The Wolfhound project has been on low intensity the second half of 2017 but the work never stopped. This spring the interior of the crew quarters will be completed and the work on the midships salon and cabins will commence with several additional joiners on the project. Stay tuned for new BLOG entries once the crew quarters are completely finished.

In the meantime the rig for Wolfhound will be changed to a stay-sail schooner. The reasons for this change is two-fold. First, it will require much less crew than a gaff rigged configuration and second it will be a lighter rig than the gaff rigged configuration.

Now comes the part of justification of this change as far as authenticity is concerned. John Alden in his designer notes indicated that the reason for the 3-masted rig configuration was to reduce the need for crew for this schooner that was intended as a blue water cruising schooner. He also designed a 2-masted gaff rigged configuration for design 0347 (Wolfhound) so there was nothing sacred about the 3-masted rig although it is very pretty.

The stay sail schooner rig was invented by Starling Burgess in 1924 and was first implemented on the radical new schooner ADVANCE which for a while was unbeatable racing.

John Alden designed a several very beautiful and fast stay sail schooner shortly thereafter. In 1928 the 60’ stay sail schooner schooner MENIKOE V (design 0394) was designed by John Alden followed in 1928 by the stay sail schooner design design 0458 DAUNTLESS and in 1929 design 0456 “High Tide” was also launched as a stay sail schooner.

Clearly John Alden adopted the stay sail schooner rig in several designs in 1928 & 1929 so it is not very far fetched that he would have considered a stay sail schooner rig in design 0347 (Wolfhound) in 1927. Most likely design 0347 was a boat designed by John Alden to possibly be built for him self on speculation and later sold as he did with many of the legendary schooners in the Malabar series. It is very likely that if a real client would have materialized in 1928, shortly after he drew the lines for design 0347, who would have requested a 3-masted stay sail schooner rig to further reduce the need for crew John Alden would have been very happy to oblige. 90 years that scenario comes true!

0394  MENIKOE V

0456   HIGH TIDE