PBO's YouTube aficionado Kass Schmitt praises Triple Jack owners Richard Wooldridge and Steve Davis for sharing the rebuild of their 47ft trimaran without a single exhortation to like, subscribe or sponsor...
For those who love a rebuilding a wreck against the odds story (and who doesn’t?) the YouTube channel Triple Jack is not to be missed.
Triple Jack is a 47ft trimaran designed by the legendary Derek Kelsall in 1979. She was built of foam-core GRP by her first owner, Frank Wood, and appears to have burst out of the shed just in time for the start of the 1981 TWOSTAR (double-handed trans-Atlantic race) which sadly ended with dismasting 190 miles before the finish.
Wood’s second attempt at racing the Atlantic in the 1984 OSTAR (solo trans-Atlantic race) also ended with dismasting, so it was likely with a huge sense of relief that her subsequent owners, Richard Wooldridge and Steve Davis of Exmouth, UK finally managed to get her across the pond in the late 1990s, albeit by cruising in the tradewinds to the Caribbean.
And there they stayed, with Triple Jack becoming a well-known competitor on the Caribbean multihull racing scene. That is, until September 2017, when Hurricane Irma ripped her off her mooring and threw her across the bay twice, resulting in the sort of damage most people would not even think of trying to repair.
But with a lot of community goodwill and help from friends and family, Richard and Steve managed to slowly put her back together again, working mostly on Sundays.
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Rather than simply rebuilding to her original design, they took the opportunity to strengthen and update many components and systems, adding for example, a carbon mast, composite chainplates, Dyneema standing rigging, a completely redesigned coachroof, and for the first time, an inboard diesel engine which greatly expands future cruising and racing possibilities.
Although it was nearly five years from disaster to relaunch, the 12-video series primarily covers the period from July 2019 to February 2020 with a few sporadic updates after that.
While wind noise makes the speech on some episodes nearly unintelligible, I find the story compelling enough to ignore that, and just feel grateful that they were willing to take time out of the rebuild to document and share it without a single exhortation to like, subscribe or sign up to a Patreon.
Richard tells me he’d like to continue producing videos about their adventures on the water, and I’ll look forward to seeing them on the screen as well as on the racetrack.