Shenandoah of Sark

Built for long voyages

Shenandoah was designed by Theodore E. Ferris and built in 1902 by Townsend & Downey on Shooters Island, New York, for Gibson Fahnestock, son of the New York banker Harris C. Fahnestock. Writing that December, the yachting journalist W. P. Stephens called her “a roomy and powerful craft for long sea voyages”. The same yard launched Kaiser Wilhelm II’s schooner Meteor III that year, and the two were built alongside each other.

She was rigged as a three-masted topsail schooner, with square topsails on her foremast, and sailed from Newport, Rhode Island, before crossing to the Mediterranean in 1905.

A century of owners

In 1912 she was sold to Germany, renamed Lasca II and based at Kiel, only to be taken by the British for the First World War. Afterwards she passed to the shipbuilder Sir John Esplen, who restored her name, and in the mid-1920s to the Italian prince Ludovico Spada Veralli Potenziani, later Governor of Rome, who renamed her Atlantide.

From 1929 she belonged to the Danish sculptor Viggo Jarl, who gave her diesel engines and electricity and took her from Cannes to the West Indies, Hawaii and 500 miles up the Amazon. During the Second World War she was hidden at Troense in Denmark with her masts removed, so that she would be of no use to the occupying forces. In 1945 Jarl lent her to Copenhagen University for the Atlantide Expedition, eight months of oceanographic research along the coast of West Africa.

Seized by French customs in 1962, she lay neglected for a decade until Baron Marcel Bich, co-founder of Bic, bought her in 1972, restored her name and put her into charter. In 1974 he sailed her back to Newport, her first visit home since 1905, during his America’s Cup challenge, and in 1983 she was the setting for Rod Stewart’s video for What Am I Gonna Do.

Rescued and restored

By the early 1990s she was leaking badly and barely afloat, and her owner came close to scuttling her. Instead, from 1994 to 1996, McMullen & Wing in Auckland rebuilt her: “more of a rescue than a refit”, in the yard’s words. Most of the riveted hull plating was replaced, while her keel and many of her 1902 frames were kept, and the work won ShowBoats International’s award for the best classic yacht restoration.

Further refits at Orams Marine in Auckland followed, the biggest in 2009, and in 2018 she was certified for commercial charter after a full survey in Mallorca found her hull in excellent condition. Along the way she has sailed around the world several times, from South Georgia, where her crew carried Shackleton’s bathtub from the old whaling station at Stromness to the museum at Grytviken, to Bora Bora, where Pierce Brosnan came aboard for cocktails.

Racing

In 2022, with 24 crew aboard, she won the Trophée Rolex for schooners at Les Voiles de Saint-Tropez against a fleet that included Elena of London, Viveka and Puritan, taking the final race in a rising Mistral.

Aboard

The saloon has a Steinway baby grand piano, floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a table for ten beneath a large skylight. Four guest cabins each have their own bathroom: the full-width master suite, a double, and two doubles with a single berth above, so she sleeps eight adults and three children. A hidden door behind the master suite’s bookcase leads to the captain’s cabin.

Life on deck centres on a large cockpit with a hardtop and windows that wind down like a classic car’s, seating ten for meals. Nothing aboard is automatic: she is sailed by hand by a crew of eleven or twelve, some of whom have been with her for almost thirty years, and guests are welcome to lend a hand on the lines.

Amenities