The Fleet

The records suggest that the Shipyard Company in Bangor, Northern Ireland built 22 S-Class boats between 1946 and 1964. They were built on commission, not on spec, so the years of build are erratic. No boats were launched in 1954, or between 1956 and 1959. Their ownership can be traced through the British Registry of Shipping and Lloyds Register of Yachts - as long as owners did register changes of ownership, which they may not have always done. Boats that have left the United Kingdom, moving to the Republic of Ireland or the Americas, are no longer recorded in the registries so ownership is harder to trace.

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The boats are listed here in launch sequence, with sail number, rig, last known home port and last known owners listed in that order. Inevitably after more than five decades of changes of ownership and renewal of sails, in several cases the sail numbers borne by individual boats no longer correspond to the actual build numbers. An advertisement published by the Shipyard Company in 1963 describes the S-Class boats and adds that there were ‘19 built to date and three more on the stocks to be completed this season’. That gives a total of 22 boats, a number that seems to be confirmed by the fact that the most recent boat known has the sail number S22 - unless of course one or more of those ‘three on the stocks’ were never finished. But as we now have names for all 22 boats, it seems as if 22 is the right number for the fleet. There are a few boats unaccounted for: Such as Saturnia, Scallywag, and Silhouette which is known only through a single yacht club regatta entry. There is more to discover ...