The Two Lives of the Schooner VALORA

It’s hard to imagine anyone recovering sufficiently from the loss of a nearly new schooner to commission a second one—different, bigger, and better—designed and built by the same pair of craftsmen as the first. Unless we’re shipping magnates or the U.S. Navy, few of us order more than one boat from a single builder, and still fewer of us think in terms of “community” when it comes to owning boats, large or small.

Karl Frey actually has done both of these things. He has had two versions of his schooner-yacht, VALORA, created in a dozen years, and has regarded both as “communities”: boats built, cared for, sailed, and loved by the people who are drawn to them.

VALORA’s community includes Frey, of course, but also her designers and builders, David and Nathaniel Stimson; her professional skipper, Lu Yoder; Frey’s wife, Patty Cullen; boatbuilder and artist Frank Raposa; and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where VALORA is the centerpiece of a day-charter business. “She has many more friends than I have,” Frey says, sounding just a little like a proud parent.

There’s much to be proud of here: planked in white pine but with a backbone of welded steel, VALORA is the product of a design tradition dating from the late 19th century. Besides the stability inherent in her round-bilged, sharpie-like hull, her sail-carrying power relies on an 800-lb centerboard and 10,000 lbs of inside ballast. It’s a concept based on the ketch PRESTO and her descendants designed by Ralph M. Munroe in the 1880s for shallow waters, particularly in Florida. The flaring topsides result in decks that are wide and comfortable to walk on; VALORA’s two cockpits (one for crew, one for passengers) feel roomy and sheltered; her steering gear and rig are about as simple and traditional as they can be. And she’ll step out nicely under full sail in the shallow, unpredictable conditions for which Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound are famous.