March / April 2025

Free as the Wind

Benoît Cayla and the art of itinerant boat restoration

Nic Compton • Photographs by Nedjma Berder

Since 2004, the Breton shipwright Benoît Cayla has led a string of remarkably efficient and intense working-vessel reconstruction projects. Here he is at the helm of his group’s most recent relaunching, the 43’ Scottish Zulu MAGGIE HELEN as the vessel returns from Brittany to the village of Mousehole in Cornwall, England, in July 2024. The boat was rebuilt in summer 2022 mostly using available and recycled materials.

To an outside observer, it might all have seemed a bit chaotic, anarchic even. In Lerwick, on the Scottish isle of Shetland, during the summer of 2022, as many as 15 people at a time worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, to restore the 1904 Zulu-class fishing boat MAGGIE HELEN. They came from all over Europe—France, Holland, Italy, the U.K. They were boatbuilders, riggers, and mechanics, all with varying degrees of skill. They worked for free because they believed passionately in the project and wanted to see the vessel sailing again. Some hoped to join her at sea; others were just passing through and enjoyed working with a group of like-minded people.

Despite the apparent disorganization, it was a highly focused operation that completed the job with remarkable speed. After some initial skepticism over one of the island’s historic craft being rebuilt by a bunch of foreigners and taken away from its home, the local community got behind the project and donated all manner of things, from lead for the ballast to the old mizzenmast that had been stored in someone’s house. There were even cash donations to help feed the hungry workers. After three months of intensive work, this friendly enterprise achieved what a fully funded professional yard would have struggled to do: they got MAGGIE HELEN sailing for the first time in 60 years and headed off over the horizon to a new life.

The restoration of MAGGIE HELEN was just the latest in a string of remarkable projects led by the Breton boatbuilder Benoît Cayla and his colleagues Élise Neau and Bleuenn Chorlay. Their run of success began with the 1964 Loch Fyne skiff ROSE OF ARGYLL, which Benoît and a friend restored in 2004–09, and which was followed by the 1926 Danish fishing ketch SWALLOW (ex-GENARA) restored in 2011–21.

The group has developed a distinctive approach to restoring old wooden boats, one that is highly skilled yet functional; it is respectful of tradition but not purist. You might say the boats are low-tech but possess a high aesthetic value; they are rustic rather than smart, in the way a log cabin is beautiful compared to a modern glass house.

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