Southerly 105 rebuild (AKA what was I thinking..)

By John Greenwood

It occurred to my wife that some of the members may be interested in the story of the rebuilding of our Southerly 105, so here goes.

Just before COVID a persistent nagging thought entered my mind. We really, really, really needed to get another boat, but this time BIGGER!

We have had a few boats over the years, and in reality are guilty of doing more repairing than sailing. Judging by some of the boats I see in the yard I am not the only one suffering this problem. Life gets in the way of sailing it would appear.

Nevertheless we began another project, with that naive, hopefulness that keeps many people dreaming of a perfect sailing yacht, with a warm force 3 wind on the rear starboard quarter at sunset. (That sounds a bit pretentious – but you get the drift!)

As this was my first attempt at such a large rebuild I was, to put it bluntly, ill prepared for the scale of the project. Our previous yachts had all been under 30 foot, so we felt it was time to move to a larger more comfortable boat (getting old and all that…)

So the search began, living in the muddy ditch known as the Roach, a bilge or lifting keel made sense. After looking for a while we came to the conclusion that a Southerly with a lift keel would be ideal. This was when the first shock occurred, apart from the fact that ancient Southerly’s kept their prices so well, there were actually not many for sale. With our sights dramatically lowered we started to look for something as a usable restoration, again there was virtually nothing for sale within our pitiful budget.

We then found a burnt out Southerly 105, it had been abandoned for at least ten years, and had been shipped to Essex from Devon by a previous dreamer. As no yard fees had been paid, everything of value had been stripped.

We found we could get the boat for almost nothing due to yard fees and debts. We made a best guess at the time and costs, and it seemed viable. I had re-rigged and re-engined our previous boats (Westerly, Kingfisher and Itchen Ferry) So we bought her. In retrospect.

What was I thinking? I must have high on optimistic endorphins. As all sailors know, until you actually own a boat and crawl over every inch of it, you will never really know the hidden delights it has in store for you!

As we cleared out the burnt mess the jobs got ever larger. The fire appeared to have started with a diesel water heater and spread upwards to consume the whole cockpit and coach roof, this then collapsed into the interior before, we presume, the fire was extinguished.

We had to become amateur fire investigators, the heat damage was amazing. One area would be burnt back to just glass chopped mat next to an aluminium winch that had melted. Yet six inches away chart paper was untouched. The idea that the heat should create such a dramatically stratified effect proves you should crawl away from a fire.   The cleaned and stripped hull now gave me an idea of the magnitude of the task. The coach roof was totally destroyed down to the base of the windows. The main cockpit area and all the seating was gone. The galley was just charred wood, the heads were full of melted plastic, which had lined the roof, and smoke had coated everything the fire had not touched.   It seems that the sails also must have caught fire and dripped liquid plastic over the whole deck. It looked like plastic seagull poo and was just as hard to remove.  

On the plus side….. Anything below the keel lifting pulleys had hardly been touched unless burning debris fell onto it, the side decks were solid, the keel box and hydraulic ram untouched (the kevlar pennants had melted) but the keel support pin was still in its hole. Moving forward, the fore cabin was heavily smoke damaged as was the aft cabin.

Amazingly the Bukh DV36 engine was not too bad with low hours (I found the burnt engine hour meter) many of the parts that had gone missing over the years (this engine was later resurrected). The hull exterior had no evidence of osmosis and the keel still had antifouling and little serious rusting.

Everything was now ripped out, if not to be chucked, to be used as templates for new parts. We took the hull back to what must have been close to the original mouldings when it was first built. At this point we stopped to survey the enormity of the work.

As the boat was ashore as the seacocks had long gone, this actually helped clean the boat as rain had been running through for years, so weirdly the bilges were clean apart from the wildlife. The water tank was removed from under the saloon seat and steam cleaned, the diesel tanks came out to be replaced with new stainless ones.

We had a spare room on our boat HMS Birdham so this became the duplicate 105 room. All the parts we acquired were prepared ready for reinstalling. Until you take a boat apart you have no idea how much gear is involved. We needed to get all the original Sowester cleats, fairleads and stanchion bases to fit into the original tapped holes, so ebay and boat jumbles were scoured repeatedly. Gradually we accumulated the missing parts.

The rebuilding of the superstructure could not be done exactly as it had been originally, as I did not have the skill or time to create moulds. I chose to build it from 13mm marine ply on laminated epoxy beams, the whole lot covered with four layers of GRP. This was bonded into the good side decks. I would cut the windows out and fit laminated glass once I had made frames. Windows where cut out of 8mm glass, laminated in case of accidents.

The original Southerly had a folding canopy, I like windows I can see through, so I built a hardwood screen to support the removable roof. Whilst this was going on we had to imagine any future jobs that would need ducts and piping. Things that would save time later like lighting, wiring, plumbing etc. This included the relocated mast supports from the deck head bonded onto the grounding plate

As we had no mast or rigging we were free to choose whatever layout we wanted. I have always admired the schooner rig for the look and the supposed ease of use, so I fitted two tabernacles to step the masts onto internal compression posts, glassed in with steel plates to distribute the load. We then we created chain plates, reinforcing by glassing in angle under the side decks. The rigging chain-plates, and stanchions are bolted through the angle to spread the loads.

The way that southerly originally joined the deck to the hull was very strong with multiple layers of GRP across the joint, we added extra layers to the existing thickness to prevent the deck lifting.

The new schooner rig had shorter masts and a lower aspect ratio but a longer base length including the bowsprit. The mast locations where not exactly as I wanted, but near enough. We can now set a forestay sail, mainstay sail, mainsail and in light winds a topsail between the masts. We can also pole out our spinnaker from the bowsprit in ultra light winds.

I can’t imagine that she sails as well originally designed, but for us the low tension rig with smaller sails makes life less exciting, which is what we like, plus you can easily balance the sails as you have multiple options, as well as trimming the keel to change the CLR. The CLR (center of lateral resistance) seems to work OK with this rig, we can adjust the CLR by lifting the keel (this moves CLR aft)

Gradually over four years we rebuilt the interior in hard wood (not yet finished) we followed the original layout as designer Dick Carter seemed to know his stuff. There are more stories to be told regarding the changes we made, and the results of learning on the job, if anyone is interested I’ll write another episode!

I’m sure that purists would be horrified by the changes we made, but she is now almost  exactly as we planned and totally unique. We are now a rolling restoration as she is usable and we can now work on beautifying her, and correcting our many mistakes.

But that’s another story!

John & Michaela.