Captain Pete's Voyages: Silver Apple, a yacht designed by a father and owned by a son

As a happy snapper with a bridge camera and of course a smartphone, I have snapped thousands of photos of boats, birds, bikes and other stuff. So when I realise I haven't posted anything on my Captain's blog for a while all I have to do is look in the giant folder where I have been trying to sort my photos out for over a year now. There is a massive folder in there called "Boats" and inside that one many others, one of which is "My boats" . Now I use a fairly broad meaning to that word "My' and what it means is the boats I have sailed or handled or delivered. Or spent a lot of time on in many cases. Or own...

Back in 2018, I was full time captain on a yacht called Artemis, a Beneteau 57, which belonged to the owner of Corfu Yacht Yard. The boat was used for some charter and owner family trips and on some days when I was not out on it and not too busy fixing and maintaining stuff, like watertanks and aircons and engines, I would do some work at the boatyard too, or on boats that were maintained by the yard crew.

One of these boats was the amazing "Silver Apple".

Silver Apple was designed by F.Spaulding Dunbar and built to his design in 1967, the year I was born, in Mallorca, Spain. She is a 45 foot wooden ketch with some very interesting features, like tandem lifting keels and twin engines.

I was called upon initially to prepare her to be lifted out and deliver her to the yard.

I then also had to do a survey of her safety equipment for the insurance company, which really gave me the opprtunity to have a real close look at all of her ins and outs. She had a very cosy aft cabin, a deep and very safe center cockpit, and of course that lovely feeling that wooden boats have, that they are somehow alive, they have a soul.

In the yard with my R100GS in front of her

Bart Dunbar her owner, is the son of F..Spaulding Dunbar, the designer of Silver Apple and has owned her for many years. When he turned up to take her away to Italy, I found out he was intending to sail her all the way to the US!

He was a lovely gentleman and even offered me a place on the crew to go as far as I wanted, Italy, Spain or further. He also gave me a copy of a book called Wood, Wind and Water dedicated to his father's design work. He designed some really beautiful and unusual yachts.

Info on who she was designed for

A lovely dedication thanking me for all the work on her

Reference to Silver Apple having sailed as far as the Chinese coast!

Folllowing are a few pictures of her interior. I didn't go very far on her, but spent lots of time aboard painting and fixing things and checking her equipment out. She definitely confirmed my love for classic yachts!