When my wife and I moved from Brighton to Devon in 2015, we made a deal. She could have the dog she pined for and which I didn’t want (too much hassle, too much mess) providing I could have the boat I pined for and which she didn’t need (ditto, according to her).

Thanks to the Brighton vs Devon property differential, we ended up with a £10,000 budget, and I soon spotted a pretty little Romilly (a 22ft ‘modern lugger’ designed by Nigel Irens) with a trailer that, although advertised at twice the price, the owner was willing to part with for exactly that sum.

We had some fun times with that boat, pottering up and down the River Dart with our two children and assorted friends, but Anna missed the comfortable cabin and galley which we had had on our previous boat, a 24ft Cheverton Caravelle, while I always aspired to a proper family cruising yacht.

We both enjoy the process of looking at second-hand boats perhaps a little too much, so even before we’d sold our Romilly we had already looked at a Frances 26 for sale in Weymouth. I liked the seaworthy hull shape (I’m a sucker for a double-ender), while Anna liked the modern-feeling open-plan interior.

Finders keepers

That boat sold before we managed to sell our Romilly, but it planted the seed of an idea, and, once our boat had sold, I started searching for something similar. I eventually spotted an ad in the owner’s forum (www.frances26.org) for a Victoria 26 (a variation of the Frances 26) for sale in Hampshire. There were no pictures in the ad, but the boat was said to be ‘stored under cover near Basingstoke’. My excitement knew no bounds: we had stumbled across our own ‘barn find’.

We drove up to Basingstoke at the next available opportunity to have a look. Merhonour, as she was then called, certainly made an incongruous sight, sitting among farm machinery in a draughty barn 35 miles from the sea. She hadn’t been used for six years and looked in a sorry state, with the hull stained above the waterline, the deck covered in dust and the rig lying over her on crutches, also thick with dust.

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Looking past the grime, however, it was clear that the boat had been well cared for in the past. Her hull looked to be in perfect condition, the rig was solid, and she had a 20hp Beta engine with only 140 hours on the clock.

More unusually, she had a trailer and launch trolley, along with an ingenious and (we later discovered) very efficient mast lowering and raising system. Incredibly, her owners had used her as a trailer-sailer, towing her behind their Land Rover to faraway places such as France, Ireland and Scotland.

The revival begins

Below decks, she had a cosy, solidly-built wooden interior, with four berths and far more creature comfort than any of my previous boats, including a calorifier, a diesel hob and a diesel heater.

Buying a barn find is always a risky business, as you don’t really know what you’re getting, but that also means you’re more likely to get a bargain. We bought Merhonour for half the price of any other Victoria 26s on the market and spent a happy month scrubbing her down, polishing the hull, and repainting the hull stripes a vibrant blue. As she had by then already had three names, we felt no hesitation in renaming her Ronja, after Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, a favourite children’s book by Astrid Lindgren turned into a TV series by Studio Ghibli.

There were a few nasty surprises. The prop shaft was loose and needed a new cutless bearing, which necessitated removing the entire engine for access, which then revealed that the rear seal on the gearbox needed to be replaced too.

We entrusted all the mechanical work to our local yard, Avocet Marine, who did good, reliable work without charging a fortune.

Ronja was lowered into the River Dart at Totnes in April 2018, and we soon found other problems caused by her long period out of the water. The rubber seals on both the bilge pump and the heads had perished and needed replacing (the two replacement kits came to about £75, plus VAT & postage), as did the impeller on the engine’s salt water pump.

And, no matter how much we tried, we couldn’t get either the hob or the heater to work, so we ended up using a camper cooker instead. But at least the calorifier supplied a steady stream of hot water, which felt like luxury to me after a life of sailing with only cold water.

There were issues with the rig too, but we managed to resolve everything (largely thanks to a TopClimber ‘ascender’ system which allowed me to climb the mast on my own) in time for our first cruise during the May half term. That was when I realised another limitation of a ‘barn find’: you can’t test the boat’s sailing performance before you buy it.

I had always assumed any hull with a reasonably long keel, such as the Victoria 26 had, would be stiff and stable to walk on. Not a bit of it. Ronja was what is known as ‘initially tender’, ie surprisingly tippy to start with, until she got in her groove and she hung on in there.

The idea of this hull shape is that it doesn’t offer much resistance to waves, which just slide past without a fight, and certainly Ronja performed well to windward – better than our next boat, a beamier and relatively ‘stiff’ Freedom 33, which has better initial stability but bashes away into a head sea.

Origins of the Victoria 26

Chuck Paine drew the preliminary sketches for the Frances while he was on holiday in Scotland in the early 1970s. Enchanted by the double-ended wooden boats he saw while visiting fishing harbours on the east coast of the country, he drew a cruising yacht inspired by their time-proven design. He imagined a boat which would fulfil his own needs, sailing from his home in Maine.

‘I designed Frances for my own use,’ he later wrote. ‘She was to embody everything I knew about the design of efficient cruising vessels of GRP construction, to be capable of yearly cruises to and among the Caribbean Islands, to be small enough to fit my limited budget yet large enough to survive a gale at sea.’

With her flush deck, long keel and sternpost-hung rudder, the Frances was nothing if not a salty little cruiser. After an abortive attempt at building a prototype, which was lost in a fire, Chuck hooked
up with boatbuilder Tom Morris, who had recently launched Morris Yachts. The result was a 40-year association starting with the Frances, of which around 35 were built, and progressing to half a dozen bigger cruising yacht designs.

Almost immediately, the Frances developed a cult following, with boats embarking on far more daring voyages than most 26-footers would be thought capable of, including multiple transatlantic crossings and at least two part-circumnavigations (one from Georgia to New Zealand, another from the UK to Australia). Despite their shallow draught (just 3ft 10in/1.17m), their relatively heavy displacement of just over three tonnes (6,800lb) meant they coped well in a seaway.

Over in the UK, Bernard Hayman, editor of YM’s sister magazine Yachting World, spotted the design and published a gushing review accompanied by a black and white photo sent to him by Tom Morris.

According to an editorial published two months later, that single photo ‘produced more correspondence and enquiries than any other boat in the last ten years’. As a result, four boatbuilders vied for the honour of building the boat in the UK, with Victoria Marine ultimately winning the desirable contract.

For the British market, Victoria Marine added a small coachroof, which stopped aft of the mast, to create the Frances 26. That was followed in 1982 by a new version with a longer coachroof and the mast stepped on the coachroof which they named the Victoria 26.

Around 175 of these boats were built, before the design was rebranded in 1990 as the Victoria 800, with slightly different accommodation but still the same hull as the original Frances. All were built to a high standard and were fairly expensive for a boat of that size. They were aimed at a discerning clientele willing to pay slightly over the odds for a rugged little cruiser that could be sailed anywhere in the world – as long as you weren’t in a hurry.

As I wrote back in 1996, while reviewing the (then new) Victoria 800: ‘No wonder owners feel inspired to sail off into the blue – more than any other of its size, this is a boat that will look after you.’

Under sail

One of the peculiarities of our Victoria 26 was the rig. At some point, Ronja had been retro-fitted with a Maxi Roach in-mast furling system. I was initially sceptical, fearing the roller would get jammed and we’d be unable to stow the sail. The more I used it, however, the more I realised the system only failed through user error, when errant lines got caught in the roller or a defunct jammer locked unexpectedly.

On the positive side, there were clear advantages to being able to infinitely adjust the size of both sails, especially when there was nervous crew on board. Often, we’d set off with just the genoa set and I’d pull out the main gradually as we went along, as the crew’s confidence increased.

The Maxi Roach also allowed me to tweak the set of the sail easily, flattening it for upwind work and setting a fuller shape off the wind, something I probably wouldn’t have bothered doing otherwise.

In the end, it was watching Ronja’s behaviour on her mooring during a winter storm that convinced me the Maxi Roach had to go. Seeing her heeling over far more than other boats on nearby moorings convinced me that all that extra weight aloft was making her excessively tender.

The following spring I tested the excellent mast-lowering mechanism and unshipped the mast. It took no time at all to drill out the rivets holding the roller furler to the mast, and expose the original luff groove underneath. Soon, I had the mast back up and the original sail (which was still on board) back in action.

I can’t pretend it completely solved the problem, but it certainly felt reassuring reverting to a more conventional set-up, even if I missed being able to adjust the size of the sail as I had done previously. When we eventually sold the boat, the buyer (who planned to compete in the AZAB) told me he wouldn’t have bought her if she’d still had the Maxi Roach fitted.

Ronja was the first boat we cruised on as a family, and I was very conscious of not wanting to scare anyone off, so we only sailed short distances (working on the basis of one hour for every year of the youngest child’s age, ie seven hours max) and chose our weather carefully.

The Helford River was the furthest west we sailed, and we barely sailed east at all. Although I now think of Ronja as a slow boat, looking through my notes I see we clocked 5.8 knots on several occasions, close to her theoretical hull speed of 6.2 knots.

I’ll never forget one overnight passage with a friend from Falmouth to Dartmouth when we were shadowed almost the whole way by a large pod (or pods) of dolphins, all jumping in unison under the full moon. If I’d seen it in a film, I’d have thought it was over the top.

Victoria 26 specifications

DESIGNER: Chuck Paine
YEARS BUILT: 1982-98
LOA: 26ft / 7.92m
LWL: 21ft 3in / 6.48m
BEAM: 8ft 2in / 2.49m
DRAUGHT: 3ft 10in / 1.17m
DISPL: 6,800lbs / 3,084kg
BALLAST: 3,500lbs / 1,588kg
SAIL AREA: 337sq ft / 31.31m2
PRICE: £15,000-£25,000

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