The Guernsey Press reported back in 2021 that the predecessor to the island’s current marine ambulance had been bought by a mysterious benefactor and taken off-island for restoration.
Now five years on, the vessel is (almost) complete, renamed the Flying Spur, and looking for a new owner.
Back in 2021, the boat was on the verge of being scrapped, after an appeal to restore it had failed and the owner had rung up £8,000 in debts at a local boatyard.
It was then that former hotel developer Jonathan Wix became involved.
‘We actually read about the demise of the boat in the paper and decided to go and have a look,’ he said. ‘I just saw this incredibly pretty boat, and thought there’s a wonderful piece of history here – it shouldn’t just be scrapped.
‘I knew a skipper in Montenegro who was brilliant with woodwork. This was during Covid and he didn’t have any work, and I had this hare-brained idea that I would buy it, and send it over to him.’
Mr Wix bought the boat for a £1 and made a settlement on the debts connected to it.
That started a long and complicated five-year journey to restoration.
The initial plan to send the boat to Montenegro by road was abandoned after it was discovered that the vessel just exceeded the maximum width to be transported without a special convoy, so Mr Wix turned to the Elephant Boat Yard on the River Hamble in Hampshire.
‘They are the leading specialists in classic wooden hulls,’ he said. ‘To put it into perspective, the flying Christine II was sat side-by-side in all her glory with Gypsy Moth, which Sir Francis Chichester sailed to become the first person to circumnavigate the world non-stop.
‘We struck a deal that when they had staff who weren’t doing anything, they would work on her. It would save them having men standing around doing nothing, and they charged me rather less than they would have, but it took rather longer.’
The boat’s hull was restored and a completely new deck and cabin fitted, as well as new engine, shafts and props.
By summer 2023 she was ready to finally make the journey to Montenegro, but this time through the French canal system rather than by road.
From Marseille the boat was sailed around Italy, and finally across the Adriatic to Montenegro.
‘The boat was just an empty shell with almost nothing inside, but a mattress and a bathroom,’ said Mr Wix. ‘The whole journey took about eight weeks, but the skipper and his wife said they had the most marvellous adventure.’
The boat then spent two years in Montenegro being refitted as a gentleman’s launch.
‘The interior is amazing,’ he said. ‘She’s based on on a New York commuter boat. In the early days of Wall Street wealth, the super-rich who lived out on Long Island built these commuter boats so that they didn’t have to go on the train with the hoi polloi to get to work.’
Finally late last summer she arrived back in Guernsey, looking nothing like the original boat, but Mr Wix said she was immediately at home in the island’s notoriously choppy waters.
‘I’ve had quite a few motor boats over the years, and a couple of sailing boats, nothing has been as easy as this to handle, you can feel her pedigree,’ he said. ‘You come into the QEII Marina and you don’t bother with the rudder, you simply use the two engines to manoeuvre her, it’s a piece of cake.’
Just when she had got back to her home waters it was discovered that the Elephant Yard had made a mistake with the way water drained off the deck, and water was becoming trapped underneath.
‘Rainwater is like garlic to a vampire when it comes to wooden boats. Thankfully the Elephant saw it was their mistake and took her back.’
The boat is now back in England being repaired, before hopefully returning to the island in the spring when, after all the hard work, Mr Wix is considering selling it.
‘I’m going to take quite a hit on this, but it was a labour of love,’ said Mr Wix, who was reluctant to put a number on the total the restoration had cost. ‘I got halfway through when I realised that there wasn’t a hope in hell of seeing my money back.
‘I think it was Robert Louis Stevenson who said: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”.’
‘That’s been me all my career. I love doing things up. I love looking at them and thinking, What can I do with this? All the hotels we worked on were listed buildings.
‘But to be perfectly honest, if somebody came up to me and said, we’d love to have that little piece of Guernsey history, I would bite their hand off.’
The original Flying Christine was destroyed in a storm in 1963, and her successor Flying Christine II was built by local company Marine Craft, which at the time was based on the Castle Emplacement.
She was launched in 1964 and for almost 30 years the vessel ploughed the seas around Guernsey responding to more than 1,000 incidents, and saving many lives.
By the 1990s, Flying Christine II was showing signs of wear, and her replacement, the island’s current ambulance launch, came into service in November 1994.
Flying Christine II was sold into the local market and appears to have changed hands several times in the intervening years, slowly falling into disrepair.
Before Mr Wix bought her she had spent more than two years out of the water, back at Castle Emplacement where she was built.
