her righting moment. She just blew over and sank.’

It was a dramatic end to a much-loved boat. When it came to buying a replacement, however, they decided to go for the next size up, the Parker 275. It was during the Covid pandemic, so they bought the boat sight unseen, though they did have her surveyed beforehand.

Making it personal

Sunbird was in fundamentally good condition, but they made several changes to personalise her to their needs; the most major was to replace the old 10hp Yanmar engine with a new 14hp Beta because, as Graham puts it, ‘We wanted reliability.’

The next big change was to buy a new foresail. The boat came with a small blade jib, which was great for sailing upwind, and a huge 145% overlapping genoa for light weather sailing, but nothing in between. So Graham simply rang the number on the sailmaker’s label and got put through to Peter Kay, designer of the original rig and now part of OneSails at Hamble Point.

Peter had the original drawings and designed a smaller genoa for them, with just 10% overlap. At the same time, Jennie and Graham moved the sheet tracks from outside the shrouds to inside. The result is a much more manageable set-up which performs just as well as the bigger genoa in most circumstances.

Like many others, they also retired their big symmetric spinnaker and replaced it with a second-hand asymmetric, which is much easier to handle.

‘Age is becoming a factor,’ says Jennie, who is 70. ‘We’re not as nimble as we used to be! I’m generally on the foredeck, and if I’m fitting the spinnaker pole and the boat is going up and down, it can be quite hairy.’

Other changes include replacing the heavy old plough anchor and its 10mm chain, which proved ineffective anchoring on Devon seaweed, with a smaller but more effective Knox anchor and slightly smaller but higher-spec chain. ‘We don’t have an anchor winch,’ says Graham, who is also 70, ‘so we wanted to save our backs!’

Below decks, the Parker 275 has limited storage space, so they converted the bunk extensions on either side of the saloon settees into lockers, along with one of the trotter boxes. With a generous double bunk up aft and only a clutch of smallish grandchildren to accommodate, maximising bunk space wasn’t an issue for them.

They also got rid of one of the two tables the boat came with (one for the saloon, one for the cockpit) by sourcing an extra table leg fitting identical to the one in the cockpit and fitting it to the bunk side, so the same table can be used inside and out.

More controversially, they’ve got rid of the chartplotter, which used to swing out across the companionway, and the chart table. All their navigation is now done on the Navionics app on their iPad – a simple, affordable and flexible solution which has served me well sailing my boat from the UK to Greece over the past few years.

Cruising grounds

Jennie and Graham are happy cruising in more local waters, mostly exploring the creeks and estuaries of Devon and Cornwall. Hope Cove is a favourite spot, along with Scabbacombe, Anstey’s Cove near Torquay, the Turf Hotel on the Exe, and the Lynher River near Plymouth.

With four grandchildren in regular attendance, one of their favourite jaunts is from their mooring in Totnes, down the Dart, around to Brixham for the night, after which the grandchildren are picked up and Jennie and Graham sail back to Dartmouth and up the river to Totnes on their own. For most young children, that is a whole world of adventure.

Light and airy

I joined Sunbird when they were heading home after just such a journey and was immediately invited down below for a coffee. The accommodation is light and airy and certainly spacious enough for a 27-footer. There’s a nice mix of woodwork and good quality blue upholstery.

Facing forwards, there are two doors set into the forward bulkhead: starboard for the heads and port for the foc’s’le, which has another more-than-adequate double berth – in this case used mostly as a playground for the grandchildren. That’s six bunks of various sizes, more than enough for normal use but just right for a boat which is sometimes sailed by two adults and four children!

Jennie and Graham have clearly gone to a lot of effort to get the boat working as well as possible, and that is reflected in her general demeanour. You might reasonably assume that a 28-year-old boat would be in worse condition than when it was first launched, but I suspect that Sunbird might actually be a better boat now than she was then, thanks to the care lavished on her.

Jennie and Graham, however, still seemed nostalgic for the performance of their old boat, the Parker 235.

‘Sunbird doesn’t sail quite as well as the 235,’ says Graham. ‘She isn’t as responsive as the 235 and doesn’t sail as close to the wind. In terms of speed, 5 knots is normal, 6 is good, 7 is cracking, 8 is a fluke surfing down a wave. It’s not a thrilling performance, but perhaps we were expecting too much, as she is after all a bigger boat?’

‘Besides, we’re not racing, we just enjoy sailing, so why does it matter?’ says Jennie, while acknowledging she is the one usually concerned with getting the boat to sail faster. ‘She’s a very dry boat, though, and we never get water on deck.’

Parker 275 specifications

DESIGNER: Bill Parker
YEARS BUILT: 1990-1998
LOA: 27ft 11in / 8.51m
LWL: 24ft 7in / 7.49m
BEAM: 9ft 3in / 2.82m
DRAUGHT: 1ft 3in / 0.38m (up); 5ft 3in / 1.6m (down)
DISPLACEMENT: 5,500 lb / 2,494kg
BALLAST: 2,050 lb / 930kg
SAIL AREA: 380 sq ft / 35.3m2
PRICE: £12,000-£28,000

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