BCA Pioneers Interviews: Malcolm Wilkinson, Part 1

Editor’s note: This article has been divided into two parts. Part II will be available next month.

Interview with Malcolm Wilkinson

Barrie (B): Malcolm, thank you very much for agreeing to talk about the Pioneer Project for BCA. The first thing we’d like to know is how did you get interested in boating?

Malcolm (M): Well, I was born in Yorkshire, in West Yorkshire, the northern part of England, which is about as far away from the ocean as you could possibly get in England. Yeah, but my aunt – my mother’s sister – had a place in  the coastal resort town of Scarborough. We used to visit regularly and I would go to Scarborough in the summer.

My aunt ran a restaurant boarding house-type place. And one of the inhabitants of the boarding house was Old Tom, a fisherman. He lived at my aunt’s all year around. I went there one summer and talked my way onto a fishing boat. I forget his name now, but the boat was called the Courage, a little rinky-dink fishing boat. The minute I went below deck I was hit by a mix of fish, fuel and damp odours.  We went out and I’ve never been as seasick in my life. I mean literally, it was a gong show.

And that was my experience starting with boating. But I used to love going to Scarborough because there was a beach. We could go out. The fishermen would take people out on their little rowboats and charge them 6 pence, and that was just paradise.

Then we moved to Vancouver in 1954 when I was 14. I remember we’d only been here a few months and we went up Howe Sound. A friend took us up in a car. We walked down to the log booms [which] used to be strung all the way along Howe Sound, both sides.

I remember walking out on the log booms there [on] a sunny afternoon, and [there were] boats, probably from the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, sailing on Howe Sound, and one of them sailed right up to the log boom and then tacked off! It was an eight meter, and they’re pretty great. If you’ve ever seen an eight meter, they’re pretty sleek boats. I thought, you know, one day I’m gonna have one of those (laughing).

B: That’s when you were about 14?

M: I was 15 at that time. Bitten by the sailing bug! Yeah, and I hadn’t sailed at that time but I liked the water and that stuff. And then we ended up living in Kitsilano. We’d only been here a very short time. And our neighbor was an Australian guy who was a little bit older than me, who said, “Hey, you know, I’m actually going sailing with this guy, and he charges us a dollar a day or two dollars a day. You want to come and have a go?” So I told him, “Sure.” So we went and I paid a dollar a day to go sailing!

B: Was that the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, or…?

M: No, this was in Kitsilano.  A fellow had a boat moored, and it was called, I’ll think of it… Le tub! – It really was [a tub]: 24 feet long, hard chine, not your sleekest boat in the world, but it was a sailboat. And it actually sailed!

So, we went sailing a few times on that. I remember that at the time I had a job, and one of the guys from work went with me. We went sailing, and I just loved it. I couldn’t wait to go back, and the fellow who owned the boat, he ended up buying a Spencer 35, and he sailed that boat halfway around the world and back. I ran into some of his friends, and at the time, I was still quite young. I had an opportunity then to sail on a boat from Vancouver to California, but I didn’t take it. (B: Oh, no!) I could have done it, but I had just graduated from high school and ended up having a summer job; I needed the cash because we weren’t exactly rich when we arrived here.

B: So, you’ve graduated from high school and are looking for adventure.

M: Yeah, and as I said, I started sailing, paying the dollar a day, and then it turns out that I became a fairly good sailor fairly quickly. So the fellow who I was sailing with, he ended up buying another boat and he offered me a job. “If you take people sailing for the weekend, I wouldn’t charge you to go.” So he bought a Lightning sailboat, which is a 19’ dinghy with no ballast.

So we used to go with three paying passengers and me on weekends. And we would sail all over the place. I mean, I sailed across to Vancouver Island and, you know; we’d get to Snug Cove and take tents and sleep on the beach. I mean, it was quite an adventure!

B: And when did you get the offshore bug?

M: Well, I’ve always been very keen on the South Pacific. And I used to be a voracious reader. In England we didn’t even have electricity on our farm. I used to go with a flashlight at night under the bedclothes to read. And I just couldn’t wait to get down there. And I’ve always had that ambition. And when I discovered sailing, I thought, ah, if you put A to B, you’ve got an ideal situation. So that’s when I started thinking. All the way through university, I would sit in the Buchanan building, which is a building at UBC, looking out over Howe Sound, thinking, “Why the hell am I wasting my time here?” [The dream] didn’t materialize for quite a while, but I started sailing. I met people, and I would go sailing with them quite regularly. And then I got into racing, and I started crewing on boats, mainly out of Royal Vancouver, Jericho…I would go with cap in hand to get a job. So I ended up sailing quite a few Swiftsure races and local races on old wooden boats.

And, actually, you want stories about boats. These boats, wooden boats, they dry out in winter. The first time you sail them in summer, they leak like sieves. We would literally have to hose the boats down to get them wet to make them waterproof again. … And we sailed in one Swiftsure race and we had to sleep in our wet gear because the deck leaked so much. But we did.

B: But you didn’t get seasick?

M: Surprisingly no…I’ve got an iron stomach [now], except for that first fishing boat. Well, I was probably ten when we came to Canada; we came by boat and I was 14. [From the time we left Liverpool] until we docked in Québec City, I was seasick every nautical mile.

But, yeah, I started racing out of Royal Van and I would catch a ride anywhere. Then as I got older, I got more serious and was racing on hot boats at the Royal Van and then I got a job sailing on the Victoria-Maui race in 1974. By then I was married and we decided that we wanted to go offshore. “Well, if you want to marry me, if you want to live with me, you’ve got to go offshore.” So, yeah, that’s what I basically told Darcy. Well, it seems to have worked out. I think we’ve been married for 56 years now and still like each other!

But we decided that we were going to buy a boat and go offshore, and part of the going offshore routine was, I wanted to find out whether I can stand it offshore. So I got a job sailing on a Spencer 50. And the fellow I sailed with was the nicest fellow you’ve ever met. He was filthy rich and he was the nicest guy ever. And so we had a great time on that race.

B: This was a Vic-Maui race?

M: Yes, the Vic-Maui race and we did it racing, two weeks there. We’d be out there in the trade winds with a spinnaker and a blooper and all that and we’d go down the waves and at the bottom of the waves, we’d slow down and go up the back of the wave at nine knots and we get to the top and [speed down] up to 16 knots, 18 knots … fantastic sailing day after day after day. We were leading our division until BANG, we hit a log. There was no apparent damage so we carried on. The steering was a bit sluggish and we fell back a bit in the standings. It wasn’t until we got into the clear and calm waters in Hawaii that we found the log had taken ⅔ of the rudder and part of the skeg! We still finished “in the money”.

B: So when did you start looking for your own offshore boat?

M: Well, when we came back, I was racing on a C &C 35 in Vancouver. Okay. And so I did the Vic-Maui race when we came back to Vancouver. Darcy and I, a couple of weeks later, thought we’d go to a movie on Sunday night. So we drove down to the Broadway corner where there were a couple of movies. They were all closed on Sunday, so we went to the Yacht Club and walked around. I had joined the Yacht Club by then. And it was the C&C 35 for sale, one year old. The owner did not like the fact that sailboats heel over. I made a “stink bid”. For whatever reason it was accepted. We bought it within a week (laughing).

So we raced that boat in Royal Van for a couple of years. And quite competently! We were pretty aggressive, actually. I say we; Darcy actually won the Royal Van Skipper of the Year and one of my junior sailors on the boat got the Royal Van Junior Skippers Award. We won the Royal, we won the VARC – Vancouver Area Racing Council – and we won the Boat of the Year!

B: Congratulations!

Malcolm’s Spencer 1330, Meridian Passage III (photo courtesy of Donna Sassaman)

M: Thanks. Well, we were pretty serious. And then at the end of the racing season, and it was probably racing, I developed ulcers. I was only 34, and I was in hospital. The doctor basically said, “You’re lucky you’re alive.” Wow. So I decided, “You know, I’m going to go offshore.” Darcy and I went looking for a boat. We went off to Europe looking for boats, to England, and all over North America. … Earlier on, I’d been racing with the Brandlmayr family who owned Spencer boats. I raced with them on a Spencer 42 as their crew member. And, anyway, we ended up buying a boat from them. We could afford a finished 35 footer but they didn’t have a 35-footer so we ended up buying a hull and deck kit with bulkheads and engine and that stuff from them for a 44-footer, a Spencer 1330, 13.3 meters. I knew the Brandlmayrs, so they agreed that if we bought a boat, we could leave it in their plant for a year and finish it out.

Darcy and I had full-time jobs in Vancouver. I’d go and pick up Darcy after work, and then we’d drive out to Spencer Boats. We worked on that boat every single night and every weekend for a whole year. We were going off to work one morning, and Darcy said, “Oh, by the way, I made a reservation to go to Hawaii,” she said, “just as a holiday.” And I said, “Oh, we can’t afford that!”

Anyway, we let the reservation stand. I remember we went out to the airport. The plane had been parked on the end of the runway and it was freezing. And we went there in our tropical gear (laughing). And we froze our whatsies off! But we arrived in Hawaii and we went to the Pele, a hotel at the north end of the island. For the first week, we did nothing but sleep on the beach. Then we’d get up and go to eat and go to bed. And it actually saved our lives. The second week, we partied!

B: Nice. So you got the boat all squared away the way you wanted it?

M: Well we were lucky. Spencer Boats made custom boats so we could design our own interior and our own exterior, basically. I’d sailed with Grant Brandlmayr, who was John Brandlmayr’s (the designer), son. I knew Grant because we’d sailed together for years, so … we decided that the sane thing to do was to have a self-steering gear. We didn’t know which self-steering gear we wanted but I knew that it would drive everybody nuts and to total exhaustion to try to steer by hand offshore. We decided, okay, we’re gonna have a self-steering gear so that means the only safe way to run a boat offshore without having an uncontrolled jibe is to not have your mainsail up. If we were going to have a self-steering gear, which means you can’t steer the boat safely because that little mechanical thing there says turn left. So we designed a custom boat that we could actually run with head sails only, downwind so if we’re reaching or running, the main doesn’t go up. The self-steering gear goes on. And if the boat does [jibe], who cares? Because nothing’s going to happen!

Then the other thing we decided that we would do was to make the mast taller and because we’re not going to be running downwind with our main sail up, there’s no point in having a long boom, so we actually increased the height of the mast by five feet and we shortened the length of the boom by three feet, and we then put twin spinnaker pole tracks on the mast. … When they weren’t in use, they actually just then slid out, and that worked really, really well.

B: Didn’t SPRAY have a similar arrangement?

M: Probably.

B: I think that maybe I learned that from my reading. So what year about was that when you got that project done?

M: Well, we went offshore in 1977 and we sailed from here around the South Pacific and back. We did 16,000 nautical miles in 13 months.

Editor’s note: In Part II, read about communication, navigation, some South Pacific highlights, and  the early days of BCA.